>Oh, boy, here we go. >Who exactly says that, and why? MS licensed it, which to the best of my >knowledge isn't theft. >(Anyway, it was Seattle Computer Products, not DR. DR's OS was CP/M.)
I'm sure MS has a division assigned to rewriting history and you have a shelf of their briefing books... "Digital Research (Gary Kildall) was livid at the cloning of his OS (and a cheap clone at that). Up to this point he felt that he and Gates were Colleagues with a Gentleman's agreement not to go for each others markets. Digital Research stayed out of Languages, and Microsoft stayed out of Operating Systems. Gates going into the OS's market seemed to be treachery, all the more so when Gates did it with a direct rip-off of CP/M. Gary tried to suit for the intellectual theft, but MS's lawyers whined and got IBM's Legal to take care of it -- who got the whole cloning thing blamed on Seattle Computing. Since Seattle Computing hadn't made any real money on the deal, DR was not going to get any reasonable damage award, and Digital Research could not fight IBM. Both Microsoft's and IBM's lawyers were bigger than Kildalls', and so he gave up in disgust. He decided to make the better product and win with Quality -- but seems to have remained bitter about this event." http://www.mackido.com/History/History_DrDos.html I caution anyone following this story to check the source of the information they are reading. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
