Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption 243
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
This is good. (Score:5, Funny)
Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Get a grip, hippo, they dont mean your kb.ms thingie. They mean the INTEROPERABILITY docs, which you will NEVER see in a website such as your msdn.
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Not saying I'm doubting you, but could you give some examples of better or more extensive developer documentation?
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Its been some years, so things might have changed.
But back in 1995(ish) when I was using, administering and programming for IBM AIX platform (AIX 3.2, xlc, xlC, Motif), I had excellent documentation available.
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The best non-FOSS documentation I have used lately is Oracles.
Example for the 10G starting directory [oracle.com]
Aside from the actual WORKING search functionality (which gives you a list in of "books" in which the search term occured with numbers of hits first, so that you can go to the relevant "book" when the search term is something ambiguous like "format" instead a long list of maybe or maybe not relevant links).
I never found the right thing on MSDN unless I stumble upon it via a Google search, Oracle usually
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Yes, good one. Another good database example is PostgreSQL. Apache and its various modules also have excellent docs.
Like you said, the searchability of MSDN leaves a lot to be desired. It's complete, but hard to find anything.
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Microsoft documentation on how to interface microsoft software with other microsoft software isn't helping anybody other than microsoft.
Yeah, because you know, there are no open source programs to display, edit and print word documents.
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I HATE MSDN! . . . it just makes ever thing so much harder then it needs to be
It depends on the tasks. I think the website layout could improve a bit. Is that your problem? Want more examples? Contribute them yourself, there's a community content section. I will admit that Microsoft is slow to take user feedback. I had to wait months for a response to an error I pointed out in the documentation. What tasks are you having trouble with? I will admit that their website is not designed to make it easy to figure out how to do obtuse things, such as adding a cab file to the ActiveSync add/
Fair and balanced (Score:5, Funny)
"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.
Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to think of /. as Taco's blog instead of a trusted IT news source. That explains just about everything.
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Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux. As far as I know, they've never even pretended to be a fair and balanced source of IT news. Have you noticed the borg icon that's used for MS stories?
/. is one hell of a lot more fair and balanced than pretty much anything out of M$ and their "partners" (gack) web sites. Paid marketers are the worst.
Slashdot is a software nerd website. That means closed source software, i.e. software that cannot be as easily modified, analyzed and understood, is inherently at
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--anon cause i do not have a flame resistant suit.
I do...
It's groupthink. I expect that many of the very loud minority actually are using Microsoft software. I suspect that the Mac fans know that they're facing problems with their devices/software but are feeling as a part of a community so will defend it even if they know they are incorrect. I suspect that there are Microsoft fanboys (I have been accused of being one until I point out the link to my homepage) who will deny any wrongs that Microsoft does or justify them away or make excuses for them. And,
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If any company is doing something poorly being unbiased doesn't mean attack and promoting those bad habits. It means reporting fact. Fact doesn't always give both sides because there isn't two sides to give and the fact is Microsoft does a lot of stupid stuff. The consumer doesn't always see (or care about) this stuff so some articles come off as biased attacks on Microsoft in those people's eye.
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.
Yes I have. That and the stained glass window. But divorcement from reality is not a healthy sign for a tech site:
Sept 22 - Earlier today, Microsoft Corp. joined only five other nonfinancial corporate debt issuers to be assigned a 'AAA' rating by Standard & Poor's. This is also the first new 'AAA' in 10 years.
Microsoft appears to be bucking an almost three-decade trend that has shown U.S. industrials' movement away from 'AAA's--and from high
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You've noticed it *is* called slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
...and not back-slashdot.
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Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux.
Just as Science has always been biased towards evolution rather than Intelligent Design.
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Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux.
You must be new here. I'm modded down all the time for insider Unix jokes or expressing a relatively mild opinion of what I feel about Microsoft Windows.
This is not your Father's slashdot.
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Are you calling Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly a linux hacker ?
Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is about as unbiased and balanced as Fox News.
Microsoft has been responsible for some really enormous fuckups and wrongs in the world of computers. They have some utterly nasty business practices that really are anti-competitive. They did, at one point, have a virtual monopoly, though that is crumbling naturally due to market forces, as more and more people in the market discover just how shitty Vista is, and how good Linux and OS/X are in comparison. That's only part of their monopoly (the other part being their office products, and that will come in time).
The thing being... for all their evils and wrongs, there's been a few good things that have come from them. And while I freely admit to being an idealist, I do like to think that the evil profit-mongering is limited to the upper echelons of the company only, and that at the lower ranks, you find people who really are trying to make the best product they can for computer users.
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I'm sure there are. And the saddest part of this is that with all those people doing the best they can, every Microsoft product is a bloated, buggy mass of security holes.
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>for all their evils and wrongs, there's
>been a few good things that have come from them (Microsoft).
I've been keeping an eye on the shenanigans that Microsoft has been pulling for about 12 years. I would say I'm pretty current on their bad behavior, but to be honest, can you (or anyone for that matter) give me some example of "good things" to come out of Microsoft that were
a) Not hostile to Open Source Licenses, with GPL being the primary victim.
b) Didn't have strings attached, aka, can only be used
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Wow... FUD much? I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this one but, well, hmm...
Let's answer A and B with Microsoft's hardware. Or were you expecting hardware to be free? You're expecting the information to be free? Then, well, what monitor are you using because I want to know if they included a copy of the schematics with it. Your CPU does the same too does it? So no, those don't do a thing to OSL nor GPL.
Good? Err... How about helping to usher a new technology age into the world where IBM wasn't
Minesweeper (Score:3, Funny)
Minesweeper. The best thing they ever did.
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they also made it cross-platform in theory (though they never went through with it and actually rolled out .NET for other platforms)
Kinda like OOXML in that respect, in theory it's cross-platform and open, realistically it's the exact same shit that has been pulled by them for over a decade, but this time it looks friendly and might protect them from legal trouble.
It'll be cross-platform when it works on other platforms, not when it's an ISO standard, that goes for C#, .NET, OOXML and anything else.
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No, only the Common Language Infrastructure and C# have been submitted for standarisation. The rest of it remains proprietary, including the Framework Class Library, which makes .Net actually usable.
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The article you linked to, and the quote that you've printed, doesn't go anywhere near proving what you were asked to prove.
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evil profit-mongering limited to the upper echelon (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law? :-)
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Well said. The people steering the company have vastly more power and vastly more responsibility for their actions. This is why it is not wrong to focus somewhat more on them. At the same time the rank and file troopers are complicit too.
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Monopolies do not crumble naturally due to market forces. That's completely backwards thinking, and if it were true, the government would not have to regulate the markets to prevent monopolistic practices. Monopolies do not destroy themselves, ever.
I'm writing this from a Vista machine that is 100% stable so far, had it for 8 months or so. Longest uptime is about a week, but it's my personal computer, it's not a server, so I turn it off every so often (note I didn't _have_ to turn it off for any reason,
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+5 Insightful, LOL! That's the most funny comment moderation I've seen today.
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+3 Informative, LOL! That's the most funny comment moderation I've seen this week!
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+3 (null data type)
ROTFLMAO!!
Mods: don't mess up the chain!
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Re:Fair and balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.
"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.
However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.
The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done ... and survive to this day.
On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.
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On the other hand
It's search engine spamming for the submitter (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. Th
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the Middle-East peace process
Middle-East WHAT?!
I think he meant the Middle-East piece process.
It's a step... (Score:4, Funny)
Documentation unfit. Awesome.
Now what about the software?
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Google is your friend...
Shared Source Licensing Programs:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
Yes, it takes some initiative on your part including looking.
Man... (Score:5, Funny)
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There is a difference between people flat out not being able to understand something and wasting their time because you couldn't be fucked to document things as you should and there is absolutely no reason for a com
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That kind of attitude quite naturally leads to contempt for documentation. Now, I've never worked at Microsoft, so I don't know what their documentation habits are like, but I suspect they are as poor as in most companies.
Now, of course many compa
All code is self-documenting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All code is self-documenting... (Score:5, Insightful)
For coders, at least.
If that would only be true. Documentation usually lists _intended_ behavior, not actual behavior. When code is self-documenting it is documenting the actual behavior, or at least, partially.
indolence (Score:2)
Oblig. Lucas reference (Score:2, Funny)
Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns.
One only knows how to reach complete happiness in computer software when they have felt the power of the source. Use the source Steve! ...gg..GAHH!! *dodges chair*
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Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns.
One only knows how to reach complete happiness in computer software when they have felt the power of the source. Use the source Steve! ...gg..GAHH!! *dodges chair*
Obviously, you haven't reached the level of a true master. If you were, you would have used your sourcefield to deflect the chair.
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Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns.
One only knows how to reach complete happiness in computer software when they have felt the power of the source. Use the source Steve! ...gg..GAHH!! *dodges chair*
Obviously, you haven't reached the level of a true master. If you were, you would have used your sourcefield to deflect the chair.
For example, Steve Jobs uses his reality distortion field to deflect all incoming chairs :)
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmers are always completely oblivious as to what will not be so obvious to someone else or themselves several months down the line. At the time you;re writing it, it's quite clear that the routine will do exactly what you want it to do at that moment.
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Yes, they do.. However, most have not explicitly been told by a Judge to write the documentation so that it is fit for purpose, on pain of some very nasty sanctions due to anti-trust litigation.
Being blase about that really isn't a very good tactic, and either reeks of rank stupidity, or sheer insolence. And I don't happen to believe for a moment that Microsoft, as an entity, is stupid.
Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
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Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Are you sure the summary meant Microsoft in that sentence?
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Yes.
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
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Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, because I have two more semesters of law school to complete. Before that, I was a computer science major.
Your mistake is that you are comparing legal code to software documentation. However, the more apt comparison is to compare legal code to software source code, at which point your analogy fails. While they aren't widely advertised, there are plenty of secondary sources (such as legal encyclopedias) out there that make law accessible to a layman.
In the land of the blind... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the land of the blind... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article says, Microsoft documents the things they want you to know very well (more software for Windows == good), so it's not like they have a corporate culture of crap documentation. What they don't do is document things they don't want you to know, like formats and protocols, because that would allow you to use non-Microsoft software somewhere (== bad).
Since their documentation is obviously biased, they're in trouble again.
3 cheers for Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (Score:2)
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I wonder if that could be a part of the problem. No, not this problem, but the larger problems in America. What is ONE judge doing with two big cases in this short amount of time? (Thanks for the link to that by the way - I missed that one as I've been busy lately.) These are two rather large cases that may set a bit of precedent here. That one judge had both of those and managed to rule on them both in that limited time frame makes me curious as to her willingness to devote the time to actually understand
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Irony (Score:2)
Not only is it unfit for US consumption, it's likely unfit for M$ consumption and is the official documentation that M$ developers have to use to interoperate with other M$ products.
badarticletitle? (Score:3, Insightful)
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
Contempt Charges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
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> Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts?
The problem is Microsoft does not work from design or specification documents for interfaces or protocols. Microsoft makes the code work, then well it works so they don't need documentation. The documents simply don't exist and are very difficult to make correctly after the fact.
Both these protocol documents and the Microsoft Documentation OOXML standard are effectively reverse engineered from the code. This
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You're trying to tell me that for the past 20 years nobody has written any specs down? That when they coded Office 2003 they had to reverse engineer Office XP? You're telling me that Microsoft Press's "Writing Solid Code" and t
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The newer stuff of Microsoft, and their public APIs, are pretty well documented. Keep in mind though that stuff like Office and Windows pre-date Microsoft's insane popularity (in numbers, not in spirit) and monopoly. So there's a lot of stuff that was never documented, and the people who wrote it aren't even there anymore, and there's a lot of code built on TOP of that. Microsoft didn't get the luxury of a 0.1% market share that would allow them to scrap everything they did and start over, like a certain hi
Unfit for consumpution? (Score:2, Funny)
Don't eat it, then!
Or did they mean it's not good for tuberculosis?
poor poster - wrong article (Score:2)
this is the actual article - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080925-judge-microsoft-documentation-unfit-for-us-consumption.html [arstechnica.com]
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.
It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.
Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Unbiased article summaries (Score:2)
I particularly liked:
"Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Here's an interesting concept the editors may wish to take a look at some time
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/objectivity [thefreedictionary.com]
All joking aside this kind of childish rant isn't very good for slashdot. Does slashdot aspire to be "News for nerds" or "old stories for trolls to bitch about"?
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she had/has no clue who she is up against (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
Really? (Score:2)
Have they seen IBM documentation? *shudder*
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Old joke. (Score:2)
Three people are in a helicopter, when a fog suddenly rolls in and makes visibility less than fifty feet. The pilot is lost, but after flying in ever widening circles, spots a building. He flies up to it, and motions for a person to open his window.
The pilot yells at the top of his lungs: "WHERE ARE WE?"
The man in the building replies: "YOU'RE IN A HELICOPTER!"
So the pilot turns due east, flies 1.5 miles and lands at the airport. After which, one of the passengers asks incredulously "How did you do that?"
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
Next in line should be Skype (Score:2)
Yeah, but has she bothered to fine them yet? (Score:2)
She should spend some time on the phone with Neelie Kroes (sp?)
source of burning is a matter of perspective (Score:2)
As a writer for Microsoft who has witnessed this.. (Score:2, Informative)
Compliance is a very very very difficult problem. This is particularly true when you have more than one compliance specification that you must work with, don't have engineering resources from the team that produced the product that is out of compliance, and are working on a short deadline while trying to deliver documentation for other projects. I have posted a longer response to this on my work blog. Feel free to share the pain...
http://gclassy.com/ [gclassy.com]
Response to Bill Gates' saying: (Score:2)
"Let them eat adequate documentation!"
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Why not just use their own internal protocol specification?
This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
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This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
In many cases this is better than reading the specification if other developers haven't done exactly what the specification says and deviated just a teensy weensy bit for the sake of (performance | expedience | being a n00b themself etc.) . Of course, if lots of people that can read the code do so and care about the specification, this may not be a problem (and is one of the strengths of open source development).
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Why not just use their own internal protocol specification?
Usually, having access to internal protocol specifications only make things worst. Those things are, as a rule of thumb, awful.
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Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you
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I must be missing something here
Indeed you are. In fact, more than one thing.
writting software to run on windows is as easy as it gets
Here, you are missing that no-one is talking about writing software to run on windows.
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
Here, you are missing that the problem is not a Windows developer integrating with other platforms, but third party developers integrating with Microsoft. In other words, yes, it is very easy to access an email server on linux from your Windows program. It is rather less easy to talk to an Exchange server successfully from Linux.
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Here, you are missing the legal concept and realit
It's a two way street. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.
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I can understand and appreciate constructive criticism but are you seriously calling the KB and MSDN "crap compared to other vendors?" The vendors with good support/documentation are few and far between, among them Microsoft seems to be doing quite well. Unfortunately that's not the documentation in question but I suppose you just wanted to bash Microsoft.
Meh... Who am I to stop you? Bash away but, well, the only spot on Microsoft's support site that I find lacking is their inability to actually help people