[meddlepal]

Eh, there's a big difference between the two. Levandowski basically stole files from Google and gave them to Uber. Cutler just transferred his knowledge of building VMS to building Win NT. I suspect that's why it was settled out of court because the case was much much weaker that Cutler had stolen something tangible from DEC.

[jacquesm]

I'm not so sure about that. DEC may have simply decided to settle because fighting MS in open court would take a long time and deplete them of cash they needed very much (we all know how they ended up), Alpha was their hail-mary pass and having NT on Alpha could have strengthened their position.

[p_l]

Cutler didn't stole files, as they would be pretty useless. But DEC had feathers ruffled because Cutler uprooted a team he picked for his attempt to do a modern rewrite of VMS, which Digital refused to do.

And it was a good team.

[dagenix]

Citation?

[jacquesm]

Wikipedia pages on NT, DEC, the Alpha microprocessor and Microsoft's general legal strategies would be an excellent starting point.

[Gibbon1]

Friend of mine worked for a company that had a TCP/IP stack for VMS. He said they were asked how hard it would to port it to NT. The answer was trivial.

That said I think there is a difference between re-implementing APIs and stealing sources.