hedwards: IMHO they tend to be unreasonably lenient about poor coding practices. Sometimes it's hard to imagine that it's not an incredibly shrewd way of harming the competition like with their lax DSDT validation for ACPI.
nuuikle: Is that MSFT's responsibility? I had the impression it was lax implementation by the industry as a whole.
The problem is that they were using a non-standard implementation and providing workarounds for common faults. At that time the standard implementation that people were supposed to be using was from Intel, IIRC they were the driving force behind ACPI at that time, but anyways, the Intel tools were available to everybody to validate against.
Unfortunately, you'd come into cases where you couldn't boot anything other than Windows because the parties writing the DSDTs were validating against the slightly non-standard MS implementation rather than the freely available Intel implementation that the opensource developers had access to.
Suggesting that it's an antitrust violation or purposeful sabotage of the opensource community is probably a stretch. But by the same token it's inline with the MS embrace, extend and extinguish protocol that caused so much trouble in the '90s.
