[bluekitten]

Everytime a big company implements a feature or rolls out something, they affect companies working in that area. You can find similar things about almost any company or person, but for some reason the bad things about Microsoft are always amplified.

For example, see how Google squashed Skyhook

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Aliyun and Acer prevented from launching a phone because of the secret rules of the "Open" Handset Alliance. http://www.zdnet.com/cn/report-google-stops-acer-from-launch...

Apple and the famed 30% cut of even sales from Apps, an example of how they used someone's OSS code in Safari and then banned them from the app store:

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

My point is that someone fed a steady diet of bad stories about one company while barely being exposed to good stories ends up not liking them and everyone knows how many tech sites and journalists and news sites like Slashdot and HN's bias in story selection because of the vocal minority who sometimes appear to be on a crusade of ends justifying the means.

[rbanffy]

It seems you need a history lesson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

[throwawaykf03]

Also, i4i: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i

[bluekitten]

>In May 2007 Vulpe and i4i successfully sued Microsoft, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

Isnt that considered evil around these parts?

[throwawaykf03]

That is the majority opinion around here, yes, but I contend that that opinion is flawed, precisely because of cases like i4i. It is a textbook case of a big guy ripping off a small guy, and patents being the only thing that helped the small guy.

The Wikipedia entry has surprisingly little backstory, so it turned out to be a poor choice on my part. But the gist is that like the Stac case, Microsoft was in active discussions to license or buy i4i's Office plugin before they turned around and, without warning, built it themselves into the next release of Word. Unlike the Stac, and indeed most, patent lawsuits, Microsoft was found guilty of willfull infringement.

I'm mostly a fan of Microsoft, and I don't really believe all the hate it gets is justified, but this is one case where it was really a bad actor.

[bluekitten]

I already knew about that, but not sure what you're implying here.

The link says this:

>in 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim. [2]

Are you alleging that Microsoft bought the judge and/or jury off? Why would they award such a high amount then? They ruled that the infringement wasn't intentional, and certainly they had way more access to the facts and testimony of the case than you or me.

I have to ask, did you even read your own history lesson before teaching it to others?

Also, it's funny that no company can even sell the equivalent of DriveSpace these days for Chromebooks, iPads and iPhones. Android phones would probably need the user to get root and/or unlock the bootloader which is a nonstarter for already niche software. Would even be banned from the Mac App Store. Yet people buy them and cheer them on just because they're more anti-MS while pretending to be pro software freedom.

A couple of contemporary history lessons for you.

Google found guilty of infringing Lycos patents. http://www.fastcompany.com/1844439/meet-vringo-cto-ken-lang-...

Similar Apple lawsuit http://www.zdnet.com/virnetx-wins-apple-patent-infringement-...

[rbanffy]

So, you think Microsoft developed DoubleSpace by itself, without knowledge of Stac's technology? I'm not sure exactly how they got away with unwilling patent infringement after that. Maybe they formed a new team and never let them read Stac's patents, or something like that. Still, they got US%5.5 for every copy of DOS 6 sold, which is, IMHO, the judge saying that, while there is not enough evidence to rule the infringement was deliberate, Microsoft didn't play nice.

Then you throw a smokescreen by mentioning Apple and Google. We are not discussing Apple and Google, we are discussing Bill Gates and his past as a sub-criminal bully and how he is trying to erase that image by high-profile charity.

As for disk and file compression, you can't sell something like it for Windows Phones either. Or Windows - because NTFS already supports file compression. You can do it for Linux, on servers and desktops, but that's another question. I'm not sure if there is stable support for file compression on any current filesystem. Probably yes, but storage is cheap these days.