Blasted for APIs document

Date: April 1993

Snippet
Erik Stevenson

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From: Dennis Adler To: bradsi; davidcol Subject: FW: Undoc APIs document Date: Monday, April 12, 1993 5:49PM

fyi....

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From: Bill Miller To: Dennis Adler Subject: RE: Undoc APIs document Date: April 12, 1993 12:52PM

thx for the input. Unfortunately, this is a doc that reflects management's view on this entire subject. Jeffpr inherited the project. I plan to kill it. Unless we (billg/mikemap) are willing to acknowledge our "sloppiness", I don't believe that a piece like this helps.

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From Dennis Adler To: Jeff Price Cc: Bill Miller; David Cole Subject: Undoc APIs document Date: Wednesday, April 07, 1993 7:51PM

Short and sweet (or sour). I've read thru most of the materials you sent along, and they are awful! You never address the issues Schulman raised in his mail. You continue to say, "There was no advantage to MS in using these APIs." Get real. You mean to tell me that the Word & Excel teams put in a bunch of API calls that they did not think would help them in a particular area? I hope not!

There is even one case (QCWin) where the "documented" use for the API SetMessageQueue enables QCWin to wait until the app it is debugging has a msg queue in place before sending it messages; this is clearly advantageous. By ignoring the very valid points Schulman has raised, you make a sham of the entire exercise of documentating the APIs now. It comes across as a cover-up, plain and simple. In fact, you are saying that Schulman is either confused or lying. That does not seem to be the case to me.

I gave up reading the whole document, as this tone of denial continues ad nauseum. Why not just document the APIs, preface the document with some HONEST history (yes, we did use undoc'd APIs, yes we now have a policy in place of not doing that -- a policy that was not in place previously, and here is the documentation for these APIs that we have utilized).

Stop trying to pretend that we did not do this to gain a competitive advantage, however slight. If that is not why these programmers used the undoc'd APIs in there code, then give me a plausible explaination for why they did... truthful would be nice too.

The people who read this document ar not stupid, and they would have to be to believe what was written. I think this doc can do as much (or more) harm as good as presently written.

/Dennis

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Comes-1614.pdf

Also see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091125035600938

http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/NovvMS-106-67.pdf