On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Julian Mehnle wrote:
Wayne Schlitt wrote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201360.html
The article is biased towards Microsoft as it doesn't portray the facts
correctly. The Sender-ID patent license may be acceptable to BigFoot
Interactive, but it still isn't open-source compatible. The flak MS has
received wasn't due to their "past practices" but due to their _current_
ones.
I was in doubts about Microsoft before MARID, but if anything MARID
experience has taught me to avoid dealing with them and not believe in
their "good intentions", what they say about MS and EEE all turned out
to be true and they use it again and again and again. I'm concerned now
as to what can happen to RSS since now MS has turned their attention to
it (not really sure in that regard if supporting atom is good or if Dave
Winer is right to keep RSS 2.0 fairly closed, which in the end just makes
others go for proprietary extensions like Apple did).
Not at all surprising confession to me, the technological excellence is
obviously not a concern once you're on that road and politicians have to
go where big money is taking them...
I seriously doubt Meng has (or had) any hard financial interest in the deal
with Microsoft.
Should have used quotes. I use the term "big money" as synonym for really
large company with lots of power and money behind it. Such companies always
have their own interest in mind and do not necessarily support and go with
best technology, but go with the technologies they believe would give them
most control over the market, often these are marketing vs technology or
marketing vs security decisions but sometimes this is more serious then that.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net