Legal Battles that Shaped the Computer Industry

Not Only Microsoft: The Maturing of the Personal Computer Software Industry, 1982–1995

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They included long legal documents that solemnly declared that the software was merely licensed and that the user had no rights other than as provided in this license. The legal validity of these licenses has been hotly disputed but today seems to be grudgingly accepted in the general case.

The right to reverse engineer is a peculiar one.

As a general rule, buyers of a product are expected and permitted to examine what they buy and to discover how it works. Copyright or patent law may restrict the building and selling of cloned products, but the investigation itself is not restricted.

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For software, these licenses would put this expectation on its head. No one was permitted to discover how the licensed software works — not even if a compatibility issue or a serious bug arose. This gave the licensor a very comfortable position, as he could now charge maintenance fees for any and all work to be done on the software. Legislators did try to introduce at least some right to reverse engineer software for compatibility purposes, but these clauses are generally regarded as weak and risky to invoke.

Book Review: Legal Battles That Shaped the Computer Industry

As soon as software by itself started to become a viable market, access to software in its human-readable source code form was becoming more and more difficult. To help achieve this goal Stallman drafted the GNU General Public License or GPL, a software license that allows anyone to freely use, distribute and adapt the licensed software at no charge. The only restriction he added was that any adapted or extended version of the software could only be distributed under the GPL as well.

This ensured the continued availability of the source code to anyone who came in contact with the software. With this license, he turned copyright on its head — an early name for the model is copyleft. Almost single-handedly he had written most of the software needed to program and use a general-purpose computer. Only one significant part was missing: His creation Linux mixing his first name Linus and Unix according to hacker tradition would become one of the most valuable pieces of software ever written.

If not for a legal battle around free software elsewhere, Linux might not have been. Based on the principles of free and open source software, the BSD had already been available since about Over the years, BSD morphed into a complete operating system, culminating in the so-called Networking Release 2 in June All code was available under the BSD license, allowing anyone to use it provided credit was given to the original authors. By that time however the development of BSD had slowed down significantly, allowing Linux to gain developer attention. Torvalds has observed he would not have created Linux if the BSD operating system had been available to him at the time.

However, it only had limited success. Over the years, the FSF had developed a rather confrontational attitude towards companies that did not subscribe to its ideas, which made companies hesitant to adopt free software. In Netscape Communications announced that it would release the source code of its Web browser. There are hundreds of FOSS licenses , although they can be grouped roughly into three categories.

The first category is often referred to as the academic licenses, which basically require that credit be given and the authors are shielded from warranty claims. The second category provides copyleft — the requirement that source code be made available to users, including derivative works. The role of social value creation in business model formulation at the bottom of the pyramid — Implications for MNEs?

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Dobusch, Leonhard and Kapeller, Jakob Theory and Method in Path Dependence Research. Schmalenbach Business Review, Vol. Botzem, Sebastian and Dobusch, Leonhard Mitchell, Will and Bettis, Richard A. Responding to Rivals and Complements: An overview of major trends and patterns.

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Legal Battles that Shaped the Computer Industry by Lawrence D. Graham - Praeger - ABC-CLIO

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Legal battles that shaped the computer industry

Stockpiling Internet Domain Names. Hardware and Software Enhancement Devices. The Year Problem. Selected Intellectual Property Statutes. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Economic Espionage Act of Notes Includes bibliographical references and index. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

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