From: jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
Date: 4 Jan 1993 16:11:42 GMT
Organization: UT Health Science Center Houston

In article <1993Jan04.043019.11266@microsoft.com> philipla@microsoft.com (Phil Lafornara) writes:
>In article <8292@lib.tmc.edu> jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard) writes:
>>If you claim to be 100% Intel compatible, and your processor exhibits
>>identical performance to an Intel processor's documented behavior, you _are_
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^
>>Intel compatible.
>   Umm, yes.  Is your rebuttal to my statement to merely state
>the converse?

No; read it again, especially the word I highlighted.
Your claim is tantamount to saying that something is not Intel compatible
unless it duplicates ALL of the target machine's behavior exactly, documented
or otherwise.

>>By default, then, MS-DOS' published API qualifies,
>    Why are you qualified to determine what the default functional
>specification is?

So propose another one. Remember that functional specs are there so that the
behavior of whatever is being specified can be fully understood, enough for
someone else to program from them. If you think that MS is not required to do
so, just remember that IBM was forced to do so by the federal government
during the IBM antitrust case, and what was good for IBM is just as good for
MS.

>> especially since MS will
>>tell you every time you turn around that that's all a programmer should
>>use...never mind that MS breaks that rule regularly...
>     Doesn't sound like a rule - sounds like a suggestion.

Look at that crawfish scuttle.
MS tells everyone else that undocumented interfaces are not guaranteed to
remain working, and that they reserve the right to change them at any time, or
remove them entirely. They then go on to say that those interfaces should not
be used. Of course, MS can go ahead and use those interfaces themselves, and
will get advance warning when they're going away so that they can have
something ready and waiting.

Maybe it's a suggestion; that's all programming rules are anyway. The fact
remains that MS gets an unfair competitive advantage from doing so.

>    Yup.  But Microsoft doesn't say that all future Microsoft systems
>products will rely only on the published MS-DOS APIs.  Never said
>it.

...in other words, they expect everyone else to stick to the published APIs,
but they don't have to. Yup. Really fair.

>    Jay, these "rules" that you're so fond of quoting - can you
>tell me where they are published?  Put up or shut up, Jay.

Look at any Microsoft programming manual. Right where they say that
undocumented interfaces should not be used.

>     You have yet to show evidence that Microsoft did anything to
>intentionally break DR-DOS.  Put up or shut up, Jay.

I _can't_. If that was documented anywhere, it would be deep in the bowels of
MS' files. That doesn't mean I can't observe and comment on the external
effects of MS' actions. Those observations, which I've noted here before, and
you apparently didn't - or couldn't - read, lead me, and others (including at
least one MS toady) to conclude that Windows 3.1 had incompatibility with
DR-DOS 6.0 as a design goal. If MS was so damned concerned otherwise, IT WOULD
HAVE HELPED DR FIX THE PROBLEM!
-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu      | adequately be explained by stupidity.
      "Science is all in the public domain, and allows few secrets."
              -- Tom Clancy, _The Sum of all Fears_