On Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:50:52 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 10/16/2011 15:42, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:55:08 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/9/2011 21:42, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>   >  Are you sure about that?
>>>
>>> Pretty sure. Certainly people like suing Microsoft more than they like
>>> suing open source projects. :-)
>>
>> You haven't been following the legal battles against Android
> 
> Android isn't open source any more. Let me rephrase and say that nobody
> sues community-developed open-source that doesn't have
> multi-billion-dollar companies backing it.

I cited a counterexample, and you changed the criteria.

>> Odd that nobody's ever sued Microsoft over that (at least not that I've
>> heard of), but somehow there's a threat of that happening with Acrobat
>> Reader, apparently.
> 
> I'm just guessing. I can't think of any upside to Microsoft trying to
> run their own repository if they don't get money from it. On the other
> hand, in places where Microsoft takes a cut (a la xbox arcade) they do
> indeed run the download servers.

They do indeed.  I'm sure they could work out a licensing arrangement for 
"approved by Microsoft" software if they wanted to, and take a cut for 
distribution.

Apple does, after all.

>> Installation directories aren't "software management elements" - things
>> like dependency resolution are.
> 
> That wasn't my point. There *are* dependency resolution things in
> installs. Look at ClickOnce or MSI for example. It's just that people
> might have stuff on their machine that did *not* come from a repository,
> and they won't necessarily know how to fix it if you delete libraries
> out from under them after 4 out of 5 applications using that library get
> uninstalled.

So, that can happen on both Linux and Windows.  I'm not sure what your 
point is.

Jim

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