>>Personally, I agree with Whil. I said way back at the beginning of the whole discussion that this is exactly the kind of thing that got MS in trouble with the DOJ in the first place. Tying the use of applications to the operating system is what started people yelling about splitting up MS into 2 divisions. If they're not careful, this is all going to come around again and bite them.
>>
>>I'm really surprised that the whole DOJ thing seems to have taught them nothing at all.
>>
>>If they want to say that they won't support use of their distributables on other than Windows systems, then that, I believe is fair game. If that was their intention, then they should say so clearly.
>
>Exactly - and it will create a market for those who will provide that support.
>
>It is curious, though, that M$ didn't react when Wine became capable of running Office stuff, or other M$ products which may be more important.
>
>I'd like to see a music publisher who would try to enforce that their music be played on proprietary brand of CD players...

Of course, it would only be equivalent if the music publisher manufactured their own cd player and only allowed the cd's to be played on that one.

Actually didn't music publishers at one point try to put copy protection on cd's that was crippling their ability even to be played on PC's? I seem to recall there was hell to pay over it and sales slumped badly for a short period until they backed off. Or am I becoming delusional once again?

Alan