Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   (And before anyone answers with a "it's their product, they can do
> > whatever they like with it", that's definitely not always the case.

> Well, technically, I'm sure any country could pass a law saying some group 
> of people has to do something.

> However, I'm pretty sure the EU's rules are more like "you're not allowed to 
> sell the iPod unless you change it to do X."  I wouldn't think there's any 
> way for the EU to say "you must sell iPods here."

> Now, they *could* say "You're not allowed to sell Vista if you don't support 
> XP."

  I'm more thinking along the lines of software writers having the legal
obligation of not harming their users deliberately. That's why, for example,
writing a virus is illegal and you cannot just shrug it off with "it's my
software, I can make it to do anything I want": No you can't. If it harms
people's computers, you are going to jail.

  While deliberately making XP perform poorly to boost Windows7 sales is
not the same category of "harm" as a virus, it still can potentially cause
harm to the millions of people and companies using the product by making
their computers less responsive (potentially causing loss of productivity,
especially for companies). What aggravates it is that it would be a
*deliberate* act, not a mistake.

  However, there's probably no precedent for this, so I don't know if it
would cause any consequences to MS. (OTOH I don't think there was any
precedent for the Internet Explorer issue either, but that got to courts
anyways.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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