Today, Sam Hinton wrote:
> >Heard on the ABC news this morning - the US Justice commission has slammed
> >a US$1M per day fine against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices for
> >bundling Explorer with Win 95. Pity it is not retrospective...
>
> Apologies if I'm repeating someone else...
>
> See also Sun's lawsuit against MS for breaching their Java licensing
> agreement. It seems that Java (you know, the 'platform independent'
> programming language) actually works differently on MS applications like
> IE4 than it does on any other OS. Strange it took Sun so long to get
> around to this. I've noticed the differences for some time now :)
>
> http://www.javaworld.com/jw-10-1997/jw-10-sunsuit.html
I hope people are not under the impression that this sort of practice by
MS is new. It long predates Win 3.x.
If my memory serves me correctly, this type of practice, then aimed at
utilities and other applications that had to work with DOS, goes back as
far as DOS2. It was presented in at least one publication, "Undocumented
DOS: A Programmer's Guide to Reserve MS-DOS Functions and Data Structures"
by Andrew Schulman et al. I used the second edition published in 1993.
Ralph Nader wrote to President Clinton in 1995 expressing his consumer
organisation's concerns over Win95. And this says nothing of the concerns
about 'market driven' applications designed for obsolesence, just plain
buggy applications or subverting standards to their own ends over the
years.
Rob...
Robert Hazeltine
r.hazeltine@nepean.uws.edu.au (University of Western Sydney, Nepean)
grove@zeta.org.au (Private account at Zeta Microcomputer Software)