Bot?
Sounds like some nominative determinism is creeping in!
A computer program does not infringe the copyright of another one just because it performs the same function as it, but it could do if it copies the means by which the other program works, an advisor to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has said. Advocate General Yves Bot said that computer programs that have the same …
"To accept that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development,"
Someone should tell the US patent office before they allow someone to patent keyboard input or addition.
If you're not prepared for a competitor to come up with a cheaper, faster, better solution in technology, then you're going to go the way of the dinosaur. No tech company is safe from this idiom, so if you haven't planned for it in a business plan, you will become a tech dinosaur. Going to the courts is just band-aiding a gaping wound and just making lawyers rich. The only solution is to evolve and make an even faster and better solution or reprice it competitively.
SAS is just one of those dinosaurs.
"To accept that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development,"
And besides... monopolysing ideas expressed in a computer program are what Patents are for...
Now, if this can apply to the US (and it should, since the USA has had a good, long run of influencing and imposing upon other markets in the name of GAAP, etc.)..
Then, it seems to me that IBM has JUST run out of excuses against revamping Lotus SmartSuite.
Last I heard, the reason IBM could not make SmartSuite into open source or decompile and recompile it to bring the functionality up to date was that an untold/un-locatable number of patent holders of SmartSuite could not be contacted....
Now, out of good will, IBM ought to let there be a fork of SmartSuite, and take a veritable laser scalpel and put down Symphony, which most decidedly is NOT what true SmartSuite users ever, EVER hoped to see.