[OT] Free software versus software idea patents

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:01:42 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Martin Gregorie
> <martin at address-in-sig.invalid> wrote:
>> I think the only real evil is to set out to make a non-standards-
>> compliant server and then design client software that seeks to lock in
>> people to your server. FWIW I'm not certain that is anything that MS
>> deliberately set out to do.
> 
> IE 6. Why is it still around? Because MS deliberately set out to
> encourage companies to use its features (mainly in intranet
> applications).

IE 6 is still around due to inertia: partly users who haven't upgraded, 
but *mostly* developers who *think* users haven't upgraded, and that IE 6 
is still the standard to code for.

I mean, it's 2011 and I recently came across a site that claimed to only 
support IE and Netscape. Netscape!!!

But if I recall correctly, the proportion of IE users still using IE 6 is 
about 10%, which makes it about 5% of the total browser share. Between 
Google (YouTube, Gmail, etc) and Microsoft dropping support for IE 6, I 
would expect that percentage to rapidly fall.



-- 
Steven