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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On Wed, 3 Jul 1996, Todd Needham [Microsoft] wrote:

> A Shelton  wrote in article
> <4r3hjo$m2k@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>...
> > NT source code is *Completely* non-portable since there are no alternate
> vendors. 
> 
> Since when does # of vendors have any relationship to source portability?

Actually, it helps keeep everybody honest.  Most Government contracts
require alternate sourcing.  This is why contracts must meet Federal
Information Processing Standards.  The result is that I don't have to
worrry about the initial vendor suddenly dissappearing, or "enhancing" the
code to the point of making it backward incompatible with the installed
user base.  Remember when the Word Upgrade came out?  Users who upgraded
would close the document and Word would save the document in a format that
was incompatibile with earlier versions.  Suddently 100 users HAD to
upgrade, and the company got stuck with a $200,000 bill.

I get a bit nervous about putting all of my intellectual property rights
into the care and trust of a company that doesn't even obey it's own
rules.

	Rex Ballard




From rballard@cnj.digex.net Fri Jul  5 18:46:28 1996
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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy