Joshua Thorp wrote: > If you are a multi-billion dollar company why interoperate? Just > declare the rest of the market for suckers and dilettantes. > Unfortunately for billion dollar companies its turtles all the way > down and they struggle mightily just to interoperate with their own > products--and largely fail. Because you definitely risk not staying a multi-billion dollar software company if you do that. Microsoft, for example, has not actually done that. For example, it's easy to make SOAP web services with Visual Studio. They were also early to put XML support into not only their middleware but also primary applications. .NET cross-language support is really pretty impressive. To match Java, they aligned all of their language support (significantly including C++ and Visual Basic) on one publicly documented virtual machine platform while also making a good competitor to Java in the process, C#. Further, they made them all interoperable with the same libraries, both for fast within-box legacy calls (COM) and cross box (SOAP). Sun might have liked to lock people in to `pure Java', but now they've also been forced to innovate in Java itself and the runtime.
I think Linux and free software definitely made these companies be better than they would have been otherwise. A strong commons helps to make them somewhat honest. In 1990 it was barely possible to get work done on entirely free systems. Tremendous progress has been made since then. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
