Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised [LWN.net]

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Feb 24, 2016 21:46 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised by Wol
Parent article: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

> How was it that MicroSoft grew in the early days? Steal IP, bankrupt the competitor, then buy them out for cents on the dollar to forestall any legal issues?

No, MS didn't have to resort to stealing -- instead they didn't use copy protection and turned a blind eye to piracy, but only long enough to put their (generally smaller) competitors out of business.

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Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Feb 25, 2016 19:32 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Which is why I referred to Stacker. I think that was widely recognised as a pretty blatant steal ...

Cheers,
Wol

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Feb 29, 2016 13:20 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>Which is why I referred to Stacker. I think that was widely recognised as a pretty blatant steal

So the story goes like this:

MS wanted transparent compression in MSDOS, because some of their competitors had it. One of the leading third party utilities was Stacker, and MS spent some time negotiating for it with Stac Electronics, but were unable to reach an agreement; instead, they bought an alternative from one of Stac's competitors and incorporated that into MSDOS.

Subsequently, Stac sued MS for violating the following two patents: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5016009, http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4701745. They eventually settled for about $80 million. Whether you consider this a 'blatant steal' is going to depend on whether you believe in the validity of software patents in general, and these two patents in particular; reasonable people could hold different opinions on this question.

Microsoft at that point in time was pretty much the poster child for 'big evil corporation', so it's easy to believe that there was some seriously underhand stuff going on here, but there's not really any information publicly available to support that.