At 10/18/2007 05:14 PM, you wrote:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:44:38 +0100
"Joao Santos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does OpenOffice infringe the intellectual property of Microsoft Office?
I very much doubt it. The concept of a word processor go back many years
before Microsoft was incorporated as a company. WordPerfect, for example, was
the biggest word processing program around for many years -- it was originally
written in 1982 and distributed by a company called Satellite Software
International, later renamed WordPerfect, Inc. Word processing programs were
originally written in the early 1970's for mainframe (green screen) computers.
Microsoft was around prior to 1982, so that's not a great example,
and "word processors" originally appeared as stand-alone special
purpose machines (mainframes had "text editors" in the early days,
which is not quite the same thing) but your point is valid.
It would be pretty hard to find anything about OOo that infringes
Microsoft Office IP. The code is completely different, and the
default file format is as well. Yes, OOo can save documents using a
file format that is compatible with MSO, but MSO can do the same with
a number of non-MS file formats too, and the whole
reverse-engineering of code thing was settled in the early days of
the PC over the question of PClone BIOS code, and Apple's law suits
against MS settled the "look and feel" question, with MS claiming you
couldn't sue over that sort of thing. They built their own petard on this one.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that IP comes in about three
basic flavors: patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
Patents are for devices, processes, or other things which are useful,
novel, non-obvious to someone skilled in the art, and which there is
no "prior art" for. Word processors are useful, but far from novel
these days and it's pretty obvious to any decent programmer how you
might build one and there is plenty of prior art, so I doubt you
could patent the general concept of "word processor". Same goes for
various techniques, like menus, highlighting text to show what's
selected, search/replace functions, help systems, etc., and even if
these were patentable today, MS wouldn't be able to do so, since they
didn't invent them.
Copyrights are for written works...the specific text of them, not the
ideas they incorporate. The actual code of MS Word can be
copyrighted, and probably is, but the ideas used in it can not
be. OOo has code which is highly unlikely to look anything like the
code for MSO, since it was written by different people who had never
seen MSO's code, and while the two are doing very similar things,
sometimes on the same OS, there are lots of ways to code that.
Trade secrets are for things you can keep secret...like the formula
for Coke...while still selling the product. It's pretty obvious to
anyone who's used MSO how it works, and it's pretty obvious to anyone
who programs how it was built, so there's not a lot that is secret
about it other than the specific source code involved.
Databases go back even further. The original computer (ENIAC) could process
simple databases and ENIAC was completed in 1945.
True, though the sort most people use today and the kind included in
MSO and OOo (relational databases) seems to have originated in an
academic paper in 1970. That *does* predate Microsoft.
-- Mike B.
--
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates '81
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