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Re: Innovation(tm) in Windows 7

Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Ezekiel <b@xxxxx> wrote on Thu, 5 Jun 2008
>  14:02:24 -0400 <7c456$48482a31$709@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>> Show me a single thing, anything, in linux that wasn't copied or 
>> stolen.

Show me something in /any/ modern OS that isn't copied from something
older. As for /theft/ ... that's /Microsoft's/ forté, not Linux's.

[quote]
Synet had already trademarked Internet Explorer as a brand name when
Microsoft came calling, offering 75 thousand dollars for rights to the
name. When they refused Microsoft stole the name anyway, and Synet went
bankrupt fighting the software goliath’s lawyers in court. After filing
for bankruptcy the company was forced to settle for a paltry five
million dollars.
[/quote]

http://thepopulist.wordpress.com/2003/10/


The origins of Microsoft's "innovation":

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

> OK, since Linux is constructed from theft, who stole, whom was it 
> stolen from, who should sue whom, and for what remedies?

Linux (the kernel) was written from scratch, and conceptually founded in
MINIX. The creator of MINIX, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, has vehemently denied
that Linus copied code from MINIX:

[quote]
Linus has been accused of stealing Linux from MINIX. Is that true?
No. Absolutely not. Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
wrote a report, funded in part by Microsoft, claiming that Linus stole
Linux from MINIX. Brown's conclusion was that companies should not use
Linux because the ownership of the intellectual property rights is
unclear. This is complete garbage. While it is most unlikely that a
21-year-old student would have been capable of writing his own operating
system had he not had the complete source code for a similar operating
system available to use, study and modify, Linus wrote the initial
version of the Linux code himself.
[/quote]

http://www.minix3.org/doc/faq.html#legal

As for Free Software in general, I can't comment on each and every one
of the hundreds of thousands of Free Software projects, but if there was
some kind of mass plagiarism going on then I think someone would have
noticed by now (other than lying MS shills, that is).

> (You are welcome to include Xerox Parc, of course, though I suspect 
> the primary plaintiff will be Microsoft, were they serious enough to 
> pursue this.)

Actually that was Apple, not Microsoft, and Apple did not /steal/
anything from Xerox. According to Jeffrey S. Young, in his book "Steve
Jobs, the Journey Is the Reward", Jobs actually set up a visit to PARC,
and made the following deal with Xerox: You let us in and look around,
and we'll let you invest in us in case we come up with something
commercially successful. [1]

Apple licensed limited features of the LISA GUI to Microsoft for Windows
1.0. When the Vole then copied /more/ LISA features and added them to
Windows 2.0, Apple cried foul, and litigated. Microsoft continued
copying even /more/ LISA features into Windows 3.0, by which time the
court case had started, but unfortunately the Judge ruled that much of
the alleged plagiarism was covered in the original license, and the
remaining elements were dismissed as trivial/unoriginal. Apple disputed
this, of course.

The one and only original product created by Microsoft was a BASIC
interpreter. From that moment to this, they have done nothing but copy
(and in some documented cases steal [2]) ideas; software; trademarks;
trade secrets; and other "IP" from others. For a company that defends
the principles of "IP" so passionately, this is gross hypocrisy.

As detailed on Frank van Wensveen's Website:

[quote]
While the BASIC programming language itself was already in the public
domain by then, there was no interpreter that could run it on the first
microcomputers, and the small microprocessor systems typically developed
by hobbyists and researchers were still being programmed in machine code
and often operated via switches.

Thus Gates and Allen could be said to have created an original product.
One might even call it a true innovation.

It would be one of their last.
[/quote]


[1]<http://www.macobserver.com/columns/thebackpage/2004/20040708.shtml>
[2]<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/>

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| 'When it comes to knowledge, "ownership" just doesn't make sense'
|     ~ Cory Doctorow, The Guardian.  http://tinyurl.com/22bgx8
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
 23:45:51 up 168 days, 20:21,  5 users,  load average: 0.10, 0.42, 0.35

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