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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Many Microsoft add-ons are inherently Windows-specific. DirectX cannot be implemented in a reasonable manner on any non-Microsoft platform. The same can be said for ActiveX, which depends on COM which is huge.

I don't get your first sentence. First you're claiming that people accuse MS of violating standards when they add things, and then you claim that people have adopted some of Microsoft's add-ons, thereby contradicting your first claim?

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Why can't you implement COM cross-platform? And the same with DirectX? Both of these seem pretty well understood and the object surface can be implemented without knowing the internals (although with COM the internals and the surface go hand in hand, although object layout and such is well documented).

Unless there are specific patents or Apple like TOS, it seems like this stuff is fair game. We shouldn't let laziness allow us to say something is not cross-platform.

Because something is not cross-platform then it's not innovation?

No, but innovation limited to single platform is violation of standards and used to rack profits from the lock-in. But cross-platform innovation can lead to easily adoptable new standards.

I would say that's a fair statement. Much of the impetus behind of innovating outside of standards is the idea that it may one day be incorporated into a standard. It's hard to define a standard that cannot be reliably implemented across platforms.

Because something that's not cross-platform is not and cannot be a standard.

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