>>> 2. Deliberately subverting open standards to force vendor lock-in.
>>
>> That's not illegal, and the vendors were never forced to use the MS 
>> extensions.
> 
> The only one of these I heard of ever being a problem was the Kerberos 
> and/or DHCP standards (I forget which), wherein MS put some important 
> stuff into the area reserved for vendor extensions, which is kind of 
> hard to argue against unless you're fanatical to begin with.

I'm pretty sure that one was Kerberos. And the point was they made it so 
their Kerberos implementation wouldn't work with anybody else's. The 
idea is "if this doesn't work with other compliant Kerberos 
implementations, you can't really call it Kerberos". A bit like if you 
made an SMTP server and an SMTP client that work with each other but not 
any other product on the market; can you really call that SMTP?

If they'd put extra information in but their implementation had still 
worked with other people's, it wouldn't be such a big deal. (It still 
leaves the issue of these fields being reversed for future use, and when 
the next standard decides to use them, it'll break the M$ implementation...)

> What other standards have they done this with.

*cough* The web?

> What I haven't figured out is the huge number of people screaming at 
> Microsoft for bundling programs with Windows that competes with programs 
> they give away for free. Say what?

Before Internet Explorer, web browsers used to cost money. After IE, it 
was basically impossible to sell them for money. Why would anyone pay 
money for something that they can get for free anyway?

So yeah, the products they give away for free compete with other 
products which are free *now*... because you can't sell them for money 
any more.

Post a reply to this message