Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com