they keep talking about building bridges, but forget that toll booths are optional
“The only way that[ customer-benefiting interoperability is] possible is for companies to really be open to licensing arrangements and building these bridges that people thought were impossible before, among different providers and among different software development models.” –Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing
Or, you know, you could agree not to assert the IP against your customers, open source, or standards-based projects, and actually benefit your customers like you claim to want to. Wouldn’t that be a wild idea. I think everyone is in favor of bridges, but some of us don’t assume that all bridges have toll booths.
(And I’m still waiting for someone in the mainstream tech media to challenge MS’s assumption here instead of just letting them get away with it. But I probably shouldn’t hold my breath.)