Bill Gate's answer was " You mean an API that you have a patent on?"

If the lawyer had said "Yes", he could have answered "No": Gates knows that patents don't really apply.

Otherwise the lawyer would have had to define it, which runs the clock down on how long Gates had to actually answer questions.

Yes, Bill Gates answer was the question I was referring to as a good one. My formatting of the quoted content was a little messed up in the first line.

>If the lawyer had said "Yes", he could have answered "No":

No to what? The original question was whether Gates was indifferent to developer usage pure vs. proprietary APIs.

This was an attempt by the lawyer to color the APIs as proprietary while asking about pure Java vs. Microsoft's API functions and Gates wanted to know exactly he meant by that term before giving an answer to the question which could imply that was agreeing with the lawyer that the API was "proprietary", which could mean different things to different people.

It's like a lawyer asking "Do you like the brand of the beer you stole?",

The proper answer is "What do you mean, stole?".

Not, "No, I don't like Budweiser".

In Microsofts case it may have meant undocumented. Features only Microsoft knew were there, since they wrote them

No, it's not. If you read the exchange posted by the parent poster again, it's about MS's additional API hooks in Java that were meant to be used by Java developers, so they're definitely not undocumented.