M$ & European Commission (EC) & Adobe AntiTrust

[Melbosa]

Granted the link below is from a blog of a M$ Employee, formerly a ZDNet Article Writer, but none the less, it certainly has some very interesting points.  Whether you agree with them or not is up to you, but he does raise some things worth thinking about. 

• Should governments have the ability to influence development practices of software, based completely on the fact that a similar product is in place (whether you rip off that products GUI/API is another story)?
• If you see a need for a better solution in a piece of software, and develop your own to fit that need, are you infringing on the rights to that original software?
• If you want a "lite" version of a large piece of software, which you only use one piece of functionality, and someone else puts it in your operating system for you, are they infringing on that larger software's piece of the market (and what piece of the market is that software for, the average person or the specific person that requires most of its functionality)?

Check it out: http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/index.php?p=1601

[Melbosa]

And another interesting article on Symantec and Vista.  Now I personally hate anything but Ghost from Symantec and immediately uninstall the products as soon as any of my client's complain about anything on their systems not working right.  And about 80% of the time this fixes the issues .  But there is something in this article that I can't fault M$ for, and that is the following statement:

Symantec and other security vendors dislike PatchGuard because it prevents them from accessing the Windows kernel.

Somehow, I don't think the kernel or engine of any software should be directly accessible from any 3rd party software. SDKs and APIs are there for a reason, and no one knows their own software better than the vendor who supplies it.  Granted this hasn't always been the case with M$'s previous versions of Windows, but I still agree with the concept as a whole - a piece of software's kernal or engine shouldn't be tampered with by 3rd party software.

Source: http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25016

[Lazybones]

Agreed.. In the MS Vista Chalk Talk I went to last MS said that they had done a great deal of research on what causes BSOD and system lockups and found only two primary causes.

- drivers that access kernel space
- hardware issues.

Sure you could argue that if some malware/virus got into the kernel it could disable any anti virus system just using an API, however if MS is doing such a good job of locking out the utility makers then it should be good at locking out changes from a virus as well.

Kernel driver issues are VERY hard to troubleshoot as a user/admin..  I had a server that would stop responding after random amounts of time.. I traced the problem to the anti virus software, and later to a kernel memory leak in the anti virus network filter driver. There are only 220MB of Paged and 110MB of non paged kernel pool memory (depending on your kernel flag), it doesn't take much of a leak to cause problems.

[Thorin]

Them articles led me to this one:

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=24929

In 2004, the commission found Microsoft guilty of shutting out rivals in the media player software market by bundling its Media Player with Windows. [...] Microsoft [...] was required to release a version of Windows without Media Player.

You can get Windows without Media Player?  Where?

[Lazybones]

In European countries there supposedly will be special EU versions of Vista that do not include media player or IE as the default browser

[Shayne]

Thorin.  Its called Windows XP Edition N.

In all honesty I would rather have microsoft build in all the tools i have to spend time downloading.  if XP had a good FTP program, a better notepad and im sure a few others i download and use often it sure would save me the hassle.  Apple does a great job of bundling up its operating system with great apple made software right out of the OSX box.