[CLUE-Talk] Legal breaking of the MS monopoly

[Grant Johnson]

I remember that several years ago, the only place you could get a phone 
was from the phone company.  (I mean the handset, not the line)  There 
was a court ruling that since they were a monopoly, they could not do 
this.  Could this be a precedent for court mandated inter-operability? 
 If so, could it be then argued that since MS is a monopoly, they must 
publish all of their API's, like phone line specs, so that others could 
make interoperable software?  If there were a true full disclosure of 
all of the API's, the WINE project would be a great benefactor.  For 
sake of inter-operability pry open the MS-Office formats, being a boon 
to Abiword, as well as Open Office.  If all of the same applications 
that run on Windows would run on Linux, that would lower the barriers. 
 If all other word processors could read their files, others could 
compete.  All we need is a legal precedent to pry open formats, API's, etc.

This is a technique that could not be turned against us.  We have no 
secrets.  They could put out a runtime compatibility layer today if they 
wanted to, but if it borrowed any GPL code, it would have to also be 
open.  Solaris did the compatibility layer.  No legal problems there....