I hate Windows 10 with a passion, and am hugely disappointed with the direction Microsoft have taken Windows since Win7. I like C# and PowerShell, and yet I can't bring myself to installing them on Linux because I don't trust Microsoft to not spy on me.
Irrelevant. Those documents are from twenty years ago under different leadership. Microsoft's attitude to open source software today is fundamentally different than it was two decades ago.
That doesn't explain why Internet Explorer's market share started its steady decline the moment that Mozilla came out with a decent alternative browser. It didn't require any monopoly tactics, just a superior product.
Once again, the subject here is Microsoft submitting code to the Linux kernel which is definitely under the watch of Linus Torvalds. It is you who is making the straw man argument by extending this to systemd. Just because you are not right doesn't make me a paid shill.
And I still haven't had anybody be able to tell me how an open source project could be extinguished by Microsoft's code submissions. The submissions are completely visible to all and can be undone by anyone who has access to the code - which is all of us! Just restating that "extend" leads to "extinguish" without any proof simply shows that you are a zealot. Someday I'll learn not to tangle with zealots who think that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with them must be a paid shill.
It is a matter of public record that Netscape was killed by Microsoft's illegal trust-making activities, for which it was found guilty and paid billions of dollars in fines. Enough with the revisionism.
If that was the real reason, then Chrome doesn't stand a chance against Internet Explorer and Edge. Oh wait, Chrome's market share continues to rise. It turns out that despite what the lawyers argue, being shipped with an operating system is not actually a guarantee of dominance. And when did Internet Explorer's market share start to drop? When Mozilla released a viable alternative that wasn't a bloated mess.
So it is less revisionism, and more history proving that the original argument was incorrect. To continue to claim that the original court judgement is the only one that counts is like deferring to an ancient scholar who proved that the Sun rotated around the Earth despite all the evidence since then that shows that the proof was wrong.
You shouldn't even have mentioned IE being included in Windows in the first place because it was Windows-only. And the whole idea of pushing Netscape onto oblivion was to make Windows mandatory -- because IE would be mandatory.
No, it was for Windows, Mac, OS/2, and Solaris until IE5 (IE3 for OS/2). That kind of ruins half your rant.
Thus, stop with whatever feeble justification you might have: they wanted to get 90% of the desktop market and they got it -- even if their programs were the lousiest, like Windows.Explorer and that jewel of the software research, Notepad.
No, they got over 90% of the desktop because they already that before they included the browser.
If you're left without a print system, you cannot print, OK. You remove IE and suddenly no problem, you can use Netscape. This was done to demonstrate IE is not essential and that Netscape would provide the same functionality.
But developers could embed calls to IE into their software, so those programs would stop working. And I'm not just talking about loading a webpage in the default browser window. IE became part of the user interface of third-party software as an embedded element. That was exactly what people complained about when they did make their version of Windows without IE. Sure, Netscape worked, but who knows what other software would suddenly fail. Hence, so few people bothered to take advantage of the cut-down version of Windows.
Because said software, by Microsoft or otherwise, relied on IE being always available. On Linux, there's a default editor and I can change it to the one I want, and things won't stop working. Is it too much to expect that a professional OS developer do the same?
Great, now remove glibc and see if that causes problems.
Particularly against Openoffice, they perceived office format standardization as a threat to their business -- which in fact it is -- and proceeded to make sure they had their own standard, which they made sure to be very confusing (e.g. with ten times the page number of the previously approved standard).
Do you remember when Microsoft got into trouble because OpenOffice spreadsheet functions didn't work in Excel when they did support the ODF format. That's because they supported the standard and not what OpenOffice actually emitted. It seems like the standards problem is not limited to Microsoft.
No, it's not that easy -- in a corporate setting, one cannot change such things because everyone does not get to have admin rights.
That's funny. I just changed my default PDF reader and I'm logged in as a standard user. If an admin does lock that down as part of a corporate policy, then you can't blame Microsoft.
And you must have corporate rights to adjust Cleartype! (can you believe that?)
Great. You just made me turn off Cleartype. As a standard user. It did actually prompt for the admin password, but I think that's a bug because it doesn't need it.
And more, on a single computer on which I do have administrative rights, that "open with..." and "remember this application" didn't work, and Edge kept opening pdfs.
Great. You just made me run Edge. Twice, just to test that it was really the default application for PDFs. Now I changed it back and it worked fine. Did you try this in an early version of Windows 10?
As you can see, I have a very negative opinion about Microsoft. But some people are choosing to give them a new opportunity. Let's hope they're right and I'm just being a grumpy old man.
I can appreciate that. I hate Windows 10 with a passion, and am hugely disappointed with the direction Microsoft have taken Windows since Win7. I like C# and PowerShell, and yet I can't bring myself to installing them on Linux because I don't trust Microsoft to not spy on
How is it a straw man argument to ask how Microsoft could get bad code into the kernel when the summary is all about Microsoft has 12 Linux kernel contributors and quotes a Linux kernel maintainer about what code they are contributing to the Linux kernel?
Look at the train wreck that is SystemD.
Here is a great example of how Microsoft can't extinguish the operating system, because you can still get distros that don't use systemd. Even if they screwed up systemd, to the point where nobody could boot we could still get around it. It's all open source, after all.
That's rich, coming from someone who's entire argument is to copy and paste from Wikipedia. And I'm the one doing the canned talking points???
It's not really much of a challenge here. If there is a story about Microsoft then someone will inevitably make a post just saying "Embrace, extend, extinguish" as if that is something useful or insightful. Then we get long quotes from Wikipedia followed by accusations of being a shill. Is it really that hard to put some original thought into something?
For example, have a think about how Microsoft could ever get some extensions that could lead to extinguishing the kernel project past Linus Torvalds. Let's face it, if he spotted anything even remotely suspicious coming from Microsoft he would hardly be one to hold his tongue about it.
So in other words, you couldn't find an example. Once again, a single instance from 20 years ago does not prove a pattern of behaviour. The Linux kernel is not in any danger, no matter how many times people chant that three-word mantra.
Ah, I was waiting for someone to copy and paste that list.
Active-X controls - the complaint here is that Microsoft made their own incompatible plug-in system instead of using Netscape's incompatible plug-in system. Let's face it, Netscape were quite happy to make their own extensions to HTML. It was the done thing in the day (especially as standards moved at such a glacial pace).
CSS - at the time of the Opera lawsuit that claimed EEE, Microsoft had already released IE7 which included support for new and better web standards. Every version they have released have made things incrementally better. The big problem was the long time that IE6 stuck around, which was of course due to the delays in making Windows Vista. This was the big disadvantage of tying IE version to Windows versions. But can this be said to be a case of EEE when each version makes fewer extensions? I think not.
Office - Microsoft were definitely very protective and proprietary, but what did the EEE? It was their own Office package on their own server platorms and browsers. They didn't have to embrace anything for that. It's a dick move, but not EEE.
Java - This is the daddy of EEE. The only problem is that Java is still the most used language according to the TIOBE index, so there was no extinguishing. Frankly, I think it hurt the language to lose having the code run be default on Windows. It would have been better for Sun to insist that Microsoft include their runtime in Windows so developers had certainty that their programs would run with minimal setup.
Kerberos - This is definitely an example of EE, but once again not of EEE.
Instant messaging - AIM hasn't been extinguished, although development did stop ten years after that article was written. They also kept changing their protocols to block Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger. Not a good example.
Adobe fears - This one is definitely FUD, especially considering that Office now does have PDF support and yet the standard hasn't gone tits-up yet.
Employee testimony - Well, that's just Java again.
None of this shows any reason how Microsoft could even hope to extinguish the Linux kernel. If they are contributing to someone else's open source project then the code belongs to everyone and their contributions can be used by anybody.
But it is not a case of embrace, extend and extinguish. It was a simple patent dispute, which happens all the time. Microsoft didn't license Stacker, but instead licensed DoubleDisk from by Vertisoft (which then became DoubleSpace). They didn't attempt to make it compatible with Stacker, and then extend it as would be required by the EEE mantra. If Microsoft had selected Stacker for their disk compression, perhaps it would be Vertisoft that we would be talking about here. In which case, there was no way for Microsoft to make a choice that didn't backfire on them. I have no doubt that Vertisoft would have had its own patents to use against Microsoft. The real villain is the concept of software patents.
Also, what you said doesn't match what I have read about the subject. Microsoft did successfully counter-sue Stac Electronics for misappropriation of a trade secret. It was Stac Electronics that claimed it had reverse engineered the undocumented calls as a defense.
This did not stop Stacker from working, and a later version of the product was even able to convert a DoubleSpace compressed drives into their own format.
It was a big blow to Stac Electronics to have Microsoft include a compression utility in DOS, but their product did have a limited lifespan. It only worked on FAT drives, meaning NTFS and HPFS on OS/2 would not work. Also, as drives increased in size, the need for compression died off. They continued for another eight years after the lawsuit before the company eventually was dissolved. Is it really that clear-cut that Microsoft killed this company?
The problem with that example is that Java is the top ranked programming language on the TIOBE Index. In other words, there was no extinguish. Also, that example was from 1995. If that is the latest attempt then it doesn't seem like a pattern of behaviour.
So if there are 100 or more examples of them successfully embracing, extending and extinguishing, name one of those. You can probably easily name more than 100 examples where people have accused Microsoft of having that plan for something, but not one time when it has actually eventuated. In other words, it is FUD.
Lol, wow, you've got a selective memory. There was an actual court case with very high-powered lawyers specifically about this issue and it resulted in findings of fact which you can read here:
I said then as I maintain now that the judgement was wrong. I don't think the judge was technologically savvy enough to understand the quality difference between the two browsers. If Netscape had been superior to Internet Explorer, then people would have still downloaded it. The judge was also not savvy enough to realise that web browsing is something that should be a basic part of an operating system; just like printing and networking.
Not sure why you are talking about "these days" because Netscape and Firefox are not the same in any meaningful sense
I am not just talking about Firefox, but all third party browsers (especially the market-leader, Chrome). Microsoft's browsers continue to decline and are no longer have the largest user base. All this has happened with Microsoft shipping both Internet Explorer and Edge with Windows. It seems that shipping the browser with the OS is not the guarantee of success that the naysayers want us to believe.
How are any of those examples of embrace, extend, and extinguish? The Stac Electronics case found that while Microsoft did infringe on two of Stac's patents, the infringement was not willful. That's just a simple patent case, not EEE.
In the case of QEMM, Microsoft simply made a competing product. As for DR-DOS, a pre-release version of Windows 3.1 would not work on their DOS. No released version failed to run. What was embraced or extended or extinguished in either of those cases? I think the grandparent's post still stands.
If history wasn't inundated with examples of Microsoft doing exactly what the GP says, then maybe you would have a point. Stop astroturfing.
All I see is a bunch of Anonymous Cowards repeating this claim without providing any real examples of it. When asked, the only response seems to be to twist and pervert the meaning of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. People try to claim that releasing a competing product is "embracing". And if another product stops being developed then it is "extinguishing" even if there was no "extend" involved.
It is not astroturfing to counter vague and baseless claims, no matter how much you believe it in your heart.
What killed Netscape wasn't so much the price, but the fact that IE was included -- in fact, they claimed it was an inseparable part of Windows back then (it wasn't, someone removed the browser from Windows and it kept working). It's like every desktop/notebook being sold with Windows so that nobody really needs to think about installing a new OS (e.g., Linux).
No. What killed Netscape was that it was a bloated mess. As I said before, browsers like Chrome are having great success even though Windows comes with two browsers these days. As you said later in your post, Microsoft don't ask which browser you want to use initially, and yet it hasn't stopped the decline of their browsers' usage. What more proof do you need? If the alternatives are superior then users will find a way to download and use the software.
As for Internet Explorer being a part of Windows, it was true - despite the fact that you could remove the DLLs. You could also remove the DLLs that handle printing and the OS would still work; at least until the applications tried to print and then it would fail. Developers can rely on the print system being there. Similarly, they could also rely on Internet Explorer being there too, and call its API. When Microsoft made the version of Windows without IE for the European market, some people complained when some software stopped working.
Sorry, no, I don't get the idea. I don't know about the Mac, but on Linux, Openoffice never prevented the installation of other suites
And Microsoft never prevented the installation of any other web browser. But my point was that all those programs mentioned were free offerings that could be said to undermine commercial software's revenue. If you complain that IE was released for free, then why not also that OpenOffice performed the same functions as Microsoft Office? Should we cry for Microsoft? No,because it's simply competition.
Heck, now you are even pushed to open pdfs with Edge -- not what Firefox do, when you're browsing, but for local PDFs, too. Talk about EEE...
It defaults to Edge, but you can change this to whatever software you want. I use Sumatra. What operating system doesn't come with a default PDF reader these days? And if you think that this is EEE, tell me what software has been extended or extinguished? Once again, having competing software is not EEE.
Dude, if you were there, stop trolling as you know darn well what they did. And if you're young and wasn't there, do your homework and learn what a cutthroat Microsoft was.
I was there, and I'm not trolling. I remember installing Internet Explorer before it was ever included with Windows and found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to the bloated Netscape Navigator. Fast forward to Mozilla releasing Firefox and once again it was breath of fresh air from the stagnated IE. So just because I don't agree with your viewpoint doesn't mean that I am trolling. However quotes like this:
if you cannot kill them, join them. And kill them from inside...
...are definitely trolling because you don't provide any evidence that they are doing this nor do you say even how they could kill an open source project.
Essentially you are saying that someone who has 14 years of experience somehow knows better than people who have 20 and more years of experience?
No. That is simply stupid and utterly irrelevant. Essentially I am saying that 14 years experience knows better than someone who has "never experienced the advantages of a unixoid system".
Well "better" is not an objective thing. For Lennart, for example, "better" usually means "more complex" or "able to solve non-existent problems".
If that is the case, and there is no problem that needs to be solved, then his projects will be ignored by distro creators. But wait! That isn't the case. It seems that those who make the distributions must disagree with you.
If you have used Windows before, you have never experienced the advantages of a unixoid system.
I can't understand how you can seriously say that someone who has been developing in the Linux world for at least 14 years and works for Red Hat has no understanding of the advantages of a unixoid system. Perhaps the problem is that you don't have enough experience with other systems to give you the sense of perspective and to avoid zealotry.
They embraced the idea... web browsers were new then
Gave it away free
You must hate Linux then. And OpenOffice. And Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the Mac. And... well, you get the idea.
It is not evil to make your own program and include it in your operating system. This sort of thing happens all the time. I remember shareware authors complaining when AmigaDOS added functionality that their little programs offered in an operating system update. Windows didn't originally have TCP networking stack, so a company called Trumpet sold a version. Later, this was added into Windows. Was that unreasonable? Should the operating system not have had built-in access to the Internet?
Is it unreasonable for an operating system to not have a web browser too? You would be hard-pressed to find an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality. You want to blame Microsoft for that, but perhaps you should be thanking them.
And in the case of Netscape, that was even less of an issue considering that the first browser ever written was public domain - so other browsers were free too! Also, Netscape Navigator was free for personal use. Is it that much of a stretch for make a competing browser that extends this free use to all?
Finally, this is all irrelevant because it is absolutely NOT an example of Extend, Embrace and Extinguish. You should have ignored the Extend part of the phrase, assumed that Embrace can mean just making your own version of a product (which it doesn't), and that any Extinguish is still part of it when this even when Netscape has to share the blame for making a bloated mess of a browser that required a lengthy rewrite.
I mean people who grew up with Windows, before they started to program. People who have experienced all the glossy surface of Windows, but never the problems of those design decisions.
How does being the user of an operating system change how someone codes? A user can't tell by looking at the glossy surface how the system is programmed underneath.
Sure, Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd did say that the audio stacks of Windows and MacOS were superior to what they had on Linux at the time, but was that a blind assumption that Windows does it better (as you suggest), or was it a carefully considered examination of both programming structures? Considering that he has many tens of projects under his belt, I think that it is safe to say that he has some understandings of the problems of his design decisions.
Well for one, Ie all but killed Netscape. There was a big lawsuit over it..
Competition is not the same as Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. Sure, Microsoft added their own HTML elements, but so did Netscape (like layers). They certainly didn't extend any Netscape code, and the lawsuit was not about EEE.
Netscape pretty much killed itself by becoming monstrously big and slow, then taking way too long to create a new version because they started again from scratch. People bleat on about IE having the advantage because it came with the operating system, but that doesn't stop any browsers from being loaded these days. That excuse is now proven to be false.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe that you would trot out that "troll on a payroll" line in response to me saying
If I was a Microsoft shill, would I say:
If I was a Microsoft shill, would I say:
If I am on Microsoft's payroll, then I'm going to have to face some awkward questions for badmouthing the company and its products.
Irrelevant. Those documents are from twenty years ago under different leadership. Microsoft's attitude to open source software today is fundamentally different than it was two decades ago.
They never had a partnership deal with Stac Electronics. They chose Vertisoft instead.
That doesn't explain why Internet Explorer's market share started its steady decline the moment that Mozilla came out with a decent alternative browser. It didn't require any monopoly tactics, just a superior product.
Once again, the subject here is Microsoft submitting code to the Linux kernel which is definitely under the watch of Linus Torvalds. It is you who is making the straw man argument by extending this to systemd. Just because you are not right doesn't make me a paid shill.
And I still haven't had anybody be able to tell me how an open source project could be extinguished by Microsoft's code submissions. The submissions are completely visible to all and can be undone by anyone who has access to the code - which is all of us! Just restating that "extend" leads to "extinguish" without any proof simply shows that you are a zealot. Someday I'll learn not to tangle with zealots who think that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with them must be a paid shill.
And why should anyone care what a self-appointed armchair expert thinks, long after the question was definitely settled?
If that's the case, why did you bother to reply? Apparently you must care to some degree.
It is a matter of public record that Netscape was killed by Microsoft's illegal trust-making activities, for which it was found guilty and paid billions of dollars in fines. Enough with the revisionism.
If that was the real reason, then Chrome doesn't stand a chance against Internet Explorer and Edge. Oh wait, Chrome's market share continues to rise. It turns out that despite what the lawyers argue, being shipped with an operating system is not actually a guarantee of dominance. And when did Internet Explorer's market share start to drop? When Mozilla released a viable alternative that wasn't a bloated mess.
So it is less revisionism, and more history proving that the original argument was incorrect. To continue to claim that the original court judgement is the only one that counts is like deferring to an ancient scholar who proved that the Sun rotated around the Earth despite all the evidence since then that shows that the proof was wrong.
You shouldn't even have mentioned IE being included in Windows in the first place because it was Windows-only. And the whole idea of pushing Netscape onto oblivion was to make Windows mandatory -- because IE would be mandatory.
No, it was for Windows, Mac, OS/2, and Solaris until IE5 (IE3 for OS/2). That kind of ruins half your rant.
Thus, stop with whatever feeble justification you might have: they wanted to get 90% of the desktop market and they got it -- even if their programs were the lousiest, like Windows.Explorer and that jewel of the software research, Notepad.
No, they got over 90% of the desktop because they already that before they included the browser.
If you're left without a print system, you cannot print, OK. You remove IE and suddenly no problem, you can use Netscape. This was done to demonstrate IE is not essential and that Netscape would provide the same functionality.
But developers could embed calls to IE into their software, so those programs would stop working. And I'm not just talking about loading a webpage in the default browser window. IE became part of the user interface of third-party software as an embedded element. That was exactly what people complained about when they did make their version of Windows without IE. Sure, Netscape worked, but who knows what other software would suddenly fail. Hence, so few people bothered to take advantage of the cut-down version of Windows.
Because said software, by Microsoft or otherwise, relied on IE being always available. On Linux, there's a default editor and I can change it to the one I want, and things won't stop working. Is it too much to expect that a professional OS developer do the same?
Great, now remove glibc and see if that causes problems.
Particularly against Openoffice, they perceived office format standardization as a threat to their business -- which in fact it is -- and proceeded to make sure they had their own standard, which they made sure to be very confusing (e.g. with ten times the page number of the previously approved standard).
Do you remember when Microsoft got into trouble because OpenOffice spreadsheet functions didn't work in Excel when they did support the ODF format. That's because they supported the standard and not what OpenOffice actually emitted. It seems like the standards problem is not limited to Microsoft.
No, it's not that easy -- in a corporate setting, one cannot change such things because everyone does not get to have admin rights.
That's funny. I just changed my default PDF reader and I'm logged in as a standard user. If an admin does lock that down as part of a corporate policy, then you can't blame Microsoft.
And you must have corporate rights to adjust Cleartype! (can you believe that?)
Great. You just made me turn off Cleartype. As a standard user. It did actually prompt for the admin password, but I think that's a bug because it doesn't need it.
And more, on a single computer on which I do have administrative rights, that "open with..." and "remember this application" didn't work, and Edge kept opening pdfs.
Great. You just made me run Edge. Twice, just to test that it was really the default application for PDFs. Now I changed it back and it worked fine. Did you try this in an early version of Windows 10?
As you can see, I have a very negative opinion about Microsoft. But some people are choosing to give them a new opportunity. Let's hope they're right and I'm just being a grumpy old man.
I can appreciate that. I hate Windows 10 with a passion, and am hugely disappointed with the direction Microsoft have taken Windows since Win7. I like C# and PowerShell, and yet I can't bring myself to installing them on Linux because I don't trust Microsoft to not spy on
Straw man argument.
How is it a straw man argument to ask how Microsoft could get bad code into the kernel when the summary is all about Microsoft has 12 Linux kernel contributors and quotes a Linux kernel maintainer about what code they are contributing to the Linux kernel?
Look at the train wreck that is SystemD.
Here is a great example of how Microsoft can't extinguish the operating system, because you can still get distros that don't use systemd. Even if they screwed up systemd, to the point where nobody could boot we could still get around it. It's all open source, after all.
That's rich, coming from someone who's entire argument is to copy and paste from Wikipedia. And I'm the one doing the canned talking points???
It's not really much of a challenge here. If there is a story about Microsoft then someone will inevitably make a post just saying "Embrace, extend, extinguish" as if that is something useful or insightful. Then we get long quotes from Wikipedia followed by accusations of being a shill. Is it really that hard to put some original thought into something?
For example, have a think about how Microsoft could ever get some extensions that could lead to extinguishing the kernel project past Linus Torvalds. Let's face it, if he spotted anything even remotely suspicious coming from Microsoft he would hardly be one to hold his tongue about it.
So in other words, you couldn't find an example. Once again, a single instance from 20 years ago does not prove a pattern of behaviour. The Linux kernel is not in any danger, no matter how many times people chant that three-word mantra.
Ah, I was waiting for someone to copy and paste that list.
None of this shows any reason how Microsoft could even hope to extinguish the Linux kernel. If they are contributing to someone else's open source project then the code belongs to everyone and their contributions can be used by anybody.
But it is not a case of embrace, extend and extinguish. It was a simple patent dispute, which happens all the time. Microsoft didn't license Stacker, but instead licensed DoubleDisk from by Vertisoft (which then became DoubleSpace). They didn't attempt to make it compatible with Stacker, and then extend it as would be required by the EEE mantra. If Microsoft had selected Stacker for their disk compression, perhaps it would be Vertisoft that we would be talking about here. In which case, there was no way for Microsoft to make a choice that didn't backfire on them. I have no doubt that Vertisoft would have had its own patents to use against Microsoft. The real villain is the concept of software patents.
Also, what you said doesn't match what I have read about the subject. Microsoft did successfully counter-sue Stac Electronics for misappropriation of a trade secret. It was Stac Electronics that claimed it had reverse engineered the undocumented calls as a defense.
This did not stop Stacker from working, and a later version of the product was even able to convert a DoubleSpace compressed drives into their own format.
It was a big blow to Stac Electronics to have Microsoft include a compression utility in DOS, but their product did have a limited lifespan. It only worked on FAT drives, meaning NTFS and HPFS on OS/2 would not work. Also, as drives increased in size, the need for compression died off. They continued for another eight years after the lawsuit before the company eventually was dissolved. Is it really that clear-cut that Microsoft killed this company?
Umm, is this not just the sort of point Casandro was making?
No. Windows doesn't have distros, so how can that possibly be the same thing?
The problem with that example is that Java is the top ranked programming language on the TIOBE Index. In other words, there was no extinguish. Also, that example was from 1995. If that is the latest attempt then it doesn't seem like a pattern of behaviour.
So if there are 100 or more examples of them successfully embracing, extending and extinguishing, name one of those. You can probably easily name more than 100 examples where people have accused Microsoft of having that plan for something, but not one time when it has actually eventuated. In other words, it is FUD.
PDFs in stupid Edge are horrible
Web pages are also horrible in Edge. There really is nothing that it can do right.
Lol, wow, you've got a selective memory. There was an actual court case with very high-powered lawyers specifically about this issue and it resulted in findings of fact which you can read here:
I said then as I maintain now that the judgement was wrong. I don't think the judge was technologically savvy enough to understand the quality difference between the two browsers. If Netscape had been superior to Internet Explorer, then people would have still downloaded it. The judge was also not savvy enough to realise that web browsing is something that should be a basic part of an operating system; just like printing and networking.
Not sure why you are talking about "these days" because Netscape and Firefox are not the same in any meaningful sense
I am not just talking about Firefox, but all third party browsers (especially the market-leader, Chrome). Microsoft's browsers continue to decline and are no longer have the largest user base. All this has happened with Microsoft shipping both Internet Explorer and Edge with Windows. It seems that shipping the browser with the OS is not the guarantee of success that the naysayers want us to believe.
How are any of those examples of embrace, extend, and extinguish? The Stac Electronics case found that while Microsoft did infringe on two of Stac's patents, the infringement was not willful. That's just a simple patent case, not EEE.
In the case of QEMM, Microsoft simply made a competing product. As for DR-DOS, a pre-release version of Windows 3.1 would not work on their DOS. No released version failed to run. What was embraced or extended or extinguished in either of those cases? I think the grandparent's post still stands.
If history wasn't inundated with examples of Microsoft doing exactly what the GP says, then maybe you would have a point. Stop astroturfing.
All I see is a bunch of Anonymous Cowards repeating this claim without providing any real examples of it. When asked, the only response seems to be to twist and pervert the meaning of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. People try to claim that releasing a competing product is "embracing". And if another product stops being developed then it is "extinguishing" even if there was no "extend" involved.
It is not astroturfing to counter vague and baseless claims, no matter how much you believe it in your heart.
What killed Netscape wasn't so much the price, but the fact that IE was included -- in fact, they claimed it was an inseparable part of Windows back then (it wasn't, someone removed the browser from Windows and it kept working). It's like every desktop/notebook being sold with Windows so that nobody really needs to think about installing a new OS (e.g., Linux).
No. What killed Netscape was that it was a bloated mess. As I said before, browsers like Chrome are having great success even though Windows comes with two browsers these days. As you said later in your post, Microsoft don't ask which browser you want to use initially, and yet it hasn't stopped the decline of their browsers' usage. What more proof do you need? If the alternatives are superior then users will find a way to download and use the software.
As for Internet Explorer being a part of Windows, it was true - despite the fact that you could remove the DLLs. You could also remove the DLLs that handle printing and the OS would still work; at least until the applications tried to print and then it would fail. Developers can rely on the print system being there. Similarly, they could also rely on Internet Explorer being there too, and call its API. When Microsoft made the version of Windows without IE for the European market, some people complained when some software stopped working.
Sorry, no, I don't get the idea. I don't know about the Mac, but on Linux, Openoffice never prevented the installation of other suites
And Microsoft never prevented the installation of any other web browser. But my point was that all those programs mentioned were free offerings that could be said to undermine commercial software's revenue. If you complain that IE was released for free, then why not also that OpenOffice performed the same functions as Microsoft Office? Should we cry for Microsoft? No,because it's simply competition.
Heck, now you are even pushed to open pdfs with Edge -- not what Firefox do, when you're browsing, but for local PDFs, too. Talk about EEE...
It defaults to Edge, but you can change this to whatever software you want. I use Sumatra. What operating system doesn't come with a default PDF reader these days? And if you think that this is EEE, tell me what software has been extended or extinguished? Once again, having competing software is not EEE.
Dude, if you were there, stop trolling as you know darn well what they did. And if you're young and wasn't there, do your homework and learn what a cutthroat Microsoft was.
I was there, and I'm not trolling. I remember installing Internet Explorer before it was ever included with Windows and found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to the bloated Netscape Navigator. Fast forward to Mozilla releasing Firefox and once again it was breath of fresh air from the stagnated IE. So just because I don't agree with your viewpoint doesn't mean that I am trolling. However quotes like this:
if you cannot kill them, join them. And kill them from inside...
...are definitely trolling because you don't provide any evidence that they are doing this nor do you say even how they could kill an open source project.
Essentially you are saying that someone who has 14 years of experience somehow knows better than people who have 20 and more years of experience?
No. That is simply stupid and utterly irrelevant. Essentially I am saying that 14 years experience knows better than someone who has "never experienced the advantages of a unixoid system".
Well "better" is not an objective thing. For Lennart, for example, "better" usually means "more complex" or "able to solve non-existent problems".
If that is the case, and there is no problem that needs to be solved, then his projects will be ignored by distro creators. But wait! That isn't the case. It seems that those who make the distributions must disagree with you.
If you have used Windows before, you have never experienced the advantages of a unixoid system.
I can't understand how you can seriously say that someone who has been developing in the Linux world for at least 14 years and works for Red Hat has no understanding of the advantages of a unixoid system. Perhaps the problem is that you don't have enough experience with other systems to give you the sense of perspective and to avoid zealotry.
They embraced the idea ... web browsers were new then
Gave it away free
You must hate Linux then. And OpenOffice. And Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the Mac. And... well, you get the idea.
It is not evil to make your own program and include it in your operating system. This sort of thing happens all the time. I remember shareware authors complaining when AmigaDOS added functionality that their little programs offered in an operating system update. Windows didn't originally have TCP networking stack, so a company called Trumpet sold a version. Later, this was added into Windows. Was that unreasonable? Should the operating system not have had built-in access to the Internet?
Is it unreasonable for an operating system to not have a web browser too? You would be hard-pressed to find an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality. You want to blame Microsoft for that, but perhaps you should be thanking them.
And in the case of Netscape, that was even less of an issue considering that the first browser ever written was public domain - so other browsers were free too! Also, Netscape Navigator was free for personal use. Is it that much of a stretch for make a competing browser that extends this free use to all?
Finally, this is all irrelevant because it is absolutely NOT an example of Extend, Embrace and Extinguish. You should have ignored the Extend part of the phrase, assumed that Embrace can mean just making your own version of a product (which it doesn't), and that any Extinguish is still part of it when this even when Netscape has to share the blame for making a bloated mess of a browser that required a lengthy rewrite.
I mean people who grew up with Windows, before they started to program. People who have experienced all the glossy surface of Windows, but never the problems of those design decisions.
How does being the user of an operating system change how someone codes? A user can't tell by looking at the glossy surface how the system is programmed underneath.
Sure, Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd did say that the audio stacks of Windows and MacOS were superior to what they had on Linux at the time, but was that a blind assumption that Windows does it better (as you suggest), or was it a carefully considered examination of both programming structures? Considering that he has many tens of projects under his belt, I think that it is safe to say that he has some understandings of the problems of his design decisions.
Well for one, Ie all but killed Netscape. There was a big lawsuit over it ..
Competition is not the same as Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. Sure, Microsoft added their own HTML elements, but so did Netscape (like layers). They certainly didn't extend any Netscape code, and the lawsuit was not about EEE.
Netscape pretty much killed itself by becoming monstrously big and slow, then taking way too long to create a new version because they started again from scratch. People bleat on about IE having the advantage because it came with the operating system, but that doesn't stop any browsers from being loaded these days. That excuse is now proven to be false.