>>In Germany looser in a court case has to pay lawyer cost of the winner (within certain boundries). Not so in every jurisdiction - esp. the states. So there is serious financial risk evoked in some jurisdictions even "if nothing illegal [was] going on" if going against deep pockets and lawyer teams already on payroll. Also often used as a tactic to force change of behaviour by settling early/without court decision.
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>This is a valid point; lawyers and legal systems can ruin even the innocent. I cannot argue against this valid point.

There's another point which nobody made here yet (well Lutz just did to a degree), that upthread the M$ was assumed to be some benevolent force, a nonbiased force on the side of law, the fully rightful owner of Fox. IMO, M$ is anything but. They played every dirty trick in the book, repeatedly over decades, and added several chapters. They bought Fox to compete with Borland and kill them if possible, not because they liked it (bGates loves Basic...), and behaved with it as the venture capitalists do with old factories here - to strip mine them of anything valuable and then shut them down, leaving them with the valuable real estate, production and workers be damned. And I refuse to believe that Rick was completely ignorant of this. If I found a hidden bug in M$ software (as in "they knew about it and kept mum and did nothing") as early as 1987, by the end of the century anyone who wasn't sitting on his ears knew about it, because there were dozens of malicious practices perpetrated by M$ by then.

>He should perhaps have considered your approach as a first step but I still dont think it was out of malice - maybe I am too naive but I prefer to always give the benefit of the doubt when certainty cannot be known.

Why "the doubt"? There can be only one doubt? (just curious about the phrase)

>>I see myself as rather tolerant (or thick skinned or arrogant) online, while trying to never utter myself anything online I would not say face-2-face and mark sarcasm/irony even where most think of it as evident.
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>Good principle and which I abide by too. Whatever I say online I will say face to face. It seems a virtue which is rapidly being lost in the world.

As two colleagues of mine once had a dispute, and one said
- and why do you keep going around and saying behind my back that I'm so-and-so?
- well I can't take you with me each time, but I'll tell the same to you now, face to face.