About ten days ago, a federal jury in L.A. returned a verdict against STAC on a trade-secret claim by Microsoft. The jury even awarded punitive damages because it considered STAC's actions deliberate. Since then, STAC's president, Gary Clow, and others have devoted an enormous amount of energy on these forums trying to foster the belief that Microsoft will use this verdict to pursue claims against third-party developers who legitimately use debugging tools to achieve or maintain compatibility with
Microsoft's operating systems. These statements just aren't true. Nor are
STAC's claims that all they did was use a few undocumented calls. STAC
disassembled and analyzed a sizable chunk of MS-DOS itself to understand its
internal design. Then STAC used that knowledge to write code identical in
functionality for STAC's own product. The preloading program copied by STAC
is one that integrates data compression seamlessly into the internal
operations of MS-DOS to allow data compression to be performed in a safe,
easy, and efficient manner. This had nothing to do with undocumented system
calls. (STAC did intercept a few internal calls but this was the least
significant part of our design and not the reason we sued them.)
Information obtained during the discovery phase of the case, through diaries
and testimony of STAC developers, and confirmed during the trial, shows that
STAC did not merely analyze the compression integration portion of MS-DOS 6
but disassembled and copied the design, functionality, features, and
processes of more than 3,000 lines of MS-DOS compression integration code.
(By comparison, the compression technology of DoubleSpace, which STAC sued
Microsoft over, involved only about 1,500 lines of code.)
At the trial, STAC produced a number of expert witnesses who testified that
they regularly "reverse-engineered" other programs, and STAC is using that
as "proof" that other developers are on his side. In fact, during
cross-examination, every one of STAC's witnesses said they defined
"reverse-engineering" to mean analysis for debugging or compatibility testing
and not for disassembling and copying someone else's work. STAC's final
expert witness, Jim Sesma, a developer not affiliated with STAC, was
specifically asked whether he had ever reverse-engineered or disassembled
one of Microsoft's products in order to copy the internal design into another
product. His answer: "No, I have not. That is not the intention of anything
that I would do."
Our outside expert witness testified that STAC could not have done what it did
with a simple debugger or usual debugging techniques, and that what STAC did
went far beyond what anyone in the industry would consider necessary for
compatibility. In fact, STAC's existing product was already compatible with
MS-DOS 6, and evidence was presented at trial showing that STAC had other
technical avenues for preloading that would not require STAC to disassemble
and copy Microsoft's designs. For example, IIT's XtraDrive product replaces
the boot sector with its own code that loads their driver into memory before
loading IO.SYS, so they get a preload effect without having to use Microsoft's
technology. Digital Research took still another technical approach to
integrating disk compression in DR DOS 6. STAC did not need our trade secrets
to solve its technical problems; taking our intellectual property was merely
the most expedient way to do so.
Andrew Schulman and one or two other authors have claimed in various public
forums that Microsoft's compression integration design is not a trade secret
because it has been documented in at least two books, including Schulman's own
Undocumented DOS. Schulman's book, however, documents less than 2 percent of
the compression integration design. This provides some understanding of the
relative amount of weight in the integration design between the overall
feature set of the program and the few internal operating system calls used.
Schulman and other authors substantially understate the daunting challenge of
uncovering and documenting the complete, detailed technical design that would
be necessary to replicate an entire subsystem within the operating system,
which is what STAC did. For example, Schulman has not been able to document
how MS-DOS 5 (released three years ago) loads itself into high memory, and
that task is far simpler than the compression integration of DoubleSpace.
STAC was able to copy Microsoft's work only after a heavy investment in
developer time (documented in their own diaries) and has been found guilty of
violating Microsoft trade secrets in doing so.
Note: My comments here are not pointed at Andrew. What he has done in his
research, and what he has published in his books and articles, is radically
different than what STAC has done.
Microsoft's system business is predicated on getting a large number of third
parties, both big and small, to develop products for our operating systems.
Through our developer relations efforts, we continue to provide technical
information to outside vendors and to encourage support third parties to write
products for our systems. In addition, from time to time, we will likely seek
to license third-party software technology to incorporate into our operating
system and application products. (For MS-DOS 5 and 6, we licensed technology
from Central Point, Roundup, Helix, Vertisoft, and Quest/Norton.)
Microsoft has no interest or intent in pursuing developers doing legitimate
technical work to build products to run on MS-DOS or Windows. It is one thing
to use software tools to analyze an operating system to ensure that
applications are compatible with it, or to fix bugs in your product that show
up in low-level interactions in the operating system, or to work around bugs
in the operating system itself. It is another thing entirely to disassemble
the operating system, copy the design of key features, and incorporate them
into your own product. Microsoft is not confused about the difference. The
developer community should not be confused. Microsoft will work hard to
encourage honest developers to build products for our systems, but we will
absolutely take steps to protect our trade secrets from unscrupulous
