From: ray@Celestial.COM (Ray Jones)
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
Organization: Celestial Software, Mercer Island, WA
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 1993 19:54:38 GMT

In <30DEC199211471782@moose.cccs.umn.edu> rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu (RICHARD HOFFBECK) writes:

>In article <1992Dec29.224608.1011@Celestial.COM>, ray@Celestial.COM (Ray Jones) writes:
>> >> You have not been a victem of Microsoft'a predatory practices.  Just see
>> >> what happens if you come up with a clever inovation that might really cut
>> >> into thier profit.  I have worked for such a company.  We just talk to a few
>> >> companies about what we wanted to do and within 30 days got a letter from
>> >> the Microsoft legal department that said,
>> >> "Just try it, and we will sue you out of existance."
>> >> Our lawyer told us we were well with in our rights BUT we could not afford
>> >> the legal assult.  Two years later, Microsoft came out with the product.
>> >> Nice gut, that Gates.
>>  
>> >Perhaps you could give us the particulars, like the product in question and
>> >why MS thought that they would have a basis for litigation. There seem to
>> >be numerous counter-examples like Stacker, various backup utilities, disk
>> >compressors, etc.
>>  
>> Company was Microport Systems.  Product was the ability to run Xenix
>> binaries on our Unix system.  Microport was just starting out, had the only
>> Unix 286/386 product on the market (lots of Xenix and Xenix applications)
>> but with few Unix applications.  We could have a big jump ahead if we had access
>> to more applications without the apps vendors having to recompile.
>> Microsoft said the only way we could do this was because we had seen the
>> Xenix source code - not true.  The only difference in Unix binaries and
>> Xenix binaries was the header of the file.

>Are you sure it was the source code?  Most compiler products of the time
>had licenses that forbid disassembling the binary; in fact, if you did
>disassemble the binary produced by the Microsoft DOS F77 compiler, there
>was an embedded text comment to the effect that you weren't suppose to
>be looking at the binary.  If the XENIX license had a similar clause I
>would think that you'd be out of luck regardless of what the lawyers
>said.

Yes, I am sure, the letter make reference to source code.  I am not sure
about licenses forbidding disassembling the binary.  But I do know that it
is easy to see the header in any UNIX code.  The "file" command reads the
header and tell you a lot about the header.  You would not have
to disassemble the binary, just find where the header leaves off.
Here are a couple of examples
file /usr/local/bin/a2p
/usr/local/bin/a2p:	80386 separate executable not stripped
file /usr/bin/msg
/usr/bin/msg:	80386 separate executable
>>  
>> FYI Microsoft had Xenix as a product prior to DOS.

>I stand corrected.

>--rick

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