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More Details of MS/DOJ Deal
There are various news articles out at most major news sites, but they're all based on this press release from the Department of Justice. The actual terms of the settlement will probably become public shortly, so I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to dissect this press release. Just read it for generalities. In sum: for this whole multi-year case, which you will recall started when Microsoft refused to obey its earlier behavior restrictions, we have more behavior restrictions, lasting only five years. And if MS doesn't obey those, they'll ... be in effect longer. Update: 11/02 15:07 GMT by M : Here are the promised terms of the settlement. Now you can dissect them. :) Update: 11/02 15:53 GMT by M : The states are refusing to sign on.
Oh, poppycock. Yes, Microsoft has some hidden interfaces, but most of the important interfaces are way more accessible under Windows than under (for example) Linux. There's tons of information in MSDN that goes way beyond any documentation that's available for most open-source projects. Want to use VBA to write scripts that add functionality to Word/Excel, or use them a data source? Plenty of information available. Want to do the same for any of the open-source word processors or spreadsheets? Good luck. Want to write an Explorer shell extension to expose a new (non-filesystem) namespace? Plenty of information available. Want to do the same on Linux? Yeah right; Linux doesn't even have a concept of non-filesystem namespaces[1]. Want to write a filesystem for Windows? There've been whole books published on the subject - and more books on generic driver development - for all flavors of Windows, for years. Want to write a filesystem for Linux? Good luck finding any documentation for the interfaces you'll use, and good luck getting anything but obsecenities out of Al Viro (primary designer of the piece of crap that is the Linux VFS layer) when you ask questions. Oh yeah, you'll have to get intimately involved in the revolving-VM-system mess too, because of the way filesystems interact with the VM system.
Yeah, sure, MSDN costs money, and there are some glaring omissions in what it covers, and it can be a real bitch to find the information you need when it's hidden in the knowledge base or something. Overall, though, MS provides very good documentation, and they even provide a huge mass of source code including the actual source for just about every driver they've written. I wish as much useful information were available for Linux.
[1] This is a serious matter. One of the worst things about Windows is the way that the architecture has historically forced a lot of people to implement stuff as drivers because there was no way to do what they needed to do in user space. This has resulted in a lot of driver code written by crappy programmers, and is about 90% of the reason Windows is so unstable. The code written by Microsoft themselves stability-wise, although they still share some responsibility for every crash even if it's proximately caused by someone else's code. The lack of non-filesystem namespace handling in Linux is an example of Linus et al making the same inexcusable mistake.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
The government can't stop them, so I'm going to do the only thing I can to help stop microsoft. I will never develop any program for Windows XP, and support for win9x will stop after I finish my current project. Besides the fact that Microsoft will just clone anything for windows which is useful (or are MSN Messager(or was that ICQ?), Media player 8(Or was that WinAMP?),MS compressed folder support(Or was that WinZip?), theme support(or was that Window Blinds?), Internet Explorer(or was that Netscape?), MS Office(or was that wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and Harvard graphics?) , inventive and innovative?), and I'm not going to help them anymore. Starting with my next project (technically the one I'm working on is for DOS anyway), I'm going to investigate alternative operating systems to develop under. Maybe my next game will be for BeOS, or X11, or SkyOS, or AthiOS? I know it will *NOT* be for windows XP.
I urge other developers on this site (I know there are windows developers on here, you aren't *all* using linux!) to do the same. Don't support or develop for a platform which will reward developers who make popular programs with betrayal, and don't sit by while your hard work is assimilated by microsoft.
It's been a long time.