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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.
...just how much GPL'd code in in M$ software.
In any case, I find it hard to believe Microsoft would have done this. Not because they are saints, but because certainly they would have learned from the 'Stacker' incident (Which was a patent infrigment, not copyright, but similiar to this case in many ways).
Microsoft might be evil, but they aren't stupid. I'll reserve final judgement until more facts are known.
I wonder if this could be cited as a reason to call in an audit on Microsoft. After all, there's now more evidence that they pirated software than the school systems they are accusing.
Miko O'Sullivan
I like the idea of calling Dr. Villanueva (that's his name, not Dr. Nuñez) the "St. Thomas Aquinas" of the free software movement. Although, his letter is really a lot more concise than the Summa Theologica ever was. It's telling that a Peruvian politician has made a stronger, clearer, and more irrefutable business-case for free software than Red Hat, ESR or IBM have.
He got $422,000.
Can you even Buy SoftImage for that price?
I don't have the numbers on me here but I seriously doubt it. At least not outfit an office with that much. Shoot Maya and Max can top 50 grand per workstation. They are not even near SoftImage's price range as it's directed mainly towards Hollywood.
When asked what I think of using Microsoft software, I simply reply, "It's against my moral and professional standards to encourage the use of software written by criminals." The events of the past 20 years have shown that Microsoft has little regard for either it's customers, or the law.
Think about this one, folks. I know there are many arguments for/against open source, but the most powerful one may be that of ethics. You can argue up and down about the relative merits of the software, but Microsoft is undeniably a criminal organization - a fact brought to light by the courts of the United States and other countries. The next time someone asks why you don't run a Microsoft OS, simply reply that you don't feel like funding organized crime.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm the same, basically no more shock value. What truely surprises me, though, is how fans of the company aren't shocked either and remain fans! If I found a company that made a burger I really loved, then found out they were cutting up babies to add flavor, I'd turn around and dislike the company. It's amazing how some fans make excuses for all of the bad press (I have a co-worker notorious for this), but at some point any reasonable human being will have to see all this bad press is created because of a bad company. It's hard to believe so many people choose to remain so blind.
It doesn't bother me that I'm no longer shocked. It bothers me that fans of MS and their software aren't shocked.
Developers: We can use your help.
It would be more accurate to say Microsoft bought Softimage for unclear reasons, tried to Microsoftify it to some extent, decided it wasn't really worth owning, and found Avid as an exit strategy. Softimage was completely owned by Microsoft, and the decision on what to do with Softimage was made by Microsoft.
So how are things up there in the tundra...is Marche Michel still around?!?
- adam
http://www.base.com/software-patents/articles/stac . tml
Microsoft Corp. was found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay $120 million in damages to a tiny California firm in a rare setback for the giant computer software company.
However, the federal jury on Wednesday also ruled that the violation was not willful and awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on a counterclaim against Stac Electronics, which makes a data-compression program called Stacker.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
what kind of crack are you on ?
..it must be lsd to see so many rainbow hues.
.. M$ is never going to 'pound linux into the ground' They may have a lot of money .. but linux is not a centralized corporation. You can't sue .. lets say .. 500 people for writing under the GPL ..
.. its not like unix and its deravitaves are 'new players' or anything .. hell .. i learned to code on a Next station. long before windows was on every pc in the workforce.
.. which is cool.
.. we were having an issue with our graphics department's server [it was not allowing group read/write permissions]
... oh .. its a permissions error. Especially since he was playing with the group permission settings the previous day.
.. he called m$ technical hot line (our company pays a yearly fee to be able to do this) and started a 4 hour tour into 'lets play with this until it works' with the 'afore vaunted' CS graduate on the other end of the phone.
.. instead of having to learn their code .. they can just hit the net to find examples .. i cant COUNT the # of times my nephiew jumped into the mirc rooms i hang out in .. and started asking programming questions .
.. i prefer it in a non secure/desktop setting ..
2nd thought
First off
Linux (as much as M$ hates it) is here to stay
Making something technologically 'easier' to use doesnt always help either.
granted . it makes it easier for folks like my mom to get e-mail
but a lovley growing trend i see now is a lot of CS grads who can't *DO* anything.
those 95% [who's ass did you pull that # out of??]
of recent CS grads that work with windows are friggen trained to call the M$ help desks.
example : i work for a fortune 500
common sence would think the network admin (who gets 85+ a year) would say
instead
even your average unix/linux neophyte can chown -r a folder on their own.
these CS grads had it too easy in college
these guys turn into coders who have to have net access to do their job. or who's company needs to pay the annual fee to microsoft for tech support.
now, im not saying windows is crap
im not even saying m$ is evil (i might be implying it though)
im just saying your argument is silly.
especially if you think abstract knowledge of a system makes you BETTER at programming that system.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
In politics, that's known as "innoculation": you accept a small penalty for a problem so that you avoid bigger problems later. I wouldn't be surprised if MS did that here.
Miko O'Sullivan
Microsoft will go into negotiations with a company. Their engineers will also be working with the prospective company while they happen. The deal goes sour, so Microsoft pulls out. But some schmuck engineering manager or possibly some exec decides it's not worth it to re-write the code from scratch, let alone create a "clean room" version. The code stays, it's not published, it's hidden from view and few know about it because the software is "closed source." This fact makes me laugh when Microsoft says Freedom Software "violoates IP" -- because Microsoft has blantantly plagerized actual source code verbatim over and over!
Microsoft has done this to such companies as IBM, Digital, SCO, Pen Computing and Micrografx -- none of which would ever see a dime in compensated, even though their code is in Windows today. Another, non-software product where this has happened has been the Microsoft erogonomic mouse (cannot remember the company's name). Verbatim rips of the design, down to the tenth of a millimetter. As Microsoft is finding out, it can no longer sustain the legal issues of this common practice in its own organization.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Microsoft did similar with the XBox. They just started using the name without checking if someone else has it trademarked, well someone did. that would have been fun to be one of the XBox consulting lawyers, "Yes, Microsoft you are going to write a check so large, it hurts, or we will get a cease and desist order until after xmas"
Heh, I always thought that it stood for Fucked-Up Disinformation. Thanks for the clarification!
It has been all but acknowledged by Microsoft that MS-DOS 1.0 contained code directly borrowed from CP/M. _The MS-DOS Encyclopedia_, for example, notes that "the resemblance [between CP/M and MS-DOS] was even more striking at the rpogrmaming level, with an almost one-to-one correspondence between CP/M and MS-DOS in the system calls available to applications programs."
This was not a matter of common design or reverse engineering; there was actual CP/M code in MS-DOS, I believe specifically in the FCB-oriented file services.
I wish I could remember where I read the interview where Tim Paterson acknowledged "low-level borrowing" from CP/M. I can't seem to find it right now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!