4 ms·

Kildall never explicitly claimed that MSDOS copied CP/M's code. There are just repeated claims that "MSDOS infringed on CP/M's copyrights" and based on all rev

by phire 10y ago

Kildall never explicitly claimed that MSDOS copied CP/M's code. There are just repeated claims that "MSDOS infringed on CP/M's copyrights" and based on all reverse engineering efforts and the lack of an actual lawsuit, we can safely assume Kindall is not using a legally valid definition of "copyrights".

rbanffy 10y ago
It's "Kildall". And he hasn't been doing anything for quite some time. He died in the 90's.
- phire 10y ago
  Thanks, I fixed the spelling. Though it doesn't really matter what he has been doing recently, my point is that there was no lawsuit back in the '80s when he was alive, so we can safely assume he had no proof of actual infringement. Furthermore, we can infer that what Kildall claimed was "Infringements of CP/M's copyrights" was something more along the lines of what google and oracle are now having massive legal battles over.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    Possibly, but I would assume that he was referring to fairly unique features of CP/M, code that was never released under a free license, that were mimicked by QDOS in order to make it easier to port software to it, or, maybe, because they were a genuinely useful idea. At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite remarkable and, maybe, worth fighting for. Unfortunately, Kildall had other demons to fight.
    - groovy2shoes 10y ago
      > At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite remarkable On microcomputers, perhaps, but not on computers in general. Unix is a well-known example of an OS that did this, with the hardware-dependent parts mostly confined to a small amount of assembly language and much of the C source platform-independent. This was the state of Unix by around 1973 or so. And that was near the dawn of minicomputers. Even before Unix and minicomputers, it was starting to become common on mainframe computers as manufacturers started releasing revised and novel models (and dealing with the porting efforts). Notably, the Burroughs B5000 didn't have an assembly language at all, and system software (the Master Control Program, an awesome name that (perhaps unfortunately) lost the jargon skirmish with "Operating System") was written primarily in a dialect of Algol-60. The MCP went on to run on successor systems starting with the B6500 with only a small number of changes to support the new architecture, and Unisys's offerings to this day still run a continuously updated version of that original MCP -- first released in 1961.
      - rbanffy 10y ago
        That's true, of course. That doesn't make his accomplishment, to pull this off on severely limited machines, any less remarkable. And that's not mentioning he wrote the language to do it.
        groovy2shoes 10y ago
        Of course. Good point!

by phire 10y ago

rbanffy 10y ago

It's "Kildall". And he hasn't been doing anything for quite some time. He died in the 90's.

phire 10y ago
Thanks, I fixed the spelling. Though it doesn't really matter what he has been doing recently, my point is that there was no lawsuit back in the '80s when he was alive, so we can safely assume he had no proof of actual infringement. Furthermore, we can infer that what Kildall claimed was "Infringements of CP/M's copyrights" was something more along the lines of what google and oracle are now having massive legal battles over.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Possibly, but I would assume that he was referring to fairly unique features of CP/M, code that was never released under a free license, that were mimicked by QDOS in order to make it easier to port software to it, or, maybe, because they were a genuinely useful idea. At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite remarkable and, maybe, worth fighting for. Unfortunately, Kildall had other demons to fight.
  - groovy2shoes 10y ago
    > At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite remarkable On microcomputers, perhaps, but not on computers in general. Unix is a well-known example of an OS that did this, with the hardware-dependent parts mostly confined to a small amount of assembly language and much of the C source platform-independent. This was the state of Unix by around 1973 or so. And that was near the dawn of minicomputers. Even before Unix and minicomputers, it was starting to become common on mainframe computers as manufacturers started releasing revised and novel models (and dealing with the porting efforts). Notably, the Burroughs B5000 didn't have an assembly language at all, and system software (the Master Control Program, an awesome name that (perhaps unfortunately) lost the jargon skirmish with "Operating System") was written primarily in a dialect of Algol-60. The MCP went on to run on successor systems starting with the B6500 with only a small number of changes to support the new architecture, and Unisys's offerings to this day still run a continuously updated version of that original MCP -- first released in 1961.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      That's true, of course. That doesn't make his accomplishment, to pull this off on severely limited machines, any less remarkable. And that's not mentioning he wrote the language to do it.
      - groovy2shoes 10y ago
        Of course. Good point!