On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 09:21:00PM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
> Can't buy it they throw their vast resource at producing a competing
> product and give it away for free claiming it is part of the OS (anyone
> remember doublespace?).
FSF giving software away is good, and MS giving software away is evil?
> -- Release "undocumented" OS API's documentation only to it's internal app
> developers.
Sounds entirely reasonable to me. The internal developers are the only
ones where the OS developers can control that the undocumented
functions are used in a safe way.
Besides, in a free country Microsoft should have the right to decide
if they want to develop an OS that only runs Microsoft software, an OS
that runs all software equally well or an OS that runs Microsoft
software better than software from others. If they make an
unreasonable decision, application developers and end users will use a
different operating system instead.
> -- Use it's monopoly with hardware vendors to prevent competition's
> product from being pre-installed on new equipment.
Microsoft has no monopoly. It's just that most hardware vendors happen
to think that they will sell more computers if they pre-install
Windows and not, say, OpenBSD. But that is their own decision, and
there have always been hardware vendors selling other pre-installed
systems.
> -- Deliberately tie developer resources to IE so it *must* be installed to
> make use of M$ dev tools.
Nobody forces you to use the MS dev tools (incidentally, the GNU dev
tools produces better code). But if you choose to use them, is it so
unreasonable to expect you not to remove parts of the system?
> But let's face it folks anyone that can claim that
> Microsoft is interested in competition in a free market place is either a
> fool or a liar.
