Microsoft seeks input on promise not to sue individuals (yet)

Posted Nov 15, 2006 22:03 UTC (Wed) by edvac (guest, #13074)
Parent article: Microsoft seeks input on promise not to sue individuals

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. I would not trust ms as far as I could throw them - and that's not very far.
This promise (ploy) is a virtual lever that ms will use in the same way they used other levers against: Gary Kildall, Apple, Ed Roberts (MITS Altair), Tim Patterson (Qdos), and the many people who developed BASIC, Fortran, and Pascal. MS hired Charles Simonyi who built their GUI from the research he did at PARC ( Xerox at Palo Alto) and used him. There were legal battles that were ramped up in the mid 80's as the $ stakes increased and ms came out on the top; not so much because of programming skill, but more on the use of legal (?) moves and intimidation. Gates enticed Steve Jobs to collaborate on the gui; then ms developed BASIC for the 6502 processor used by Apple and locked Apple up with a license for basic. MS deceived Jobs and Apple in 1987 regarding MacBasic (see the Wall Street Journal sept 25 1987) forced apple to not develop macbasic because it would compete with msbasic. Throughout the entire history of ms they have used legal manipulative leverage to make lots of money and control the computer market. Let this be a stern warning to those who have yet to see the light. For those who don't already know, the story of microsoft is the story of the process of producing something everyone needs by using things others have already produced and openly shared; and then locking its ownership and creation process down so the absolute power is in the hands of the new owners (ms) ; and then calling every one else who trys to do that very same thing with their (microsoft's) subsequent creation a criminal or a software pirate. They seem to say collectively "its ok for us to take other's work but no one else is allowed to do the same". Let the ms history speak for itself.