Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 24 Oct 2001 07:48:52 -0500 (CDT) | From | Jesse Pollard <> | Subject | Re: OFF TOPIC: HOWTO: compromising Microsoft |
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"Rick A. Hohensee" <rickh@Capaccess.org>: ... > Consider legislation declaring Microsoft operating system products to be > "specifically compromised intellectual property". The "compromise" is to > allow anyone to "reverse-engineer" and resell Microsoft operating system > products no less than five years after thier release dates, on a > permanent, continuing, version-by-version basis. If such a law were > enacted today that would mean that e.g. Windows 95 and earlier are fair > game for modification and/or reselling by others as of today, as are early > versions of NT, I believe. Windows 98 and later would still be exclusively > Microsoft's protected property for a couple years. This is the measured > approach to take, measured against, and in the units of, the industry in > question. Five years is a long time for a great engine of innovation. I > believe a five year product lag of this nature will destroy Microsoft, > unless they rapidly become the great engine of innovation they so ardently > pose as. However, this scenario has clear advantages for Microsoft even as > they exist now versus other proposals. Meanwhile, viable alternatives to > Microsoft as a source of operating systems for PCs can reasonably be > expected to arise rapidly. This approach puts Microsoft in level > competition with thier own past, thier only possible source of substantive > competition in the short term.
Won't work. MS would immediately report the true amount of new code in the protected stuff includes 90% of the code in the old stuff, and therefore still protected. The 10% of unprotected stuff would be the interfaceing code already released (system calls, include files, library calls ...) plus a few drivers for hardware no longer available. And removed comments...
> The advantages to Microsoft are that this approach leaves them as the > pilot of thier own compromised ship, the sole architects of all thier own > products, the sole judge of what should be in a Microsoft OS and what > shouldn't, and otherwise spares them from government micromanagement. > Government involvement would be very limited, stating what is and is not > bundled. For example, MSN-related client software is bundled and > compromisable, the MSN network itself isn't. Et cetera. This leaves them > free to be thier rusticly charming proprietary selves vis-a-vis the > products they have not yet bundled into Windows, such as (last I heard,) > Office, which reflects the idea that the operating system has > public-interest aspects that ancillary products may not. Thus Internet > Explorer and so on would be subject to compromise in due time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesse I Pollard, II Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil
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