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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Yes
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 27 2012 @ 07:03 PM EST
That is exactly the threat that middleware posed to Microsoft: that application
developers might switch to targeting the middleware's APIs instead of the APIs
of Windows itself. By doing that, they would escape the "vendor
lock-in" of Microsoft. Both those application developers, and Microsoft's
customers, would easily be able to switch to a new OS if they wanted, because
the applications they needed would be available on any OS the middleware could
be ported to.

That's why Microsoft worked so hard to kill off Netscape (it would expose
middleware APIs and be a platform that developers could target). That's why
they worked so hard to "embrace and extend" their own version of Java,
into something that had Windows-only APIs so it would be incompatible with every
other version of Java (MS lost a lawsuit to Sun over this, and had to stop
calling their version Java).

Its also why they wanted to not only have another near-monopoly in Microsoft
Office (to protect the "moat" around their OS castle) but also why
they needed to marginalize their competitors competing suites before one of them
succeeded in becoming a cross-platform middleware platform attractive enough for
lots of application developers to start targeting their applications to that
platform.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Middleware
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 03:13 AM EST
As a software developer I think this is the clearest, cleanest definition of
"Middleware" in the context of the case.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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