Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

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> Remember Microsoft's policy of "embrace, extend, extinguish" in the 1990s? If SSO is protectable, then "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics may cross the line from simply distasteful to actionable unfair competition.

Let's step back a bit. There's a software product in use today that embraced an open standard, extended it and in doing so "extinguished" other implementations in a way that has much greater implications for software development (especially in the present tense) than anything Microsoft ever did.

What product am I thinking of? The GNU C Compiler, of course! And the GNU tools in general (which have thoroughly "EEE'd"[0] competing POSIXes), while we're at it.[1]

If "SSO" or "EEE" are "actionable unfair competition," then whoever is the current owner of the Bell Labs IP has every right, and every monetary incentive, to get the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem shut down.

[0] "EEE" isn't bad! You could just as easily call it "beating the competition by making a product with better features."

[1] Assuming you agree with me that compiler lock-in and operating system lock-in have greater implications for software development than for example web browser lock-in.

For EEE to work the Extend needs to be proprietary so that the third E can take place with regard to competing products. The GCC exists under an open license so it can't be used that way.

It's not a phrase for winning by doing a better job.

I don't recall reading that in the infamous Microsoft memo. Extending and extinguishing can and most certainly has taken place, whether a monetary incentive exists or not.

Over the past 20 years GCC and GNU/Linux have gone from negligible to overwhelming market share in the fields of C compilers and POSIX-on-the-server, thanks in large part to the massive software ecosystem that has developed which can only be compiled using GCC and its non-standard language extensions, and/or can only run on GNU/Linux and its non-standard extensions to POSIX.

Once enormously-popular competing implementations, Borland C, Solaris, etc, have been "extinguished." Surviving and new implementations treat GCC and GNU/Linux as the reference standards more than anything the ISO puts out.

Again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing; just the opposite. Inferior products (which can and do include the published standards themselves) were beaten out by superior ones.

Your case is reinforced by clang's recent rise as a worthy alternative to gcc.

Yes, and especially by the very large investment (of Apple time and resources) they've put into their ongoing effort to reach one-for-one compatibility with GCC's non-standard extensions. It's unlikely Clang would be growing in popularity nearly so fast had they exclusively rolled their own APIs for language extensions, or especially if they stuck strictly to the standards.

> Extending and extinguishing can and most certainly has taken place, whether a monetary incentive exists or not.

Um, sure, but EEE is important because it was a strategy and one that was executed repeatedly by Microsoft. On the other hand, just because some products have been "extinguished" (debatable) does not mean that was the strategy employed by GNU, nor does applying EEE here seem to serve any predictive function.

I think what you are doing is re-defining the strategy and saying it isn't bad. But the way MS used it was wrong. They didn't just create open tools that everyone wanted to use so they won out. They intentionally tried to join into an effort, purely to try to move it in a direction where they could shut others out using their market dominance and then kill off competitors. It's not just winning through fair competition and that's the problem I have with your statement. MS violated the law and behaved in an unethical manner rather than competing on the merits of their products.

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