[dijit]

Monopoly can be unintentionally abused, simple things like not providing a compiler in the box or trying to add security can be seen to crush competition (like in secureboot, and the current apple App Store distribution issues)

It also goes without saying that the law trails ethics and morality; not the inverse.

[zepto]

> simple things like not providing a compiler in the box or trying to add security can be seen to crush competition

Neither of these things crush competition in any way.

Security is not illegal, nor is anyone compelled by law to write compilers.

[dijit]

I could not possibly disagree more.

Being unable to use any other operating system on your PC was definitely seen as harming the user, and after lots of battles secureboot is optional on x86 windows PCs (but not arm)- in the same vain we managed to successfully argue that people other than Microsoft should have secureboot keys too, and thus redhat also have secureboot keys.

Not having a compiler though? That’s what put back computer science and education 10 years in the Microsoft era, the barrier to programming was a lot higher than it was prior to the late 90s and only recovered in the late 00s where we saw a resurgence of young people learning programming with the availability of WAMP and later django and rails.

You can thank Microsoft that less and less people each year understood native programming.

Microsoft hid their compiler suites behind complex systems, if they had been included or easy to access this would not be the case. But it was a choice on the side of Microsoft that only determined people really need a compiler anyway.

Apple is doing the same thing. But Apple at least ships with some interpreters of some languages like python or ruby. Windows didn’t even have those. Only vbscript (which is not a general purpose language)

[zepto]

Who was shipping a free compiler in the Microsoft era?