Re: OFF TOPIC: HOWTO: compromising Microsoft

[Jesse Pollard <pollard@tomcat.admin.navo.hpc.mil>]

"Rick A. Hohensee" <rickh@Capaccess.org>:
...
> Consider legislation declaring Microsoft operating system products to be
> "specifically compromised intellectual property". The "compromise" is to
> allow anyone to "reverse-engineer" and resell Microsoft operating system
> products no less than five years after thier release dates, on a
> permanent, continuing, version-by-version basis. If such a law were
> enacted today that would mean that e.g. Windows 95 and earlier are fair
> game for modification and/or reselling by others as of today, as are early
> versions of NT, I believe. Windows 98 and later would still be exclusively
> Microsoft's protected property for a couple years. This is the measured
> approach to take, measured against, and in the units of, the industry in
> question. Five years is a long time for a great engine of innovation. I
> believe a five year product lag of this nature will destroy Microsoft,
> unless they rapidly become the great engine of innovation they so ardently
> pose as. However, this scenario has clear advantages for Microsoft even as
> they exist now versus other proposals. Meanwhile, viable alternatives to
> Microsoft as a source of operating systems for PCs can reasonably be
> expected to arise rapidly. This approach puts Microsoft in level
> competition with thier own past, thier only possible source of substantive
> competition in the short term.

Won't work. MS would immediately report the true amount of new code in the
protected stuff includes 90% of the code in the old stuff, and therefore still
protected. The 10% of unprotected stuff would be the interfaceing code already
released (system calls, include files, library calls ...) plus a few drivers
for hardware no longer available. And removed comments...

> The advantages to Microsoft are that this approach leaves them as the
> pilot of thier own compromised ship, the sole architects of all thier own
> products, the sole judge of what should be in a Microsoft OS and what
> shouldn't, and otherwise spares them from government micromanagement.
> Government involvement would be very limited, stating what is and is not
> bundled. For example, MSN-related client software is bundled and
> compromisable, the MSN network itself isn't. Et cetera. This leaves them
> free to be thier rusticly charming proprietary selves vis-a-vis the
> products they have not yet bundled into Windows, such as (last I heard,)
> Office, which reflects the idea that the operating system has
> public-interest aspects that ancillary products may not. Thus Internet
> Explorer and so on would be subject to compromise in due time.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.