Actually, it's not a correction. The first poster is right, but so are
you, mostly. Stac said Microsoft violated one of Stac's patents. Microsoft
said Stac violated Microsoft trade secrets. They *both* won. Stac won
something like $120 million for the patent infringement, and Microsoft
won something like $20 million for the trade secret misappropriation.
The two then promptly settled, with Microsoft licensing the Stac patent
for something like $40 million over several years, and Microsoft also
buying some significant but non-controlling interest in Stac (I think it
was around 10 or 20%).
The reverse engineering part of this is generally not applicable to
the situation of someone reverse engineering commercial code to get something
to work with Linux, because, if I recall correctly, Stac reverse engineered
a beta copy of DOS 6, which they had received under a beta agreement under
which they almost certainly agreed not to do things like that.
--Tim Smith
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