Quote
I only said Microsoft may own some Intellectual Property there ("IP" is broader than just copyright and includes patents).
This thread is about copyright. There is no reason at all to muddy the issue with talk about patents, which have nothing to do with copyright.
"Intellectual Property" is a useless concept. Copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, etc are all fundamentally different. They need to be treated as separate issues. Please do not conflate them.
You are also conflating copyright and patents with "property", a common mistake. They are not "property". Copyright is a monopoly on the copying and distribution of a work; a patent is a monopoly on the use of an idea; and a trademark is a monopoly on the use of a name or branding. With patents in particular, it's absurd to say that you "own" something because it makes use of an idea that you patented. Say, for example, you had a patent on the idea of typing a password into a pop-up window. That wouldn't mean that you "own" gksudo, a simple program that does that on some GNU/Linux systems. At the most, you could colloquially say that you "own" the idea (meaning that you own the patent on the idea). That's very different.
But again, this is completely unrelated to this topic and to copyright.
If there were a patent on some part of the way MSVC compiles a program, then:
-
The patent wouldn't necessarily be held by Microsoft.
-
MSVC wouldn't necessarily be the only affected compiler.
-
You wouldn't want to know about it, because if you do, you become substantially more liable for patent infringement if you, you know, compile a program you wrote, without the permission of whatever troll holds that patent.
So except as a minefield we all have to blindly walk through in the hopes that we don't get hurt, patents are irrelevant. You're probably going to be in violation of patents no matter what you do, because there are simply too many of them and they are simply too broad. (Again, see "Patent Absurdity". You can find it for free on YouTube.) Ignoring them and hoping for the best is all we can do, so the possibility (or rather, high likelihood) of patents existing should not affect anything that you do.
In short: patents are irrelevant to this topic. Only copyright is relevant here.