On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 6:28 PM Phil Bouchard via Std-Proposals
<std-proposals@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

On 8/4/21 5:03 PM, Emile Cormier wrote:

It's ironic that you complain about Microsoft embracing and extending standards for their own profit, while you propose to do the same thing by embracing C++ and extending it with the apparent motive of earning profit off of your (pending) patent.

So if you want to judge people I suggest you measure them based on their merit.

Let's recapitulate on Microsoft, a for profit company:

- Visual Basic: embraced and extended already existing BASIC;

- Windows 3.1: embraced and extended Macintosh;

- Microsoft Word: embraced and extended Wordperfect;

- Microsoft Excel: embraced and extended Lotus 1-2-3;

- Internet Explorer: embraced and extended Netscape;

- DirectX: embraced and extended OpenGL;

- Microsoft Teams: embraced and extended Zoom;

OK, this is kind of getting off the subject, but it's *really*
important to note that you're largely misusing the term "embrace and
extend". This is a phrase used to indicate that the party in question
has taken a standard, either de-facto or de-jure, and created a
program that implements that standard along with proprietary
extensions. The fact that it implements the original standard is
*important* here. The whole problem with "embrace and extend" is that
other programs that use the same standard are incompatible with the
proprietary extensions, thus creating incompatible data.

If Direct3D was compatible with OpenGL but added new stuff, it would
be "embrace and extend". But it wasn't; it was a completely different
API that did the same thing. That's called "competition", not "embrace
and extend".

Microsoft Teams does not "implement" Zoom; it's just an application
like Zoom. Internet Explorer did not extend Netscape (you could claim
that it "extended" HTML, but so did Netscape. That's still a common
thing today). Etc.

In your list, the only instances of actual "embrace and extend" are
Word&Excel, since it actually implemented reading WordPerfect/Lotus
files, but had their own features outside of those formats. Even
Visual Basic doesn't really count, since BASIC hadn't been just one
language; it was a set of common tropes among dozens of languages
called "BASIC". Microsoft just put their own spin on it.

It really seems like you just have a personal bugbear about Microsoft
creating competitors to products.

Also... you never *actually* answered the point. Namely, that you're
talking about "embracing" C++ and "extending" it with
patent-proprietary technologies that will ensure that anyone trying to
implement it will only be able to do so if they agree to your terms.
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