Writing one's own product doesn't really help to interoperate with the service in which your potential customers are already storing their data.

Does this include Mozilla Corporation and Python Software Foundation, which ship open source code and binaries compiled using Microsoft Visual C++?

Because Kevin Horton's NANDputer was built by hand out of a pile of 74HC00 (quad 2-input NAND gate) ICs on a breadboard. There isn't enough room in any single 7400 to insert a backdoor.

The "trusting trust" attack that you linked already has countermeasures. One by David A. Wheeler, called diverse double compiling, involves bootstrapping the compiler using several independently developed compilers for the same language and seeing whether they ultimately produce the same binary. Of course, these countermeasures are no help for a proprietary language such as the Pascal variant used by Delphi.

You still have to worry about other incumbent copyright owners claiming you misappropriated their copyrighted design and concept.

If tabletop games and video games are irreconcilable, then explain World Series of Poker for Xbox and Xbox 360. Or explain the GBA game that includes Risk, Battleship, and Clue(do). Or explain Catan 360. Or explain NES games like I Can Remember, Classic Concentration, and Concentration Room, which are essentially an old card game with different card graphics.

There was "Atlantik" in KDE Games 3.

Monopoly is older than I am, and I'm old enough to drink beer. Therefore, any patent will have expired.

How so? I've read that 8.1 just brings back a visible button in the lower left to open the Start screen. It still has the same problem that the Start screen entirely covers up the applications you were using on the desktop, breaking subconscious continuity, unlike the Windows 7 Start menu or the Classic Shell Start menu that sits in the lower-left corner and leaves what you were working on visible.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

How so? In comments to stories about cryptographic lockdown policies sometimes called "walled garden", some users (who shall remain nameless for the moment) keep claiming that the vast majority of users of computing devices have no desire to learn a programming language or do anything else commonly associated with job titles that fall under "developer". This is why the lockdown inherent in game consoles and devices running iOS doesn't hinder their adoption by the general public.

Case in point: The forthcoming Xbox One console is believed to run a customized build of Windows 8 alongside the "Windows XB" used by games. If "everyone is a developer," who will have access to the Xbox One SDK?

Sure, Firefox has the Beta, Aurora, and Nightly channels, Chrome has something analogous, and Ubuntu has the beta of the next semiannual Alliterative Animal version. But the vast majority of end users don't expect them to be supported in the same way that the release is supported. Beta users expect breakage. However, developers can rely on builds marked "release candidate" to be nearly identical in behavior to the RTM, especially once the final release candidate is declared RTM a short time in advance of pushing it out to the vast majority of end users. Even if this window between the release of an RC and its deployment is only a few days, it's still long enough for developers to fix those application defects that have the highest impact.

If a behavior difference between preview and release causes an application that worked under preview to fail under release, the owners have to deal with increased support issues resulting from this failure. Support costs money.

I think the point of the article is that developers feel likely to end up burned by any substantial differences between Windows 8.1 preview and Windows 8.1 RTM. When a difference between preview and RTM causes an application not to work, it may end up with unjustified 1-star ratings (or whatever the equivalent on Windows Store is).

Is that the same FAG, a Schaeffler Group company, that makes the vibration measuring tool it calls the FAG Detector III?

If the dimensions of a basketball court (94 by 50 feet, rim 10 feet up, size of free throw lane, etc.) and the official size, weight, and bounce ratio (2/3 of initial height) of a ball are considered rules of the game of basketball, then "the matrix shall be 10 cells wide" and "the pieces shall be the seven one-sided tetrominoes" and "pieces shall move by translation and 90 degree rotation" and "a row filled with squares disappears to make room for more pieces" sure sound like mechanics and rules to me. I guess I must be misunderstanding exactly what the judge found to be "expressive elements" in this case, other than perhaps the piece colors.

I get the impression from reading the opinion that using the same set of pieces (all seven one-sided tetrominoes) is sufficient to "look too similar". Is there a case that The Tetris Company lost?

U.S. judges have tended to draw the line between idea and expression in different places for games compared to other kinds of software. On the one hand, you have Lotus v. Borland and Oracle v. Google that weaken copyright in interfaces between a program and a user or between a program and other programs. On the other hand, you have Tetris v. Xio that strengthens copyright in the basic rules of a game.

But expression is, and good luck convincing a judge that what you copied is the idea, not the expression.

And some of these App Store copycats are getting sued.