Picking the Best Tying Violations, and Kendall Clark's post.

[Hans Reiser <reiser@ricochet.net>]

  My thinking is that I should pick:

• Favoritism of MSIE over Netscape in Windows 98, because it is the most publicized and easily understood by the lay person.  
• Netscape font aliasing, because it is evidence of maliciousness.
• Maybe Visual Studio, because it is simple to describe and provides enough repetition to create a sense of pattern, and besides I mentioned it in my complaint.
• File systems, because it is my business, and because it will force a court decision that solves the problem thoroughly.  File systems are the hard one: important but not understood, no emotional punch, and requires specifying a method for resolving inevitable disputes over the standard interface.  Any court decision that handles untying file systems is going to handle just about any OS component.  If we get the court to rule that Microsoft must show due diligence in making it possible for file system vendors to sell competitors to NTFS, we have opened the entire OS component market up, and Microsoft will be eaten alive in seven years by the army of ants my outfit is one member of.  Us ants are pretty competitive....

Kendall G. Clark wrote:

Hans,

I'm on the AM-INFO list and have learned a lot from your posts. Two things:

1. What about the fact that the anti-competitive universal pre-loading of MS
operating systems has meant that vendors can sell, often w/out the consumer
knowing the difference, brain-dead devices like Winmodems and Winprinters,
which, even if the consumer comes at some point to break free from MS, don't
work under many other OSs because they are considered non-standard. I guess it
may not be against the law, but it sure does suck and it provides a strong
incentive to prevent people from trying a new OS:  ``you mean I'll have to buy
a new modem and printer...?''

  Can you make this argument in more detailed precise logic?
  
In particular, can you argue that it wasn't the independent hardware
  vendors but MS that drove this?  I reserve comment for now.

 

2. If you need help with Web site maintenance or development to organize all
of your evidence, I volunteer to help you. I do all the HTML for my Linux
users group (http://www.ntlug.org/). In fact, I'd be willing to help host the
material if you need that too.

  If you are willing to create an account for me,  I'll ftp the web
  page to ntlug:~reiser/tying.html.  You are welcome to spruce it up
  to your heart's content, and put your name on it as one of the two maintainers. 
  I reserve the right to veto/remove content, but you may add content without
  my prior consent.  Basically I want it to remain focused on legal
  issues, though links in the section at the end to other am-info related
  things are fine.

See you at the conference,

Hans