Guess what? That's irrelevant. Fooling the US courts on compliance is one thing, but the ruling is still the same. M$ engaged in monopolistic action. And that's why the EU got them too.
I don't disagree with this...
The bottom line is that emrce and extend works for M$ and they use it to destroy competiton.
...but because the embrace portion of 'embrace and extend' benefis both end-users and the developer community, it is a legitimate way of winning the market share game (i.e. 'destroying the competition') and is not a tactic companies should be penalized for engaging in.
Companies are free to 'extend' at their own risk - that's known as innovation and everyone does that. In case you didn't realize, Netscape practiced an even less savoury form - from a technical POV - of 'embrace and extend' wrt the HTML standards. Redhat (finally, something Linux related) embraces and extends too (to my disgust, btw...).
In conclusion, MS be may guilty of anticompetitive tactics, but bundling and 'embrace extend' _per se_ cannot be considered such. The lawyers have to throw that in along with a whole bunch of other practices before they can paint a portrait of a monopolistic company that the judge will agree with them on.
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