Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jlgreco 4697 days ago
> WHY?

Well, because apparently there isn't a soul at Microsoft who knows how to read a ToS...

Why do you think Microsoft are resorting to a smear campaign? They don't have a leg to stand on.

1 comments

Just because it's in a ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable or immune from complaint or criticism. I can require in my ToS that everyone who uses my Awesome(C) API to do a headstand on first access, that doesn't make it reasonable.

It's completely unreasonable, to the point of being WTF-worthy, to require the app which accesses the API to be in a certain language.

Seriously. I'm having trouble phrasing how dumb this is. As long as the app can generate the appropriate requests and serve the appropriate data, who cares? What possible legitimate reason does Google have to decide if the app is written in HTML5, Java, INTERCAL, brainfuck, or lolcode? Why provide an API at all if you're going to do platform restrictions?

Microsoft are lucky Google isn't cutting them off entirely. If I were Google, that's what I would do.
At least that would be more defensible than what they're doing now.