On Thursday 03 November 2005 07:28 am, venk wrote: > Microsoft can create a competing version of Windows. TCP/IP became a > standard long before Microsoft even acknowledged it's existence. So did > ASCII, the IBM BIOS, and serial ports, to name just a few. Does the > term > "ISO standard" mean anything to you? Regrettably, the assumption that "ISO Standard" = "Open Standard" seems not to hold. I have found a number of ISO standards that are not meaningfully open. I am still a little confused about why anyone would do that. Regarding whether Microsoft has committed a "crime", I believe Tim Daneliuk was attempting to draw the distinction between "criminal" and "civil" offenses, and indeed, I do believe Microsoft has only ever been indicted with the latter. This is a pretty big distinction in the US, I don't know how other countries characterize offenses. For example, one of the big points about so-called "software piracy" is that the recording and movie industry has been trying very hard to conflate "copyright violation" with "theft" -- but the former is only a civil offense, and the latter criminal. Big difference. -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
