A Tale Of Revenge, Retractions, And Reverse EngineeringA Tale Of Revenge, Retractions, And Reverse Engineering

It's been a rough week for Chairman Bill. The European Parliament on Wednesday shot down an effort to legalize software patents which could have won Microsoft a king's ransom in licensing fees--and lawmakers swung the axe just hours after Bill Gates stopped in for a visit. Earlier in the week, the British press delivered its own low blow, admitting in published retractions that pages of handwritten doodles they attributed to Prime Minister Tony Blair--scribblings handwriting experts declared the work of a raving megalomaniac--actually belonged to Gates. Ouch.

The week's most interesting smackdown, however, didn't involve Gates directly. Yesterday, CNET News.com reported comments Sun executive and Java creator James Gosling made to a gathering of Australian developers. Gosling first laid into Sun's information-sharing pact with Microsoft as a wasting asset, since European anti-trust regulators aim to turn many of the proprietary Windows protocols Redmond had been sharing into public knowledge.

"We're still trying to work out what that agreement means," CNET reported Gosling as saying. "In some levels, it's actually meaning less and less."

Also, while Gosling praised Microsoft's decision to open its XML-based Office document formats, he was astute enough to note that here, too, nothing is what it seems to be. Gosling pointed out that even as various government heavies (in this case, the State of Massachusetts) squeeze Redmond to release various proprietary odds and ends, the company is doing its best to monkey-wrench efforts to reverse-engineer its products for interoperability.

Reverse engineering is still more or less legal in the United States, as it is elsewhere in the world. A key exception, as Gosling stated, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on reverse-engineering digital rights management technology. In an act of perverse brilliance, Microsoft has proceeded to spread DRM code throughout its software stack--including places where it serves no legitimate purpose.

"Under the sheets," Gosling was quoted telling the audience, "the major justification is to make reverse-engineering illegal."

Bill Gates may be one of the world's most generous and visionary philanthropists. But stuff like this would make Dr. Evil weep with joy.