Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[David Schwartz]

"Matt Garrish" <matthew.garrish at sympatico.ca> wrote in message 
news:GHR6f.1428$ki7.48975 at news20.bellglobal.com...

> I'd be interested in hearing what you think a right is?

    A right is a scope of authority. That is, a sphere within which one's 
decision is sovereign.

> In Florida, for example, you have the right to gun someone down if you 
> think they're a bit too menacing. In Canada, most people find that 
> reprehensible. So does a Floridian visiting Canada have their rights 
> infringed on by our rogue government because they're not allowed to gun 
> down menacing looking Canadians at will?

    That's obviously a complicated question but totally unrelated to the 
issue at hand, which was one's sovereignty over one's own property. 
Obviously issues where a person has to use force against another are going 
to be complicated. The existence of complicated questions doesn't make the 
simple ones complicated.

> Should they be able to exercise that right regardless and not have to face 
> the consequences of our laws?

    I think there are objective criteria in which the use of force is 
justified regardless of the laws. However, the strategic decision of whether 
to use objectively justifiable force when one may not be able to justify it 
to non-objective observers who may use force against you is going to be a 
complicated one.

> I think "right", however, was the wrong choice of words in this thread; 
> there is rarely anything codifying a company's "right" to succeed at all 
> costs and at the expense of all competition (except Crown Corporations and 
> the like, which are created (in theory, anyway) in the interest of general 
> population as opposed to it).

    My point was that the Microsoft corporation was not an impersonal 
entity. It is an entity that is supposed to embody the will and rights of 
its shareholders and exists to allow them to act together for their own 
benefit.

> Your question here appears to be one of ethics. Is MS ethically bankrupt 
> for pursuing business practices that run counter to society's established 
> norms, and should they be punished for doing so? And is their behaviour 
> the more reprehensible because of the contempt they show for the decisions 
> of society's judicial arm.

    It is only proper to show contempt for bad decisions. MS obligation was 
to comply with the law and not perform actions that the law put them on 
clear notice were prohibited. The court's determination of the relevent 
market, on wich all of their other decisions were predicated, was arbitrary 
and bizarre, and the law did not provide any notice of how the market would 
be determined.

    In the sense of interchangeability, almost all operating systems are 
monopolies. And if you go by application, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD are 
all interchangeable -- there is nothing significant you can do on one that 
you can't do on the other.

    DS