Re: Petreley on commercial support for non-MS OSes

["Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>]

Brett wrote:

>In the case under discussion, however, there is no justifiable place
>to draw a line because any distinction would be artificial. It is as
>wrong to exhibit anti-competitive behavior in the realm of operating
>systems as it is in, say, game software or spreadsheets or browsers.
>This is the point of the Caldera case.

That's not the kind of line I was thinking of.  The line would be between
applications and the underlying platform on which they are built, and the
distinction would be that many ISVs would like an open-source OS to build
on while keeping their own products closed.  I don't know why ISVs would
have any particular reason to prefer a GPLed OS over one that uses the BSD
license, except that Linux happens to be the platform that has perceived
momentum.

I don't think drawing this line is any more artificial than drawing a line
that says "Internet Explorer is not part of the operating system."  Each
application vendor wants equal access to the OS APIs.  With open source
OSes, they get it.  With Microsoft, they do not.



--
Eric Bennett ( http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/ )
Cornell University, Field of Biochemistry, 377 Olin Chemistry Lab

We have increased our prices over the last 10 years [while]
other component prices have come down and continue to come down.
-Joachim Kempin, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corp.