[PLUG] Microsoft Earnings Report

Brian Quade serendipity at pobox.com
Thu Oct 23 14:44:01 UTC 2003


I have some questions about this, if anyone knows the answers....  How 
much can MS isolate themselves and their market by using proprietary 
file formats that they "own".  For example, OpenOffice supports most MS 
file formats (doc, xls, ...).  Is this legal?  Can a company patent a 
file format?  If so, does MS just look the other way in order to avoid 
complicated legal battles?

I think Adobe owns Acrobat reader and the product (forgot the name) that 
creates PDF files.  Is it legal for me to create a PDF using rtf2pdf and 
put it on my web site without using their product?  I know that people 
do it all the time, but is it technically legal?

If this is not technically legal (even though they have not gone after 
people thus far for doing it), then eventually corporations will exploit 
that law to protect their monopolies.

Then that leads me to ask, what if I developed an open source streaming 
audio client program that recognizes rm files?  Does anyone know the 
laws about this?  If open source developers are free to use file formats 
that were developed for proprietary products, then those products will 
eventually be marginalized by cheaper, or free, competing products.  But 
that's not the way things are supposed to work in a monopolistic society....



Paul Heinlein wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Rich Shepard wrote:
>
>>>Open Source model, software is produced by loosely associated
>>>groups of unpaid programmers,
>>>
>>I wonder if the folks at Red Hat, etc. would agree with this
>>assessment.
>>
>
>That caught my eye, too. It's definitely a gray-area sort of
>statement.
>
>The distinction between "paid to produce proprietary, saleable
>software" and "paid to produce open-source software that in turn
>supports proprietary, saleable services/solutions," is pretty thin.
>
>Then again, some open-source contributors are really "unpaid
>programmers" (many of whom would like to think that 'unpaid' is a
>temporary adjective :-).
>
>--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
>
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