Copyright upholds Monopoly,was: Microsoft's OS competitors

The result of the discussion of this topic is:

Microsoft has a de facto unbreakable monopoly on operating systems, further enforced with some dubious bully methods.

Add to this the fact that, as the operating system gets bigger, more and more competing functions get gobbled up into it. Anyone bought a memory manager, disk compression, disk defragmenting utility recently?

I loved Stacker, but now that Win 95 has a product that is amost as good ... And no software or hardware vendor can blame the Win 95 compression utility for problems with their product, because win 95 is the standard. They loved to blame Stacker compression for any problem I encountered with their software.

Web browsers will be next, once they are totally integrated into the operating system, good bye Netscape.

Of course, the intention of all anti-trust legislation was exactly to avoid such a monopoly. Imagine if ATT had sold fax machines that needed to adapt to the ever changing quirks of their phone lines and switching stations. And other fax machines would only belatedly receive the information on the new phone line specifications.

How come the anti trust probe went nowhere? Why don't they create exemptions to copyright protection to break up this monopoly? Why do they not force Microsoft to publish, COMPLETELY, and in advance, all operating system specifications, and to prohibit the use of undocumented system calls by any application software. If the specifications were complete and exhaustive, reverse engineering is unnecessary. And, the way the monopoly hides itself behind a shroud of secrecy, reverse engineering is actually the only possible self defense.

Why do anti trust authorities not require good programming techniqes: modularity and clearly defined interfaces between parts of the operating system? Thus, other companies could, more easily produce parts of the operating system, the same way as car parts can be made by many different companies?

Why does no other country take similar anti trust measures? After all, Microsoft is a monopolist in almost all countries.

Mario Heilmann
a3[_at_]a3.com

Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

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http://www.a3.com/ just type a3 or a3.com Received on Fri Apr 25 1997 - 17:11:22 GMT