Author: Amir Ban
Date: 16:10:49 11/01/98
Go up one level in this thread
On November 01, 1998 at 11:51:01, Christophe Theron wrote: > >I was very sad when I learned that OS/2 was dead. I am pleased to see that Linux >grows. > >I don't use Internet Explorer. I use Netscape Communicator. > >Because we need to support several software companies. We need all of them, not >just one "big brother". > How much did you pay for Linux and Netscape Communicator, Christophe ? >You can buy ChessBase products, but don't forget to buy other chess programs >too. > >You know what is my worse nightmare? That Microsoft releases a serious chess >program. And you know how they will do it: they will take the best programs, >disassemble them, and steal the algorithms to build their own program. Of course >you know that they have already done this with the Stacker Disk Compression >Utility. Don't you remember? The result is the "Microsoft" Dos and Windows disk >compression utility. They could do the same with chess programs. > This is not what happened. Microsoft's DoubleSpace compression originates from "DoubleDisk", a product of Mitan, a small Israeli company run by Micky and Eitan Feldbau, and published by Vertisoft, its US distributor. The brothers Feldbau were old friends of mine, and I was in close contact with both Mitan and Stac when this episode happened. Mitan, in '90 or so, were the first to come up with "transparent" drive compression based on the Lempel-Ziv algorithms. Stac, a company from Carlsbad, CA that did compression hardware came up with Stacker based on a similar concept soon later, and led the market. Then Microsoft became interested. They negotiated with both Mitan and Stac and decided on buying the DoubleDisk source code, which the developed into DoubleSpace. Stac then sued Microsoft for patent violation. It seems Stac had patent rights for the algorithm called LZ77 (I never understood this part, since Lempel & Ziv, two Israelis, published this in the public domain in 1977. I know that my friend Micky, who saw very little money out of all this, was very bitter about this. The words he had for Stac were worse than what Thorsten Czub has for Chessbase). Stac won in court, and the court awarded them $40 million. Microsoft payed only $26 million, I think, because Microsoft also won a patent counter-suit. A byproduct of this was that Mitan & Vertisoft went out of business. Stac, by the way, also left the compression business after that and are doing other things now. >The result would of course be a good program. Would you call this a "wonderful >development for consumers" ? > >For the community of chess programmers, this would be the *last* development. > I think if Microsoft decide to enter this market, the people who should be concerned are at Mindscape. I don't understand why this affects chess programmers, except that one or more of us will be working for Microsoft. Amir
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.