On 8/21/2015 5:25 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: >>> Where would MICROS~1 be if Gary Kildall were to have been litigious? >> > On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Jay Jaeger wrote: >> How so? Digital Research spurned IBM, and would have had to take IBM >> on as well as Microsoft. Litigious or not, it would have been a >> seriously uphill battle. > > The influence and basis on, of MS-DOS and CP/M is undenied. >
Influence does not necessarily constitute intellectual property. If it were, DEC could have sued the pants off of Kildall for concepts stolen from their operating systems. IBM likewise. Kildall certainly didn't invent very much. By the same logic of "influence", AT&T and probably others could have sued the pants off of Microsoft and IBM for the influence UNIX had on MS-DOS 2.0 (just look at the list of system calls). But, the reality would have been that there was nothing to base a case on. And on and on and on. (Back in those days there was also no idea of software patents). Even if Kildall had been litigious, it would not have made any difference to where Microsoft ended up. Even if he would have had a case, he could simply have been bought out. > In fact, the clear copyright issue was apparently why IBM chose to ALSO > sell CP/M-86. However, there are disagreements about whether the > pricing choice was an IBM effort to sabotage the CP/M-86 sales, or a > serious error by DRI. (I believe the latter) Nonsense. Absolute rubbish. Not a chance. There was no copyright issue, not in any way. Find me a written reference that says otherwise, and I might change my mind. The written records I have read state that Kildall finally came to his senses way way late, and realized what a market opportunity the IBM PC represented. But by then he was too late. By every account I have read, he blew off a meeting arranged by Gates that would have been a chance to sell his operating system, so IBM asked Gates to see if he could find an alternative elsewhere and found what eventually became MS-DOS, and the rest is history, as they say. Even had IBM been somehow responsible for the disparity in the pricing, DRI could have marketed it on their own anyway. The truth of the matter seems to be that Kildall just didn't have any business acumen, and Gates, who did, rolled right over him after he blew his chance. > > > But, Gary (and Xerox Parc) was not litigious. > Xerox was not necessarily not ligitious. They just had no clue about the value of the technology they had, and failed to protect it in any meaningful way. That is also a matter of written record. JRJ
