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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.
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.