Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There were some allegations that Cutler did a bit of a Levandowski on DEC. Or maybe it should be that Levandowski did a bit of a Cutler on Google.

Anyway, they settled out of court as long as MS promised to port Windows to DEC's Alpha.

View on HN

Eh, there's a big difference between the two. Levandowski basically stole files from Google and gave them to Uber. Cutler just transferred his knowledge of building VMS to building Win NT. I suspect that's why it was settled out of court because the case was much much weaker that Cutler had stolen something tangible from DEC.

I'm not so sure about that. DEC may have simply decided to settle because fighting MS in open court would take a long time and deplete them of cash they needed very much (we all know how they ended up), Alpha was their hail-mary pass and having NT on Alpha could have strengthened their position.

Citation?

Wikipedia pages on NT, DEC, the Alpha microprocessor and Microsoft's general legal strategies would be an excellent starting point.

Cutler didn't stole files, as they would be pretty useless. But DEC had feathers ruffled because Cutler uprooted a team he picked for his attempt to do a modern rewrite of VMS, which Digital refused to do.

And it was a good team.

Friend of mine worked for a company that had a TCP/IP stack for VMS. He said they were asked how hard it would to port it to NT. The answer was trivial.

That said I think there is a difference between re-implementing APIs and stealing sources.

During early days of NT, if you wanted a port, you filled in a form and entered partnership where you were responsible for your system-specific code and MS cooperated with you.

Majority of NT/alpha work was done by team at DEC, later Compaq.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com