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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (15105)	1/14/2000 12:18:00 AM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

<LOL> Your response to Sam beat mine by 4 minutes. You had an unfair advantage; you use page points. I always seem to finish second to you, Merlin. uf

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (15105)	1/14/2000 12:38:00 AM
From: Sam Johnson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

Mike, Thanks to you and Uncle Frank for the responses - you guys are quick! Thread elder = rapid response time. I think I'm even further from technological savvy then you claim you are - I majored in Psychology , for goodness sake. That passage in the manual about interfaces as opposed to source code is what had me confused. So, to summarize what I think I've learned...an architecture is open if it's developer allows others the information necessary to develop and optimize products to work with it. They can still keep the secret of their widget magic hidden, but reveal just enough to get a value chain formed around them. Which leads me to something else to check out: It sounds like there is more than one way to keep an architecture proprietary. Qualcomm has done it by their patent portfolio. Am I right in assuming that Microsoft did it by not revealing the source code itself? So it isn't a set of patents that keeps someone from coming along and cloning Windows, but it's that they keep their secrets to themselves? It also seems that Microsoft and Intel went different routes. Microsoft revealed only what the value chain needed to know. No one could clone their OS because they didn't reveal enough to allow that to happen. Intel licensed their chip architecture to AMD and others (which I'm interpreting as analagous to Microsoft theoretically licensing their source code to others). It meant more competition, but it grew the market and value chain quickly as a result. Sam