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Microsoft's Overlooked Code Theft
Like2Byte was one of many readers to point out that "Newsforge is reporting that Microsoft was fined by a French court for three million francs "because it illegally included another company's proprietary source code in SoftImage 3D," something which (as the story points out) went mostly unremarked at the time. This is one of the points mentioned by Peruvian Senator David Villanueva Nuñez in his response to Microsoft FUD.
It wasn't "outright" code theft. There was a licensing agreement that was violated.
Microsoft has been known in the past to include BSD code. (It's TCP/IP stack is one example.) This "habit" is probably why they don't like GPL code - they prefer to quietly integrate the code.
Why another article? Oh ffs shut up. Why another article? Because Microsoft getting fined for this sort of thing will garner more attention than the Peruvian Senator. Although, truth be known, I want him as a US Senator.
My reality check bounced.
See, the problem with that theory, is that Microsoft knew what the deal was before they bought SoftImage. Right before MS bought SoftImage, they sent them over to Syn'X to present this new deal, i.e., hand over the rights to your code or it's no go. They probably thought Syn'X would cave in, but they walked instead, and that killed SoftImage's usefulness to MS. It doesn't take a lot of deep speculation to imagine that MS/SoftImage probably had some commitments with the product already, and got kind of burned when Syn'X pulled out of the deal.
Tina
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Balmer called the GPL a cancer for intellectual property. What is oughtright theft? Cardiac arrest?
That arguement was a load of crap anyway - as many have posted, the GPL *PROTECTS* authors' IP rights in ways you don't get from BSD-style licenses. Don't like the terms? DON'T USE THE CODE. Exactly the same calculation with MS Eulas. The BSD license allows more or less unfettered code-poaching, which is what authors who use that license prefer. Cool, either way.
MS's involvement in this was pretty minimal. They bought Softimage, there was no, shall we say "meeting of the minds" and they soon gave up and sold 'em off. Any IP violations were pretty much Softimage-responsability and not their corporate masters du jure.
Of course Softimage is notable for being, as far as I know, the only shop that was ever bought up by MS that then succesfully fought it's way free.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
SoftImage was a temporary subsidiary of MicroSoft, purchased then sold. They specialized in 3D CAD, mainly for the film industry. They were a pretty independent operation off in Canada, not really a part of the core Redmond culture.
I can't remember the title, but it's the one where they spy on this kid and take his code to make their software.... the guy from Shawshank redemption plays the Bill Gates type character, and some nutjob plays the "hero" computer guy. Anyway, Microsoft really is as evil as the movies say, huh?
That moview was Antitrust, and they specifically mentioned Microsoft as being a competitior to the company in question so people wouldn't draw parallels between the company in the movie and Microsoft.
Microsoft was also caught in 1995 using bits of Apple's Quicktime for Windows in an MS product. See this old cnet article for more details.
In that case, they blamed it on a subcontractor. It's been speculated that the big Apple/Microsoft deal at that time (to keep Office for Mac and to bundle IE with Macs, plus a big MS investment in Apple) may have been to settle a copyright infringment claim.
Some gems from the response letter:
"... in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles."
"... the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability."
"Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely."
"Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity)."
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