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<TITLE>RE: MS Office for Linux? </TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>> From: John Chambers [<A HREF="mailto:jc@trillian.mit.edu">mailto:jc@trillian.mit.edu</A>]</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> Heh. Maybe you should ask a few lawyers. The is a great deal of legal</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> precedent for governments doing this sort of regulation. For example,</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> if I buy a package of light bulbs with the usual sorts of screw base</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> that you find here in the USA, I can screw it into an outlet in my</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> house and, aside from an occasional "sample defect", it will work.</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>> This requires all sorts of standardization...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Yes, the government can *legislate* all sorts of standardization.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>However, it seems unlikely that the *judicial arm* of the government, in the course of enforcing an antitrust law, would order a software company to port a particular software package to a particular operating system -- especially since this software package and operating system were only tangentially involved in the original antitrust lawsuit.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>--seth</FONT>
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