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Cringely On Microsoft Settlement
sandalwood writes: "Robert X Cringley has a new article about the proposed settlement in the Microsoft antitrust case. He includes information on where to write to make your views known (the 'proposed Final Judgement' accepts comments from the public for a period of 60 days after it's been published)."
A darned good idea (imho) would be to force Microsoft to publish their APIs, and restrict them from anti-competitive practices. IBM was doing this 20 years ago in the mainframe world and the European Union slapped them down hard for it.
It's mentioned in this article on gnu.org, but one of the links to the settlement details (the most important part) is broken, the new location for ibm1984ec.html is here.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
The parent to this is NOT a troll, but his comments, though valid, are useless. I am thoughouly convinced that not only do none of the slashdot editors read any of the comments posted to the stories (otherwise they woluld have to take notice to the many duplicate story postings we point out), but they don't even frequent their own site. The story duplication is getting insanely ridiculous. For every duplicate story, a good one gets rejected. How can we get THROUGH to these guys? PAY ATTENTION TO THE SITE YOU WORK FOR! God, and people want me to pay for a subscription for this???
Up until the last paragraph, this was a very intelligent comment. Then all of a sudden you start promoting virii and DDOS attacks??? This makes you sound like an immature teenager.
How about instead of breaking the law, and making Open Source hackers look like thugs in the process, we design our own micropayment system, BSD license it, and offer it up as a vastly more secure and powerful solution that passport? Or would that me to "non-31337" for you?
Wonderful idea there. (cough). How about we offer up something as good or better ? Private corporations dominating a space through de facto standards happen because nobody else has stepped up with a Free (as in speech) solution that's better. Some cases to take into consideration:
- 16-bit ISA took off because anyone could build to the IBM PC published spec (essentially free-as-in-beer).
- Then Microchannel flubbed it (must license from IBM).
(Unfortunate footnote -- for 32-bit slots, VESA came along, and was destroyed by Intel's PCI when they slaughtered their competition in the PC chipset market.)So instead of proposing that people DDoS Passport sites, maybe we need to make ubiquitous a better solution that's published and freely implementable. Microsoft did lose out on the browser encryption fight (shttp vs https) and SSLeay / OpenSSL provided free reference implementations that let people use encryption without having to play with the big monopolies (um, except for Verisign). We can come up with a system that delivers Passport / .NET's functionality too.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Micropayments? Getting a cut of internet sales? Sites being propped up by venture capital? Money being made from "internet wallets"?
It all sounds soooo "late 1999", doesn't it? Which is approximately when the business plan for Passport was turning this dumb wallet into a replacement for the operating system as a means to survive.
Forward to today. The hot model is site subscription with premiums. The internet is facing skepticism as only 3% believe it is an important information source. There IS no venture capital money - forget about propping anything up. The only sites that are seen as viable are those with a strong business model oriented around actually making money - not giving bits of money up to other vendors, when your competition is busy leaving the net altogether.
Remember the Amazon vs B&N vs Borders war? Try borders.com now. Amazon doesn't want Passport if it's the only Internet vendor that anyone uses -- Passort can only do them harm. Neither will any of the Yahoo Stores. If the size of the whole pie is smaller, the worth of a slice of that pie is diminished as well, y'know?
Getting in bed with MS is not like getting a Visa merchant account to handle payments. Along with your customers' financial data, MS could have access to their personal information, buying habits, etc. This means that the competitors of any MS partner will avoid signing up, no matter what. I'm not talking about Borland, here; I'm talking about AOL Time Warner, Sony, Sears, Visa/MC themselves, and many others that aren't rolling off the tip of my tongue.
Dominating the software world is one thing; dominating the rest of the world is entirely another.
Most companies have barged cluelessly into the net and it has hurt them. I don't see why MS's hard right turn into the net should not give them a few fits as well. And they're hardly omnipotent - as your "Bob" example should point out.
The thing about the latest generation of intellectual property laws is that they could still prevent people from using that information.
Prime example: CSS and the ways to break it. According to some interpretations of the law, if you can write the code yourself you can use it, but you can't provide a library for others to use or use a library written by others.
This is completely contrary to the reason why IP laws were created in the first place, of course, but IP laws haven't served the public interest for some time now.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
As part of the enforcement/settlement a trust, funded by MS, should be created that's overseen by an independent board.
MS must then release all its OS source to this board. Then the board should finance Win32 API (including Active X & Direct X) ports to the other X86 OSes, such as BeOS, Linux, Sco/Caldera Unix, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, QNX, etc. So those OSes could be compatible with W32 apps without emulation (a la WINE 'n Odin)
Also MS must not be allowed to release any of its application software (Office, Works, Encarta, 'Empires', etc) untill they bring out native BeOS, OS/2, Mac & Linux ports of those apps (the Linux port must be designed for transparent recompiling to other nixes, such as Caldera Unix, Solaris 'n QNX). They must be tested by the previously mentioned trustee before release.
To avoid claims that this would make thing too complicated for stockists & retailers, make MS retail all ports of each application together in the same box - like BeOS 'retail' has both the X86 & PPC ports bundled together, or like the way Claris works had both the Mac Classic & W16 ports bundled together (with 'Mac & Windows compatible' printed on the box) or like the way the new Gobe office suite has both the BeOS, W32 & Linux ports bundled together complete with a cross port license. MS could then have 'compatible with Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS & Linux' stickers on their boxed applications, so its spelled out to the customers that they can be used with all 4 of those OSes.
I bet within a year MS would have developed a development API for itself for developing applications that transparently port them across to X86 W32, X86 OS/2, X86 BeOS, X86 Linux & the PPC Mac.
God can you imagine how Gates 'n co would react if the court came out with a judgement like this.....LOL