Re: Microsoft's OS competitors

Mark Lemley <MLEMLEY[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu> writes:
>
> A question came up in my Computer Law class today that I must confess
> has me puzzled. Why haven't any potential Microsoft competitors
> reverse-engineered its operating system, copied the necessary
> functional components, and built a competing "Windows-compatible"
> operating system?

For starters, when someone did this with DOS (i.e. DR-DOS), Microsoft did everything legal (and some things likely in violation of anti-trust law) to stomp it out. Basically, if someone does this, Microsoft is likely to lower the price on the the OS to the point that they won't be able to pay for their development.

I should also point out that at least one group of people are working on writing it from scratch to run on top of Linux (a free-ware Unix), to be distributed freely. I note that, since it is an operating system, and the operating system interfaces are supposed to be well defined, that this should be emminently feasible without reverse engineering. This doesn't supply you with the "Program Manager" and all of the "applets", but you can write replacements of those fairly easily too.

For the non computer science people out there, basically, an Operating System provides lots of "commands" for a program to call. The various pieces of documentation provided for programmers should define exactly what those commands should do. So writing your own command to do the exact same thing shouldn't be that difficult.

Another area where reality intrudes on the IP analysis of "why this hasn't happened" is the fact that Microsoft would likely sue for based on all of the issues discussed later in your message. Even if they don't win on a single count, they can tie it up for extended periods of time in court. And within a year or two, the product will be obsolete.

> 4. Because it's hard. [Well, yeah, but the potential payoff is pretty
> big too].

The other thing is, Microsoft doesn't publish *everything* about thier OS. (And they have, in the past, added undocumented commands for use by Microsoft Applications.) And by the time you've figured out everything in the new release, written it yourself, and gotten the "clone-OS" to market, Microsoft has sold 90% of the copies that they're going to sell anyway AND are about to release a new version with lots of new features.

I suspect the "freeware" version of Windows will stay a revision back once completed, fairly indefinately, and if and when the world gets tired of a new OS rewrite every 3 years, it will catch up.

Keith Graham
skg[_at_]sadr.com Received on Thu Apr 24 1997 - 14:09:56 GMT