A utility, which could be supplied as part of the system, or as a separate entity to work with the system, supplied by another software designer, is just that - a component that can be built in or added on, as long as the outside designer has a clue on how to incorporate the utility into the system.
Your point is well taken, and there is also a legal precedent that might apply to future issues like this. Do you remember the Stacker compression utility that was popular several years ago? At first this utility was designed by STAC Electronics and bundled with the system as a way of saving hard disk space, in the days when disk memory was more costly than it is today. Well, Microsoft decided it need not buy Stacker, and instead it would use a slightly modified version of its own. This decision really hurt STAC, and the company forthwith filed a lawsuit charging MSFT with copyright infringement. Eventually STAC won.
Here's the lesson: If MSFT writes a utility, it is copyrighted and legally protected. If someone copies the utility enough to infringe the copyright, they'll be prevented from selling it and may also have to pay damages. The copyright law, in other words, self regulates that problem, allowing the system developer to produce his own utility, but on the other hand, not preventing an outside software developer from providing something better, as long as it is original and does not copy what already exists.
The rules of the game are not all that difficult to follow. The more they are abused, the more likely it is that some outside body, whether it be a government agency or a court, will impose regulation that can be obnoxious, costly, time consuming, and inferior in all respects to the self regulation that decent companies are capable of imposing, provided that they have the will. As one of the most noted experts on administrative law wrote (about 30 years ago), "This is not a country of laws, but of laws and men." |
