TECHRIGHTS has already gathered many examples for a list of companies betrayed by Microsoft deals which had them abandon GNU/Linux and left broke. David Gale, tadag's author, told me yesterday that Tadag would be another example of a company which Microsoft destroyed in this way, very much as it destroyed i4i, which subsequently sued Microsoft and won. For this who do not know the history of this dispute, Microsoft pretended to be an i4i partner, then it got a look at their idea, and then nicked it and incorporated that into Office. It was all deliberate and very shameless based on discovery by the court.
In 2004, tadag's owners engaged with Microsoft to discuss how tadag intellectual property rights (IPR) could be protected to enable discussions on joint development. The two were already closely involved as strategic partners working in public sector IT. Following the signing of numerous non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) facilitated by Microsoft, as well as a documented partnership mandate, multiple senior Microsoft security personnel, from all over the world, reviewed the new architecture and agreed that tadag represented a new vision for IT security.
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In April 2005, at an executive briefing in Redmond, Microsoft shared a confidential security development to a group of development partners that included tadag's author, David Gale. Unwittingly, a senior Microsoft employee presented the tadag architecture to the audience, under the banner of an 'exciting, still-under wraps, Microsoft innovation'. A formal complaint was immediately logged, with assurances coming from Microsoft that a full internal investigation would take place. In 2005, three weeks after RamTec's formal complaint, an exact replica of the disclosed component of the tadag architecture was filed for patent in the U.S. under the name of OpenID.
Following reassurances from senior Microsoft Corp executives that a resolution would be forthcoming, partnership activity continued. David Gale was lead reference presenter at the global launch of BizTalk Server 2006, at the London Stock Exchange and, for two years, a retained consultant to Microsoft, presenting on their behalf at major events across Europe. Despite Microsoft claims of having conducted a thorough internal investigation, by February 2007, Bill Gates was on a podium announcing Microsoft’s 'sponsorship' of OpenID. Since then, Microsoft has variously: issued instructions to employees to deny any memory of previous communications (evidenced in an MS lawyer's internal email), prevented senior executives from pursuing an investigation, denied the originality of the IPR, refused to reveal the outcome of an internal email scan, disputed the existence of NDAs, then finally disputed the validity of the Microsoft originated NDAs copied to them.