Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

OPINION In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then …

[Andy 73]

Great start, and then...

The starting premise is fine - subscription fees for software that can be bought once are a bad deal for consumers. Certainly we shouldn't allow Microsoft to artificially tilt the table in favour of subscriptions by making on prem purchases more of a short term loan.

However. the suggestion that AI could be used to take any software and recreate it as a legal "loophole" to ownership is.. problematic. In the short term, AI is not a "one click software duplicator" - and may never be, depending on who you ask. It therefore requires a reasonably competent team and some reasonable expenditure and effort to generate our imaginary "legal copy" of software. This may be great for groups that want to dismantle profitable businesses (or instantly compete with them), but it's less so for people who want to build new and innovative software. We're in a situation where it's expensive to create new applications and tools, and even more expensive to establish a market, but relatively cheap to reduce the value of that market to near zero. This destroys the potential reward for writing new software.

Suddenly we're in a world that looks like the early industrial revolution - once someone else has a good idea and proves it (the expensive part), it's incredibly easy to "rip it off" and basically remove all reward for the inventor. We quickly figured out that this caused chaos, and strongly disincentivised innovation... and patents were born.

(At this point, half of the people reading will stop reading and just go and downvote).

In the modern world, the rise of corporatism, legal warfare and overreach of patents has certainly caused a lot of problems. I can absolutely understand the desire to "rip it all up" and make the whole world free. However, the harsh reality is that a lot of evidence is pointing towards this sort of freedom largely benefiting corporate giants, and rarely benefiting individuals. The enthusiastic supporters of free software point to a very healthy ecosystem of projects, frameworks, tools and applications. What they don't point to is the people who have to work a day job to pay their bills, the projects that struggle for support, the immense effort successful projects have to expend on constant fund raising and support, or the burnout many maintainers experience.

No - I'm not advocating patents. Or supporting Microsoft. I'm pointing out that people have real world physical needs - food, shelter, comfort - that must be met. If we use (corporate supplied) AI to make ownership of software rights unenforceable, the only people who benefit are the corporates who charge subscriptions for AI tools. We need to ensure that creative works, innovation and even simple toolmaking provide fair reward to the people that do them. That's the challenge of our age, and anyone telling you there's an easy solution is selling snake oil. No matter how wonderful the promises of the AI giants sound, we are not living in an age of abundance, just rapid change. Up until AI puts food on our tables for us, we have to protect individual workers' rights - and that includes the rights of protection for their work. Sure - they can choose to waive those rights if they want to. Many people in the wealthy West can afford to do so (or could, whilst we had a booming economy fuelled by endless cheap credit) - but no matter how much we might want to punish Microsoft, forcibly removing rights without option hurts all of us.

TLDR; the vision AI hypesters sell of infinite free software is a mirage, and the legal loopholes they wish to encourage do not magic it into existence - instead they harm the workers and individuals who actually drive our industry. An industry shorn of legal protection is one that is at the complete mercy of corporate giants far worse than Microsoft.

[cdegroot]

Re: Great start, and then...

Note that software patents is mostly a US thing, so meh.

On duplication: AI is surprisingly competent at it. It still stumbles in the dark when writing code but the original software proves to be a good handrail.

In the last week I had Claude replicate pretty much all of the Erlang ecosystem including Elixir support for an experiment I want to run around variations on the core ideas in the ecosystem. The details aren't important, what is important is that my guidance has been very hands off and huge swaths got completed stand alone. Something I would not have dared to attempt in, say, January. All within my regular Claude Team seat.

My hypothesjs is that software licensing will be dead, commercial and open source. Not completely, but mostly. Just because the build-or-buy decision will be massively slanted towards build.

[Andy 73]

Re: Great start, and then...

"My hypothesis is that software licensing will be dead, commercial and open source. Not completely, but mostly. Just because the build-or-buy decision will be massively slanted towards build."

There are infinitely more users than builders, even with AI allowing comparatively inexperienced people to create software. Again, the AI corporates would love everyone to start building their own software, because a million people all reinventing the wheel (but personalised mildly to their circumstances) will be paying a million subscriptions. However realistically, AI does not absolve you of the need and ability to reason about software (your example of replicating Erlang/Elixir demonstrates your level of experience - I suspect you overestimate other people's abilities). So we're in a position where users are not free to build their own tools, but the people with the skills and training are not able to afford to provide the work.

Licensing addresses that asymmetry - a handful of developers writing a tool for thousands of users.

Additionally, we want those skills, expertise and business drive as they will always be applied to new problems. The ability to build is great, but it is an incredibly inefficient use of our collective resources to devalue experts in favour of local handcrafts, however well augmented.

And note this isn't an argument specifically for or against patents. This is about the broader question of protection of intellectual property, ownership of "work" and individual rights to assert ownership. The current legal frameworks of patents, copyrights and trademarks were not devised with anything like the modern digital world in mind, let alone the wrecking ball of AI.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Great start, and then...

I think you miss the point – you only need to build the clone once.

The main economic for open source has always been that proprietary software overcharges for the value added. This is why most companies that take open source software private usually struggle to make money with it.

With Windows, it's long been debated as to whether Microsoft actually makes money from the licences – when you think about the amount of work they have to do to keep it patched – but, of course, it's really gateway to selling much more lucrative Office and Exchange services, which are also much harder to swap out.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Great start, and then...

With Windows, it's long been debated as to whether Microsoft actually makes money from the licences

Probably not from licenses alone - but from (in a corporate environment) licenses+CALS (for anything that Windows talks to) they probably do make money.

CALS are the first cut-subscription revenue schemes that Microsoft came up with. Want to make the end-user pay (two or three times!) for anything they want to do, annually? Cha-Ching!

They've never managed to make Windows itself into a subscription-only thing but they have successfully monetised everything around it. Office? Yes, you *can* get a static version - it's missing some features, even with in the applications and very few people will buy it (or even download it from what used to be called MSDN) but it does exist. It's just not advertised.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great start, and then...

>There are infinitely more users than builders.

They don't all have anything like the same needs. If you consider individual needs, the ratio may look very different, and definitely not infinity.

>Licensing addresses that asymmetry - a handful of developers writing a tool for thousands of users.

For price and some social reasons they now find themselves forced to all use the same pieces of omnibus software.

>Again, the AI corporates would love everyone to start building their own software, because a million people all reinventing the wheel (but personalised mildly to their circumstances) will be paying a million subscriptions.

Just assuming for a moment that the $40 Claude subscription survives, that is far below the subscription price of almost all COTS software. What if people have to make an economic choice between a (say) Broadcom subscription and a Claude subscription?

If we go back to my youth, I designed hardware and programmed firmware for individual customers, and sometimes individual sites. Steadily falling sell prices, and steadily rising expected functionality left fewer and fewer places where that worked.

However the last couple of years has seen the design costs drop: Arduino allowed rapid development of good-enough firmware with very complex connectivity and UIs, JLC-PCB made one-off and small run electronic economic again, and now Claude is putting complex software stacks within reach of single developers with a 1-8 week timeline. I actually see the kind of custom work I did through the 80's and 90's, might become viable again, assuming there are businesses left able to pay for even a single engineer.

You can argue that a Claude clone of MSWord will be even less reliable, but no individual customer needs the massive width of functionality that has accreted to it. In a Claude world, a single developer can implement the functionality that the specific customer needs for a specific job, and probably that single developer can continue to support that single customer economically.

My son, who is a mechanical engineer with very limited software skills, implemented a measurement system using a camera to track a mechanical system then through FFT and other signal analysis to hard performance numbers. This is a single use piece of software. It took a day to get running-ish, and less that a week to be adequate to be part of a production system.

At another end he is making a signal analysis program to replace a (lowish cost) commercial package, because it is easier and faster to use Claude to re-write the needed functionality from scratch, than it is to use the software's API to make the custom UI and tests required for efficient production. The COTS software has been used in what is a manual process for a number of years as automating/customising was too hard /slow for the available talent. (An aspect of that is that Claude is very well informed about Python, but knows almost nothing about the commercial programs API, and can't help with that. For me, it would be easier to use the API, but for him a Python rewrite is easiest.)

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: Great start, and then...

Assuming your clone of Erlang ecosystem becomes a part of a commercial product (you do say you want to experiment, but then you make predictions regarding commercial products), will you be able to support and extend it?

Asking for a friend who mentioned a similarly impressive instance of vibe-coding over a pint the other day, but was not confident enough to answer this question in the affirmative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great start, and then...

What do you mean by support it?

If you mean support a universal programming language used globally by hundreds/thousands, the answer is probably no.

However if it means supporting a custom Erlang like "domain language" for a specific customer and task, then the answer is likely yes. Further, the vagaries of AI coding might in practice help lock-in the customer to me supporting it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great start, and then...

Note that software patents is mostly a US thing, so meh.

Not true. I worked for IBM reviewing and approving patent submissions. You cannot patient a piece of software, you can only copyright it. You can patent a whole subsystem or system that contains software. But that does not protect that software from being clean room rewritten as per the PC BIOS.

[NoneSuch]

Re: Great start, and then...

"Note that software patents is mostly a US thing, so meh."

Understand that U.S. law can reach well beyond its borders. In some circumstances, a U.S. court can enter a judgment against you even if you have never set foot in the United States or held any business interests there.

Nor has the U.S. government shown much respect for judicial independence lately. Just ask the ICC judges it sanctioned for authorizing arrest warrants for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And I, for one, welcome our new Great Pumpkin overlord—may his executive orders be limitless, his immunity absolute, and his pumpkin patch forever above the law.

[Antron Argaiv]

Trying...

...to shed a tear for poor Microsoft, whose strategy has been "upgrade" after "upgrade", always seeming to make something incompatible, so you'd be forced into using the latest and "greatest".

At the end of the day, it was a desktop operating system and an office suite. And they can't even get that part right. But rearranging the menus? That's their superpower, now hand over the dosh!

At my previous employer (AMPE), we once tried to use Embedded XP (really just stripped down XP) on a product. None of us could quite believe the licensing terms document. Better than Intel's though, when we tried to use their processors -- Intel won't even show you the datasheets without an NDA and you need an purchase agreement in place to even get samples! We went elsewhere in both cases; Linux for the OS and ARM SOCs for the hardware.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Linux for the OS and ARM SOCs for the hardware.

So we shan't be seeing that product in a Bork Report then ?

[simonlb]

Re: Trying...

By all means, use AI to write an alternate version of Windows whilst ensuring it's as secure as it can possibly be, but please, please, please, provide an option button to use whichever UI you prefer to make the experience at least tolerable. I can work with Win2000 or Win7, but give the masochists the options of Vista, 8 or 11 should they want it.

[Bebu sa Ware]

[IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

I don't think I had seen that in print before but it agrees with my experience of comparing the Intel datasheets and the circuit diagrams included with my Taiwanese PC clone back then.

Heaven knows what the manufacturer thought the customer was going to do with the diagrams. I cannot imagine Shirley the typing pool wirewrapping an ISA card — most PCs even in those early days were used for office or clerical tasks.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: [IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

Which is why, after their early attempts, they tried to move over to the MCA architecture - if you wanted to make one, you *had* to license the IP from IBM since it was protected by patent.

I imagine they were hoping that "no-one got sacked for buying IBM" would apply to the PC world. Sadly for them, it didn't.

Buy an IBM PS/2 (plus all the gubbins to go with it like RAM card, token-ring network card etc etc) or buy a (much) cheaper Compaq+ethernet card? It might only be 10Base2 but it'll, mostly, get the job done. You might have to twiddle the connectors every so often and it might be as fast as molasses in Alaska at times but it was Good Enough.

Did everything the PS/2 would do at half the price.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: [IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

My recollection could be a bit hazy, but I believe the story went along these lines :

IBM was big in business - all those mainframes and terminals, etc., etc. Desktop PCs were starting to appear, and businesses (especially smaller ones) were starting to see their value. But even for the big sites where "you never got fired for buying IBM", they were getting asked about desktop computers - and they had no answer.

The IBM mindset was "everything big", programmer performance was measured on KLOCs (kilo lines of code), and their internal teams just couldn't create a desktop computer that was a viable proposition.

Meanwhile, National Semiconductor had come out with this nifty little 8088 chip - and had a tech note on how you might build a system around it. Some small startup basically took that, and made it into a real system. IBM saw this, realised what it meant, and bought the whole company - and the desktop computer hacked together just by implementing the tech note got badged as the "Personal Computer". Of course, because it had the IBM badge on, it sold like hot-cakes into IBM using customers.

Of course, to make it actually usable, it needed an OS. The story about how it could have been DRDOS is legend, but a young chap called Bill Gates showed amazing business ingenuity by selling IBM non-exclusive rights to a specific version of MS-DOS (which was itself just a tarted up version of QDOS which he'd bought the right to for a fixed fee, and which IBM badged PC-DOS). Bill then went and sold the very same MS-DOS to other companies building desktop computers - each one customised to the hardware, this was before that became standardised. Better still, Bill developed MS-DOS and sold the newer versions to other manufacturers, and IBM found out the hard way that they'd been outsmarted and had to negotiate on Bill's terms to get the newer versions.

Back then, MS actually made good tools (prior to the PC/MS-DOS era, Bill had been writing compilers) that fitted an actual need - and thrived based on those tools being reasonably good. But like many others (I don't plan to ever own another Mac), over time they've borged from "sell better tools to do a job people need to do" to "stiff people for all you can get by offering them superficially shiny stuff".

[martinusher]

Re: [IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

The reason for the three ring binder with schematics and BIOS listing was that this was SOP for computer manufacturers at the time. These Big Iron merchants had grown up delivering complex, finicky, bits of custom hardware which often needed the intervention of a technician to get to actually function after installation. The PC itself was seen as a toy, as a peripheral on a par with a VDT ("Video Display Terminal") and included adapter cards to interface to IBM's mainframes. IBM didn't quite realize what they'd made (it was, after all, effectively an Apple ][ clone made with an Intel chipset) which was underscored by the way that the let Microsoft sell its non-custom version of PC-DOS to anyone who wanted it ("and the rest was history").

The origins of MS-DOS/PC-DOS are well known. It really was a CP/M clone, right down to the OS entry points and "jump around" capability to access those entry points. (That's MS-DOS Version 1.4). Microsoft improved it by cloning UNIX like file calls which rapidly superseded the CP/M entry points (which were eventually dropped). Microsoft's main contribution was complexity; their software was deliberately made far more complex than it needed to be which made cloning it difficult because you had to clone not just the functions but also any bugs and side effects. Windows just carried on the tradition; the original code was developed from 'event driven' programming, a way of simulating an operating system using a stack of Windows (which may, or may not be, graphical). There were viable GUIs around for a PC long before versions of Microsoft Windows became viable (the earliest versions were a disaster, as were their original attempts at networking).

Anyway, its all moot.....I gave up on Windows ages ago.....

[DJV]

Re: billions in damages

"the company could be on the hook for billions in damages over its efforts to date to shut things down"

Couldn't have happened to a nicer* bunch of utter crooks**!

* For negative values of "nice".

** Apart from Musk, Bezos, Zuck and Ellison, of course.

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: billions in damages

Those "utter crooks" are rich and important. It's only natural that they run with negative values of nice(1).

[JoeCool]

The conclusion is spot on

AI is a tool with the inherent intent to strip property rights from IP, and monitize that IP.

Micro$oft is surely in a quandry, trying to determine which path to monetize.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The conclusion is spot on

Is this where I point out that the brand new "American" country completely ignored everyone else's copyright ?

[JoeCool]

Re: The conclusion is spot on

I don't know. What's the tie-in ? Maybe a few details would be helpful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The conclusion is spot on

“Which path”

Yes, there are two paths you can go by

But in the long run

There's still time to change the road you're on.

And it makes me wonder.

[Bitsminer]

AI cloning state-of-the-art

The current SOTA is quite impressive:

The Bun Javascript and Typescript compiler system was converted from Zig (535k SLOC) to Rust in a couple of weeks and $165k of tokens.

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

They switched in the "minor" upgrade from 1.3.14 to 1.4. Almost nobody noticed.

Impressive.

[deeredd]

Copying isn't the problem

As ever it's selling, installing, troubleshooting and supporting. All of which would need a medium/large company with deep pockets and a long term business strategy.

I can't think of a single services company with deep pockets and a long-term business strategy, anyone?

You could reskin KDE and libre office tomorrow and be 95% of the way there but no-one would buy it, sadly.

[Taliesinawen]

Compaq and the copyrighted BIOS

“.. when IBM launched its PC .. The built-in BIOS chip .. was safely copyrighted .. It took start-up Compaq a year to blow that assumption apart. Get a team of programmers to affirm they’d only seen the BIOS interface, not the source, and get them to implement the interface in entirely new code. ”

It was Columbia Data Products that first successfully clean-roomed the IBM BIOS in 1982.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Compaq and the copyrighted BIOS

Thanks for that link, right at the end, another able down memory lane - I remember when Future Domain SCSI controllers were consider one of the best. I might even still have one or two in a box of "stuff I should have thrown out decades ago"

[Blackjack]

AI coders have the tendency to outright copy paste copyrighted code so yes we definitely are not there yet.

[Bertieboy]

Islay Malt

Used to visit Islay frequently - for me it's the 16 year old Lagavulin!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave Plummer recreated Notepad using AI. Surely enough retirees from Microsoft could use AI to recreate the whole mess.

[Cliffwilliams44]

The problem is that it IS a mess!

Microsoft cannot even get out of its own mess.

One of the most annoying things about Active Directory is that it is so hopelessly bound to the Windows API. While you can query AD using LDAP not everything can be done. So, there is not command line or PowerShell interaction with AD from a Linux PC. MS have even admitted that the task of separating this is just too overwhelming, so much of the bowels of Windows was built by people no longer at MS and must are no longer on this planet!

Why was there never a Windows 9? Because the number 9 is hard coded somewhere in those bowels of the OS (95) and fixing that was way too much effort!

The cost in tokens would be astronomical!

[I could be a dog really]

There is a story that in the legal shenanigans around SMB, where Microsoft were basically forced by the court to provide the specification for SMB to anyone on a FRAND basis, they had to go to the SAMBA project (who they'd been trying to shut down) because the SAMBA project had better API documentation than MS did. For MS, it was a case of "the code is the documentation, what the code does is the standard"; while the SAMBA project had been forced to reverse engineer the protocols/APIs.

I can well believe that much of the Windows ecosystem is poorly documented, and relies heavily of "what the ancient code does".

[Anonymous Coward]

Did someone actually say this ?

"If only Windows and Office could be cloned with the same degree of fidelity as that PC BIOS."

Have you not read anything about MS-DOS not being ready until lotus won't run ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Did someone actually say this ?

‘It has become very apparent that Lotus Notes is a major threat to the continued success of Microsoft.

We are currently about four years behind Lotus in terms of understanding what users want from groupware .. Assuming Manzi wants to keep his job, we could probably negotiate a "green mail" price of say $30 per share.’ ref

"I'd be glad to help tilt lotus into the death spiral. I could do it friday afternoon but not saturday."

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Office Alternatives

As every Reg reader knows, there are fantastic FOSS answers for office productivity

I have a fairly rudimentary OOXML spreadsheet that brings LibreOffice Calc to its knees. It contains is a single relatively small table of data, a few basic calculations, a row filter and some conditional formatting. It's baffling.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Re: Office Alternatives

I have found Libre Calc doesn't so data tables well, it's a thing the devs seem to not care about! Along with a lot of things, they have no interest in doing! It's why I don't use it and prefer OnlyOffice.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: Office Alternatives

A spreadsheet that doesn't handle tables (and I'm not talking about a database table, just a two dimensional array of data) is a very strange concept indeed!

I dabbled with OnlyOffice briefly but bounced off it when I discovered that it's only designed to resemble MS Office. The functionality is noticeably different and a lot of things that you can customise or modify in MS Office are hardcoded in OO. It was frustrating to get used to both things that looked identical behaving differently and the loss of functionality.

[Taliesinawen]

Re: Office Alternatives

Microsoft Office uses references to Windows binary "blobs" and proprietary elements that are impossible to render in LibreOffice. At the same time Microsoft claimed it was compliant with the ISO standard.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: Office Alternatives

Even after converting the file to ODS it's still a disaster

It looks like LO Calc hates XLOOKUPs

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Office Alternatives

It may well be compliant with the SIO standard - the standard explicitly includes undocumented BLOBs (such as "Document in Word97 format".) I recall at the time reading the BSI review of the proposed standard - it was really scathing about how rubbish it was. So it got passed by the simple process of putting enough shills into all the national standards bodies' committees to vote it through - and then they never turned up again, leaving those committees unable to function for ages.

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel + Macros + VBA.......

@Sorry_that_handle_is_already_taken.

Yup....lots of HUGE spreadsheets using Excel + Macos + VBA.................

NO ONE ever tested them to see if the results matched what it said on the tin!

Oh....mistake on my part....there never were any requirements................

Oh....sorry.....the Agile Manifesto tells us that "requirements" are so twentieth century............

....and you think you have problems with LibreOffice????

....and that's before we get to megabyte slop from the latest wonderful AI tool............

Did someone mention "progress"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Excel + Macros + VBA [spinner]

Yup [wheeze] lots of huge spreadsheets using Excel plus Macros plus VBA [heavily asymmetrical blinking noises].

No one ever tested them to see if the results matched what it said on the tin!

Oh [whoa, ooh oh yes: it all happened on the Jackson Park Express!] mistake on my part [cough cough wheeze] there never were any requirements.

Oh [exceptionally long thought-collecting pause] sorry [stall for time, stall for time] the Agile Manifesto tells us that requirements are so twentieth century [hacking fit].

[waiting on brain rodents to engage incredulity] and you think you have problems with LibreOffice?

[another train of thought comes along after a few minutes] and that's before we get to megabyte slop from the latest wonderful AI tool [ultimate vacant stare].

Did someone mention "progress"?

[Cliffwilliams44]

Interesting, but likely will never happen!

While the denizens of the El Reg forum will cry and knash their teeth against Microsoft, subscriptions, and AI, the masses will not!

For consumers it's a simple choice, drop $200 for a perpetual license for just Office for one PC or $9.99/mo for Office 365 for the whole family with all the added benefits that gets you! None of the wailing and whining of the lurkers in this forum will change that!

For Corporations, it is the difference between CAPEX and OPEX! (Capital expenditure vs operational expenditure). For the SMB it's a no brainer, no need to use credit to buy 100 licenses of office, no need to buy a server and install and license Exchange, it all becomes an operational expense payable out of the monthly revenue. The same holds true for large corporations. Especially where companies operate departments or projects as individual cost centers. The age-old adage holds, it's easier to get an operation expenditure approves than a capital expenditure!

Now Windows, the majority of windows license are bought with the PC and hardware refresh for the most part covers any upgrades. Then when internet speeds make VDI (virtual desktop interface) viable from any connection and remote gaming rivals speeds now seen on desktops, then the high-powered local PC becomes a thing of the past and we (well you, I won't be here) will all be using some form of terminal connected to remote servers.

So, while cloning office (well, it's already been done to a major degree, Libre, OnlyOffice) may be a cool project, or cloning Windows might be a hobby for someone, I just don't see it happening!

As far as licensing, what exactly are they reselling? Most businesses run their licenses to the very last minute! I could see if a company just bought a bunch of licenses and then went belly up! That is about the only thing that makes any sense. As I said, Windows is mostly tied to the PC, MS doesn't care if you sell a PC and sell the license with it. Are they selling SQL server 2016 licenses which goes out of support, oh look, TODAY!

This isn't the win everyone thinks it is. It certainly doesn't portend the demise of Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Escrow

Obviate FFS.

when I were a lad (and people understood what idempotent meant) a big thing about using software in business critical areas was to ensure that if (or in the 90s, when) a software house went bust, their customers could arrange to carry on with the source code to give to their own teams.

I know this because when I worked for a small software house I arranged it as part of a (quite tasty) contract.

I do find myself wondering what options MS and their elk have provided to their big name customers.

[Arty Effem]

In a UK court, 'license' is a verb; good luck selling one.

[Doctor Huh?]

Poison the data set

I suppose Microsoft could adopt the IBM approach and publish the source code, replete with copyright notices, and wait for the next generation of models-in-training to dutifully slurp it up. Then they just need to wait for an AI-implemented clone and demonstrate that the model(s) used for implementation can be induced to spit out whole blocks of Microsoft's copyrighted code. That case would seem to be a good deal stronger than the one SCO used to tie IBM up in court for years, and it would complete Microsoft's transformation into a law firm with a software side-hustle.

[Evaluator]

Its been decades since I used anything from Microsoft....and then I come here and read something that would make sense 20 years ago: "people stick with Windows and Office" but not today. Is this website owned my Microsoft?