The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.
Probably an attempt at FUD by a marketing parasite.
M$ has a multi-billion dollar per year incentive to compromise forums like/. . Even a slight percentage change in customer attitudes can mean a big absolute change in the bottom line.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
Would you really want to piss of 40% of your client base in one swoop?
No need to disconnect them initially. Just email with a warning and simple instructions on how to fix it, maybe linked to a web app to do the work. Most naive users are paranoid about viruses due to the media exposure and are happy to fix it if they are told how.
So I am asking, at what point does film do worse than digital?
Keep in mind this is being filtered by the resolution of the human eye's 6 million pixels, though the eye does have higher spatial resolution at the centre of the retina.
The government as a third party has no moral right to interfere with a voluntary agreement between two parties.
The government has already interfered by creating copyright law, and if that did not exist, contract and anti-fraud law. Modern markets are not the simple things you would like to believe; they are sustained by a complex collection of laws that ban negative competitive tactics (e.g. fraud, copying, substitution, excessive manipulation of minors and the naive, protection rackets etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (e.g. improvement in product, reduction in price, government mandated standards etc.). If these laws didn't exist it would just be warlordism, might makes right.
I cannot for the life of me understand why companies choose to fight over patent-encumbered formats when unencumbered formats exist.
As other posters have noted there is no realistic patent-free JPEG replacement. It's simply a cost thing: Does it cost more or less to hire a bunch of lawyers than it does to switch to a new format?
I applaud M$ on this one. Patents in standards are evil and the fact that they chose to fight it rather than cave is good, both for them and for the community.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I find that whenever I want to use GOTO what I really want to use is a finite state machine (FSM).
Whenever control structure gets so complex that GOTO's seem appropriate a FSM can be a good way to systematise that complexity. With the added advantage that you can often make the FSM a largely static, declarative data structure, not imperative code.
I find my code is a lot clearer as a result, with the bonus of better understanding of the problem domain and complete handling of the corner cases.
---
Large public or private organisations paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software are being economically stupid.
So what you're saying is that everybody should use M$Word for the rest of eternity because everybody uses it already?
Change, fortunately, happens. By the time these school kids hit the interviewers OpenOffice 4.0 should be well known, everybody at home will be using it because it's cheap and freely copyable and companies will be using it because the people at home are using it and are trained in it. The cost of OpenOffice training is grossly exaggerated.
I don't think there are any command economies around anymore.
Don't be too blasé about the disappearance command economies. Every large multinational company is a command economy, just accountable to shareholders, not voters.
Economic systems are a complex mixture of cooperative and competitive elements. Getting the balance right is the hard part. Cooperation can allow great things to be accomplished (e.g. Apollo) but can lead to a dangerous concentration of power that may cause significant harm to the rest of society if unchecked and unaccountable (e.g. Enron or the USPTO).
---
Large public or private organisations paying recurring, perpetual, per-seat licensing for software are being economically stupid.
Open source model does nto work well with this inherent greediness.
You are ignoring the statistics. With 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and the ability to copy software millions of times all it takes is 0.01% of people to be not greedy and you can get something happening. There are many, often selfish, reasons why people create open source e.g. a loss leader, a student getting practice, a retiree looking for something to do or a big company where the marginal cost of development is small and the publicity payback is big.
Companies do not have rights, citizens have rights. I hate the loaded word "rights". There are many conflicting rights here with shareholders, employees, customers, third parties, the patent/copyight offices, the courts and even the police all having rights and responsibilities in regard to commercial transactions.
In any case property rights have never been universal. e.g. An amazing variety of people can legally enter your house, house owners can't open businesses, the government can forceably buy a house for a highway, patents expire, copyrights expire (in theory anyway), gun owners have restrictions, farmers can't stop mineral prospectors in some jurisdictions etc.
The fact is the property owner's right to restrict code access conflicts directly with the consumers right to do what they like with a product they've purchased. One of the ways that copyright law is currently broken is the way vendors try to "lease" software, breaking first sale doctrine and engage in all sorts of anti-competitive behaviour (see my previous posr!). I expect the law will eventually catch up but until then a bit of thumbing-your-nose is entirely appropriate. New law frequently codifies existing practice and I for one do not want the practice of no-consumer-rights to be codified.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No, I'm saying you should avoid comparing your product to Windows.
They are the commercial market leader. Who else are we going to compare with? If we want Linux and other open source to gain acceptance it has to be good compared to M$Windows. Note, I am talking about comparing verifiable facts. Agreed, opinions can be much more problematic but nonetheless people must make value judgements to make decisions and therefore those value judgements must be discussed.
And that idiotic fire with fire line is the same kind of ratioanlization my kids pull in class. They're either retarded, emotionally hadicapped, or both. What's your excuse for thinking 2 wrongs make a right?
Since when is discussing a fact or an opinion a wrong? It's free speech, not a rationalisation and an adult fact of life. Sometimes fighting fire with fire is simply necessary. Democracies use guns to kill people. Political parties try to outspend the propaganda of their opponents, competing companies waste enormous amounts of money on mindspace marketing etc.
YOU are the problem with open source. YOU are the cause of so much animosity in the community, because YOU refuse to do the right thing, and instead rely on grade school justification of your childish behavior.
Thank you for your vote of confidence in my influence.;-) Fact is, I fight fire with fire only when I consider it necessary. I am quite happy to contest viewpoints on the basis of facts and not opinions but when marketing is involved sometimes that is not possible. They try to frame the debate in ways that obviate the facts. If a pro-M$ post is fact based then I am quite happy to let it stand or, if I have relevant Linux based facts, bring those to the table.
In any case my personal interest is primarily in broken copyright, patent and commercial law, not on individual companies such as Microsoft. I usually only comment on such legal/social issues not on the characteristics of M$ products.
Take the high road, and stop wallowing in the mud with the other pigs (windows).
Agreed, it is preferable. Often it is not possible. The marketing budget of M$ can and does attempt to drown out other voices. Remember, free speech can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message and M$ are masters at this.
I sympathise with your position but tactically sometimes it's just not a good idea to take it on the chin. Open source and the people who create it do not live in a vacuum and must deal with the competition.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
some minimum amount of time learning all the basic precursor stuff.
Yup, and that basic precursor stuff has been done by millions of people out of a population of billions. Statistically, it's a dead cert that many people have the means and motivation to fix common software problems. It's the uncommon software problems that may be an issue and if somebody wants a fix badly enough, they can pay for it.
Agreed, standards are not collusion, but unfortunately it's not that simple. Companies form oligopolies that charge oligopoly prices for licensing the patent pool in the "industry standard". Price fixing by another name and yet another reason why patent law is in urgent need of major reform.
you are not qualified to debate the topic of obviousness in the US patent system.
There is a fundamental disconnect here.
We know the patent office is using a self-serving, legal definition of obviousness. We are saying that definition is garbage, as even a cursory examination of recent software patents will show.
Patent lawyers claiming that software creators are not qualified to talk about it are missing the point. We are a helluva lot more qualified to talk about true obviousness in software than any lawyer. The fact that the typical patent lawyer is happy to ignore that says a lot.
you're addressing an issue that is completely beyond the USPTO's legal authority.
Typical bureaucratic finger pointing. God knows why, but congress takes the patent office's advice on patent law (the foxes watching the hen house!) and the patent office could easily be a leader in bringing in new, more just law. As it is, they're just bureaucratic empire building. It's a real shame their pettiness is causing so much harm.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed to promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
But why bother building it if I'm not going to get paid?
Why do you think no patent equals no pay? That's a piece of illogic that the patent lawyers like to push without evidence.
Say I have the idea of opening a new hardware store in a town previously without a hardware store. Somebody else sees I'm making money, thinks it's a good idea and so opens a competing hardware store.
I had the idea first and the store required a big investment, do you think they should be legally blocked from competing with me because I thought of the idea first? I don't.
1) OSS will need a registry. It doesn't need to have the shortcomings of the Windows registry. Don't be so afraid.
The registry is just another hierarchical file system accessed by system calls incompatible with regular file/directory access, meaning no standard file system utility can work with it.
By all means use a standard directory tree tree/configuration file format to store configuration information but remember the M$windows registry is a kludge. Linux's/etc and/var aren't particularly clean either but at least you can use the standard tools on them.
"Nuh-uh" and then point out Windows' flaws. It gets tired.
So you're saying that we should let M$ marketers have free reign?
In a word, bullshit.
They lie on discussion sites every day. If the law actually had any teeth they'd be in jail for deceptive advertising and fraud. The fact that they're not means we have to fight fire with fire.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
Whether it is perception, or reality, they seem to work right more often in Windows.
In a word: Nonsense. Even by the simple measure of downtime M$Windows sites spend a ridiculous amount of time offline compared to Linux - I see it in the businesses I deal with every day.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
Nonsense. Read up on economic network effect/externalities. If you have an office with 9 PC's and 1 Mac, guess what usually happens to the Mac, even if the Mac is technically superior? A form of market failure.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
but reverse engineering Close Source code is NOT fine.
No, reverse engineering to allow interorroperability is extremely important. Unfortunately, the lawmakers don't yet realise how important.
Making reverse engineering illegal is fundamentally incompatible with a free market.
Do you really want to live in a world where your leased version of M$Windows will only work with your M$ licensed PC, which will only talk to your M$ licensed mobile phone, which will only talk to your M$ licensed display, which can only send video to your M$ licensed TV, M$ licensed stereo, M$ licensed clock radio, M$ refigerator (internet ordering), M$ internet enabled car (GPS etc.), M$ internet enabled house, M$ licensed web sites and M$ licensed voting machine? Oh, and by-the-way, all communications are encrypted so no chance of sniffing them even without reverse engineering the code.
That's the world we're headed for if reverse engineering and thus interroperability is made illegal.
Making reverse engineering illegal allows an established monopoly/oligopoly player to leverage into other areas, and eventually, all areas. Prefer a Sony device? Tough, it doesn't talk to your M$ devices and so is useless. Want to read your own documents? Sure, but make sure your M$ Windows lease is up-to-date. Oh, and by the way there is a mandatory "upgrade" coming that will cost you $x and we don't like potential competitor y so we're silently blocking your access to their products and causing furfies. All hidden and encrypted of course.
Want to create a product to compete with an existing M$ product? Sure, but your market entry costs will be insane because you'll have to duplicate the entire M$ interconnection before you can compete with comparable value, let alone better value. And you'll have to deal with a monopoly player with sufficient cash reserves to run at a loss for years. Alternatively, you can pay for the M$ licenses but because they are a monopoly that will cost you about 0.1% less than your gross profit, meaning your net profit will be zero.
You need to think long and hard about what you like about the free market. Interroperability matters. In niche segments no big deal but when a substantial proportion of a big market gets locked in it has democracy compromising effects.
In addition the economic network effect is important and has profound implications for any "IP" market. When one player can write a piece of software (e.g. M$) and get a thousand times the profit compared to another player who writes identically functional software for the same cost (e.g. Sun), and can use that excess profit to "compete" and can also block interroperability, then the free market is dead.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.
Probably an attempt at FUD by a marketing parasite.
M$ has a multi-billion dollar per year incentive to compromise forums like /. . Even a slight percentage change in customer attitudes can mean a big absolute change in the bottom line.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
Would you really want to piss of 40% of your client base in one swoop?
No need to disconnect them initially. Just email with a warning and simple instructions on how to fix it, maybe linked to a web app to do the work. Most naive users are paranoid about viruses due to the media exposure and are happy to fix it if they are told how.
---
Keep your options open!
So I am asking, at what point does film do worse than digital?
Keep in mind this is being filtered by the resolution of the human eye's 6 million pixels, though the eye does have higher spatial resolution at the centre of the retina.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
The government as a third party has no moral right to interfere with a voluntary agreement between two parties.
The government has already interfered by creating copyright law, and if that did not exist, contract and anti-fraud law. Modern markets are not the simple things you would like to believe; they are sustained by a complex collection of laws that ban negative competitive tactics (e.g. fraud, copying, substitution, excessive manipulation of minors and the naive, protection rackets etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (e.g. improvement in product, reduction in price, government mandated standards etc.). If these laws didn't exist it would just be warlordism, might makes right.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
it's simply a tempest in a teapot,
No, Nikon are obviously market testing the we-encrypt-your-data waters and trying to set a precedent.
Future models will be much more restrictive. If there is no backlash now when do you think people should take a stand?
Kudos to Adobe on this one.
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Yep, I have a house key and a car key, convenient and easy to use. WTF don't I have a physical computer key?
Computers are a tool to serve me, not vice-versa, and having to expend any effort at all remembering one or more passwords is a waste of my time.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
I cannot for the life of me understand why companies choose to fight over patent-encumbered formats when unencumbered formats exist.
As other posters have noted there is no realistic patent-free JPEG replacement. It's simply a cost thing: Does it cost more or less to hire a bunch of lawyers than it does to switch to a new format?
I applaud M$ on this one. Patents in standards are evil and the fact that they chose to fight it rather than cave is good, both for them and for the community.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I find that whenever I want to use GOTO what I really want to use is a finite state machine (FSM).
Whenever control structure gets so complex that GOTO's seem appropriate a FSM can be a good way to systematise that complexity. With the added advantage that you can often make the FSM a largely static, declarative data structure, not imperative code.
I find my code is a lot clearer as a result, with the bonus of better understanding of the problem domain and complete handling of the corner cases.
---
Large public or private organisations paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software are being economically stupid.
So what you're saying is that everybody should use M$Word for the rest of eternity because everybody uses it already?
Change, fortunately, happens. By the time these school kids hit the interviewers OpenOffice 4.0 should be well known, everybody at home will be using it because it's cheap and freely copyable and companies will be using it because the people at home are using it and are trained in it. The cost of OpenOffice training is grossly exaggerated.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
I don't think there are any command economies around anymore.
Don't be too blasé about the disappearance command economies. Every large multinational company is a command economy, just accountable to shareholders, not voters.
Economic systems are a complex mixture of cooperative and competitive elements. Getting the balance right is the hard part. Cooperation can allow great things to be accomplished (e.g. Apollo) but can lead to a dangerous concentration of power that may cause significant harm to the rest of society if unchecked and unaccountable (e.g. Enron or the USPTO).
---
Large public or private organisations paying recurring, perpetual, per-seat licensing for software are being economically stupid.
GPL says "No way in hell you can ever make a profit from this" ... though I think I've already failed.
Yep, many companies have made a profit from GPL programs.
---
Like trademarks, and for much the same reason, copyright should be lost if a product line becomes generic.
Open source model does nto work well with this inherent greediness.
You are ignoring the statistics. With 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and the ability to copy software millions of times all it takes is 0.01% of people to be not greedy and you can get something happening. There are many, often selfish, reasons why people create open source e.g. a loss leader, a student getting practice, a retiree looking for something to do or a big company where the marginal cost of development is small and the publicity payback is big.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Whether they vote or not.
Can absent representatives vote by proxy?
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
who are we to crack someone elses code?
Companies do not have rights, citizens have rights. I hate the loaded word "rights". There are many conflicting rights here with shareholders, employees, customers, third parties, the patent/copyight offices, the courts and even the police all having rights and responsibilities in regard to commercial transactions.
In any case property rights have never been universal. e.g. An amazing variety of people can legally enter your house, house owners can't open businesses, the government can forceably buy a house for a highway, patents expire, copyrights expire (in theory anyway), gun owners have restrictions, farmers can't stop mineral prospectors in some jurisdictions etc.
The fact is the property owner's right to restrict code access conflicts directly with the consumers right to do what they like with a product they've purchased. One of the ways that copyright law is currently broken is the way vendors try to "lease" software, breaking first sale doctrine and engage in all sorts of anti-competitive behaviour (see my previous posr!). I expect the law will eventually catch up but until then a bit of thumbing-your-nose is entirely appropriate. New law frequently codifies existing practice and I for one do not want the practice of no-consumer-rights to be codified.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No, I'm saying you should avoid comparing your product to Windows.
They are the commercial market leader. Who else are we going to compare with? If we want Linux and other open source to gain acceptance it has to be good compared to M$Windows. Note, I am talking about comparing verifiable facts. Agreed, opinions can be much more problematic but nonetheless people must make value judgements to make decisions and therefore those value judgements must be discussed.
And that idiotic fire with fire line is the same kind of ratioanlization my kids pull in class. They're either retarded, emotionally hadicapped, or both. What's your excuse for thinking 2 wrongs make a right?
Since when is discussing a fact or an opinion a wrong? It's free speech, not a rationalisation and an adult fact of life. Sometimes fighting fire with fire is simply necessary. Democracies use guns to kill people. Political parties try to outspend the propaganda of their opponents, competing companies waste enormous amounts of money on mindspace marketing etc.
YOU are the problem with open source. YOU are the cause of so much animosity in the community, because YOU refuse to do the right thing, and instead rely on grade school justification of your childish behavior.
Thank you for your vote of confidence in my influence. ;-) Fact is, I fight fire with fire only when I consider it necessary. I am quite happy to contest viewpoints on the basis of facts and not opinions but when marketing is involved sometimes that is not possible. They try to frame the debate in ways that obviate the facts. If a pro-M$ post is fact based then I am quite happy to let it stand or, if I have relevant Linux based facts, bring those to the table.
In any case my personal interest is primarily in broken copyright, patent and commercial law, not on individual companies such as Microsoft. I usually only comment on such legal/social issues not on the characteristics of M$ products.
Take the high road, and stop wallowing in the mud with the other pigs (windows).
Agreed, it is preferable. Often it is not possible. The marketing budget of M$ can and does attempt to drown out other voices. Remember, free speech can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message and M$ are masters at this.
I sympathise with your position but tactically sometimes it's just not a good idea to take it on the chin. Open source and the people who create it do not live in a vacuum and must deal with the competition.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
some minimum amount of time learning all the basic precursor stuff.
Yup, and that basic precursor stuff has been done by millions of people out of a population of billions. Statistically, it's a dead cert that many people have the means and motivation to fix common software problems. It's the uncommon software problems that may be an issue and if somebody wants a fix badly enough, they can pay for it.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
Agreed, standards are not collusion, but unfortunately it's not that simple. Companies form oligopolies that charge oligopoly prices for licensing the patent pool in the "industry standard". Price fixing by another name and yet another reason why patent law is in urgent need of major reform.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
you are not qualified to debate the topic of obviousness in the US patent system.
There is a fundamental disconnect here.
We know the patent office is using a self-serving, legal definition of obviousness. We are saying that definition is garbage, as even a cursory examination of recent software patents will show.
Patent lawyers claiming that software creators are not qualified to talk about it are missing the point. We are a helluva lot more qualified to talk about true obviousness in software than any lawyer. The fact that the typical patent lawyer is happy to ignore that says a lot.
you're addressing an issue that is completely beyond the USPTO's legal authority.
Typical bureaucratic finger pointing. God knows why, but congress takes the patent office's advice on patent law (the foxes watching the hen house!) and the patent office could easily be a leader in bringing in new, more just law. As it is, they're just bureaucratic empire building. It's a real shame their pettiness is causing so much harm.
---
Patents by definition restrict distribution and are incompatible with standards which by definition are supposed to promote distribution. Say no to patents in standards!
But why bother building it if I'm not going to get paid?
Why do you think no patent equals no pay? That's a piece of illogic that the patent lawyers like to push without evidence.
Say I have the idea of opening a new hardware store in a town previously without a hardware store. Somebody else sees I'm making money, thinks it's a good idea and so opens a competing hardware store.
I had the idea first and the store required a big investment, do you think they should be legally blocked from competing with me because I thought of the idea first? I don't.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
1) OSS will need a registry. It doesn't need to have the shortcomings of the Windows registry. Don't be so afraid.
The registry is just another hierarchical file system accessed by system calls incompatible with regular file/directory access, meaning no standard file system utility can work with it.
By all means use a standard directory tree tree/configuration file format to store configuration information but remember the M$windows registry is a kludge. Linux's /etc and /var aren't particularly clean either but at least you can use the standard tools on them.
---
Keep your options open!
That's a huge problem for Linux.
Bullshit. The lying marketing parasites are out in force today.
A setup script using "tar -xzf" to create a single directory works just fine for even large packages like OpenOffice.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
"Nuh-uh" and then point out Windows' flaws. It gets tired.
So you're saying that we should let M$ marketers have free reign?
In a word, bullshit.
They lie on discussion sites every day. If the law actually had any teeth they'd be in jail for deceptive advertising and fraud. The fact that they're not means we have to fight fire with fire.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
Whether it is perception, or reality, they seem to work right more often in Windows.
In a word: Nonsense. Even by the simple measure of downtime M$Windows sites spend a ridiculous amount of time offline compared to Linux - I see it in the businesses I deal with every day.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
Nothing prevents those customers from switching.
Nonsense. Read up on economic network effect/externalities. If you have an office with 9 PC's and 1 Mac, guess what usually happens to the Mac, even if the Mac is technically superior? A form of market failure.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
but reverse engineering Close Source code is NOT fine.
No, reverse engineering to allow interorroperability is extremely important. Unfortunately, the lawmakers don't yet realise how important.
Making reverse engineering illegal is fundamentally incompatible with a free market.
Do you really want to live in a world where your leased version of M$Windows will only work with your M$ licensed PC, which will only talk to your M$ licensed mobile phone, which will only talk to your M$ licensed display, which can only send video to your M$ licensed TV, M$ licensed stereo, M$ licensed clock radio, M$ refigerator (internet ordering), M$ internet enabled car (GPS etc.), M$ internet enabled house, M$ licensed web sites and M$ licensed voting machine? Oh, and by-the-way, all communications are encrypted so no chance of sniffing them even without reverse engineering the code.
That's the world we're headed for if reverse engineering and thus interroperability is made illegal.
Making reverse engineering illegal allows an established monopoly/oligopoly player to leverage into other areas, and eventually, all areas. Prefer a Sony device? Tough, it doesn't talk to your M$ devices and so is useless. Want to read your own documents? Sure, but make sure your M$ Windows lease is up-to-date. Oh, and by the way there is a mandatory "upgrade" coming that will cost you $x and we don't like potential competitor y so we're silently blocking your access to their products and causing furfies. All hidden and encrypted of course.
Want to create a product to compete with an existing M$ product? Sure, but your market entry costs will be insane because you'll have to duplicate the entire M$ interconnection before you can compete with comparable value, let alone better value. And you'll have to deal with a monopoly player with sufficient cash reserves to run at a loss for years. Alternatively, you can pay for the M$ licenses but because they are a monopoly that will cost you about 0.1% less than your gross profit, meaning your net profit will be zero.
You need to think long and hard about what you like about the free market. Interroperability matters. In niche segments no big deal but when a substantial proportion of a big market gets locked in it has democracy compromising effects.
In addition the economic network effect is important and has profound implications for any "IP" market. When one player can write a piece of software (e.g. M$) and get a thousand times the profit compared to another player who writes identically functional software for the same cost (e.g. Sun), and can use that excess profit to "compete" and can also block interroperability, then the free market is dead.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.