>Not a very good rebuttal. Again, my point is that in issues like this, skills specific to the discipline of software development are not germane. Somebody with a fundamental understanding of the technology, what it can do and so forth, can certainly comment on what allows for or restricts competition.

There was nothing to refute, you offered no evidence or example for me to counter. You stated a non-technical person can, and I stated that they cannot. Further elaborating either point would require offering proof or example that neither you nor I has access to, and further, both statements are purely opinion.


>Linux, being in the news or not, is 100% irrelevant with respect to the argument of whether MS is/is not a monopoly.

Linux is in the news because it is gaining marketshare at a blindingly fast pace. If MS had an OS monopoly, this would not be possible. Most or all definition of the word monopoly use the word exclusive. If a competing product is gaining marketshare, MS does not have exclusive control over the market.


>How do you know there is absolutely NO new case law that applies here?

I don't know this for sure, but maybe you can help: where have we had, in the last several years, a company the size of Microsoft in the software business being accused of being a monopoly?

>As for barriers being next to nothing, lets apply a litmus test. Can you today, fund development of a new OS and successfully market it? My guess is that you cannot. It would take 100's of millions of dollars both in terms of RD and marketing dollars. That it is folly to think that no significant barriers to entry exist in this industry.

Isn't that what Linus Torvalds and his helpers did?

>It is possible. Just because somebody has not practiced law all that long does not make them unqualified. Again, the lawyer just needs a fundemental understanding of the technology. While development skills in the trenches are nice to have, they are not required..

Microsoft built the ability to convert a VFP cursor to an ADO recordset and vice-versa into VFPCOM. It says so right in the VFP docs. But you would have had to try to use this technique in production to know that, even though the feature is there, it's not practical to use. Didn't you say this, in so many words?

I think that the same can be said for most of the practical issues involved in OS and software interaction. A lawmaker cannot really know how much the cooperatiomn of the OS developers, Tools developers, and the Browser developers really helps the developer. I know, because I write software that depends on that cooperation. To a lawmaker, it looks like collusion, to me, it looks like a beautiful orchestration.