It's probably not news to the nerds out there but why does this come as such a surprise? I guess because along with half the Net I succumb to the marketing messages being put on DRM. But then again I had no idea that the whole history of Microsoft was so blatantly based on ripped-off software code. I wonder when gag orders expire?
1982: Digital Research sued Microsoft and IBM over copyright infringement. Gary Kildall sat down at a fresh IBM PC, typed a few keystrokes and poped up a Digital Research copyright notice. This impressed the Judge. DR won the case, monetary damages, and the right to clone MS-DOS. Microsoft won a gag order to make sure the public never heard about this case.
More:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100258/categories/faceTheMusic/
You have to find it ironic, that the entire Bill Gates empire is based on one thing: Intellectual Property theft.
You may have heard the story of how Gary Kidall's ex-wife, and business partner threw out the IBM suits over their request that she sign a (then rare, now common) non-disclosure agreement. IBM went back to Bill Gates and asked him if he had an OS they could use, he said yes even though he didn't (you have to love the audacity of Gates to lie to IBM). So Bill went off and bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products. Where did SCP get the software from? They claimed that one of their employees, Tim Paterson, wrote it. In six weeks...
That's pretty amazing considering that it took Kidall three years to write CP/M! For proof of the fact that Peterson stole the code look no further then the fact that the first 36 DOS system calls mirror the original CP/M calls EXACTLY. Nearly 20 years after the fact, Caldera (the last owner of CP/M) won an out of court settlement from Microsoft over that theft, too little, too late.
"Ask Bill (Gates) why the string in function 9 (in DOS) is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that".
-- Gary Kildall (1942-1994)
Kidall died in a seedy bar on July 8, 1994 of a massive heart attack. He died a broken man, still believing that his ex-wife and Gates had denied him his destiny..