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Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.
Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!
Documentation unfit. Awesome.
Now what about the software?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
When will this unjustified persecution of undocumenting coders be stopped!? If I can understand 15 layers of recursion with pointers to 8 dimensional arrays and no documentation, you should be able to as well!
For coders, at least. Documentation is for auditors.
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
t
Scary thing is, I've always found their doc decent... relative to other companies. This judge needs to attempt to assemble some of the more ornate IKEA offerings - she'll have a new appreciation for MSDN/Technet...
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003.
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.
It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.
Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you can't make a full-featured document that anyone else can open with their software.
A barrier to enabling this competition is Microsoft not properly documenting the most widely used software systems in the world, thus making it difficult to create functionally equivalent software that people will be able to use while having compatibility with Microsoft software, which is necessary in order to compete with them.
It is against this country's best interest to have monopolies controlling important infrastructures like software stacks that people depend on everyday. It becomes an unfair market, which makes our economy mercantilist rather than capitalist. Regulation of this sort keeps the market fair, drives innovation, and makes our infrastructure more secure by not putting all our eggs in one basket(the basket is Microsoft).
If all of Microsoft(people and servers) were to be blown up simultaneously by heavy bombs, and there was no competent replacement for the Microsoft software stack, much of our society would be really really screwed for quite a long time. This is a bad thing. There needs to be more than one option to the services and software Microsoft provides, for the good of our society.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.