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)."

Comments

Microsoft should be treated like IBM was.

[Hobart]

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.

Re:Microsoft should be treated like IBM was.

[wfrp01]

You don't really want to know Microsoft API's, unless you are writing code to interoperate with Microsoft software. This is detrimental to Microsoft in the same way compelling Microsoft to install their software at thousands of elementary schools is detrimental to Microsoft. It just encourages people to use more Microsoft products.

Better to demand they publish their file formats and networking protocols.

Re:Time to watch our backs

[brunes69]

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?

Oh great idea there.

[Hobart]

Perhaps frequent DDoS attacks on Passport-compliant web sites are in order. ... we need to do something, so that Microsoft does not use Passport to take the internet away from us.

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:

• Bus architectures
  • 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.)
• Email specs
  • X.500 and X.400 were [are] big bulky specs that you need to buy a copy of from ISO
  • DNS and SMTP / RFC822 are specified for free in RFC's and everyone is welcome to use them. X.400/500 email transfer across organizations is rather archaic now.
• Document Formatting
  • EDI was a closed (if well written IMHO) spec, which I believe requires a license from IBM to use.
  • XML is a freely available spec, and is largely eradicating EDI's hold in the 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.