> Google is certainly throwing their weight around these days, which is precisely why Microsoft was hated in the 90s.
Not really. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with "throwing your weight around," as you put it. For example, that's exactly what IBM was doing when they decimated SCO's absurd lawsuit.
Microsoft was hated because they aggressively pushed out competitors in dishonest ways, because they intentionally made it difficult to interoperate with their software through proprietary protocols and file formats, and because they attacked open source.
Some of your questions directly illustrate why "throwing your weight around" can be a good thing. Did Sun/Oracle accuse Google of "stealing" Java? Yes, but do you really want to live in a world where people can copyright APIs, thereby giving creators of popular APIs a large amount of control over everyone else? I surely don't (and I say this as someone who has dedicated literally years of my life into designing APIs) but Oracle and Microsoft would like that world.
I don't "expect" Microsoft to give away anything, but the fact that their business model depends on tightly controlling it makes them an inherently less open source-friendly company than Google.
Not really. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with "throwing your weight around," as you put it. For example, that's exactly what IBM was doing when they decimated SCO's absurd lawsuit.
Microsoft was hated because they aggressively pushed out competitors in dishonest ways, because they intentionally made it difficult to interoperate with their software through proprietary protocols and file formats, and because they attacked open source.
Some of your questions directly illustrate why "throwing your weight around" can be a good thing. Did Sun/Oracle accuse Google of "stealing" Java? Yes, but do you really want to live in a world where people can copyright APIs, thereby giving creators of popular APIs a large amount of control over everyone else? I surely don't (and I say this as someone who has dedicated literally years of my life into designing APIs) but Oracle and Microsoft would like that world.
I don't "expect" Microsoft to give away anything, but the fact that their business model depends on tightly controlling it makes them an inherently less open source-friendly company than Google.