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by jillesvangurp
105 days ago
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> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?" You can try patenting; but not after the fact. Copyright won't help you here. You can't copyright an algorithm or idea, just a specific form or implementation of it. And there is a lot of legal history about what is and isn't a derivative work here. Some companies try to forbid reverse engineering in their licensing. But of course that might be a bit hard to enforce, or prove. And it doesn't work for OSS stuff in any case. Stuff like this has been common practice in the industry for decades. Most good software ideas get picked apart, copied and re-implemented. IBM's bios for the first PC quickly got reverse engineered and then other companies started making IBM compatible PCs. IBM never open sourced their bios and they probably did not intend for that to happen. But that didn't matter. Likewise there were several PC compatible DOS variants that each could (mostly) run the same applications. MS never open sourced DOS either. There are countless examples of people figuring out how stuff works and then creating independent implementations. All that is perfectly legal. |
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https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/pc/6025008_PC_Technical_Ref...
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/xt/1502237_PC_XT_Technical_...
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_...
Between this and the fact that their PC-DOS (née MS-DOS) license was nonexclusive, I'm honestly not sure what they expected to happen.
The nature of early IBM PC advertising suggests to me that they expected the IBM name and established business relationships to carry as much weight as the specifications itself, and that "IBM PC compatible" systems would be no more attractive than existing personal computers running similar if not identical third-party software (PC-DOS wasn't the only example of IBM reselling third-party software under nonexclusive license), and would perhaps even lead to increased sales of first-party IBM PCs.
Which, in fact, they did, leading me to believe the actual result may have been not too far from their original intent, only with IBM capturing and holding a larger share of the pie.