Re: Some clarification.
We are somehow failing to communicate. Here is a key pair of sentences from my immediately preceding post: "On the subject of the Workplace Shell itself, I frankly no longer care, having moved on. However, I thought it was an interesting case study in the business obstacles to taking a codebase open-source that has previously been not only proprietary but also binary-only, like other real and hypothetical cases people have discussed, such as Star Office, Netscape Communicator, and WordPerfect."
It seems that you still do care about WPS, and not just as a case study in obstacles to open-sourcing. That's fine, but I simply don't.
Accordingly, my concern was not whether "Workplace Shell has input from Microsoft", but rather, in part, whether Workplace Shell is encumbered by patents, copyrights, or trade secrets held by any third party.
The fact that you talk, in your post, about trademarks suggests that you probably didn't follow what I was talking about, since it's inherently irrelevant to the open-sourcing question. Your use of the meaningless term "IP" is unfortunate, as it lumps together four vastly different categories of abstract legal rights.
And:
I wouldn't be shocked if outsiders helped as I believe that the WPS for Windows 3.x was done externally.
This, of course, is purely and simply changing the subject. (Yeah, yeah, you can't see why that is, and want me to prove it to you, right?)
At this point, I'm obliged to give up on this discussion as hopeless. I'm sorry I tried.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
