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.

Comments

Re:A couple points.

[Royster]

Yeah, they just put in the Univ of Ca copyright notice for the fun of it.

what goes around comes around

[tps12]

Coming from the culture (shared by my fellow slashdotter, I think) of "information freedom," I can't say I'm surprised. Think about it: Microsoft is one of the biggest recruiters of CS grads in the U.S. A full 92% of their employees are under the age of 25. Which means they have all grown up in the geek culture where television, radio, and Internet are all free or subsidized.

The Free Source community is an offshoot of the same ideals, where cooperation is encouraged and revelation celebrated. What Microsoft has done here is not so different from what Linux Torvalds did to Minux. Just as his actions drove Minux out of business, so too will Microsoft proceed to drive Linux into the ground.

In the end, the winners are the users. For us, things just get more free and easier to use, which is what technology is all about. Empowerment to be our best.

Re:HAHAHAHA

[HiThere]

Besides, this isn't the first time they've done this, so it isn't really news anyway. (e.g., Stacker)

Do you really believe that all those newspapers were only carrying one story? I saw several business items, even several computer business items. So they must have decided it wasn't "newsworthy", whatever that means.