Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

[st33med]

These are the 3 E's that I found in Wikipedia about MS's business practices. And I find them guilty of it now.

Embrace
Microsoft threatened the Linux kernel for violating 235 patents, which they new were false. They promised Linux distros that, if they pay them royalty fees, they will not sue them. So far, Novell, Linspire, and Xandros have fallen to these false claims.

Extend
Microsoft is now giving them CNR's, programs that people can download so that they can use Windows programs and make OOo and MS Office share files better.

Extinguish
In the future, MS will possibly make a new, more advance document system, make better media files, etc., shutting out Linspire, Novell, and Xandros from using these better technologies. Since they willl be relying on these things heavily, they possibly will have to rebuild their package list. Or worse... They might find a workaround for these newer techs, then MS will sue them. They said that Ms granted them freedom from sueing them, but they refuse that ever happened.


I only wish we could have warned them... :(

[floke]

You are assuming that MS could make 'a more advanced' document system.
Than what?
And how?

[st33med]

You are assuming that MS could make 'a more advanced' document system.
Than what?
And how?

Yeah good point. Can they make a better document system>_>?

What I really meant to say is that they make it incompatible with CNR's or OOo.

[crazyjx23]

They will try to make it incompatible. I'm sure it would be reversed engineered easily anyway. They will probably push for "Trusted Computing" so that way there is no way to even view the file regardless on format.

[Sims2789]

Why don't we embrace, extend, and extinguish MS?

Before we start, we need to get rid of a few OpenOffice annoyances, like the weird italics and numbering system. Plus, OpenOffice isn't trademarked in the US (but Open Office is) so we should trademark it if possible.

Embrace: Become compatible with all of MS's formats. At the same time, advertise OO with OEMs as a way of offering lower-cost computers to customers.

Extend: When we have a large enough userbase, we extend our implementations of MS's formats. We patent these extensions, and only license them to developers that use open-source licenses.

Extinguish: Once we have enough marketshare, Microsoft will be forced to either open source MS Office or be incompatible with OO. If they make MS Office compatible, we sue them for patent infringement. If we do a good enough job with patenting they won't be able to reverse engineer it.

We could also encrypt OO files by default for "security" and patent the encryption methods we use. These patents will only be licensed only for open-source programs, so MS Office will be unable to read our files.