Fahad Zone

Published first on Technorati

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Microsoft has been ordered by a federal appeals court to stop selling Microsoft Word starting January 11, 2010, and pay $290M to i4i Inc.

The Canadian company sued Microsoft on 2007 for illegally using its technology in Word.  The technology gives Word users an improved way to edit XML.

Starting in January 2010, Microsoft must remove the mentioned feature only from the new versions of Word and Office, which will allow sales of the software to begin again.

This lawsuit adds to the long list of lawsuits against Microsoft since 1994 when they signed a consent decree with the Justice Department, agreeing that its OS licenses will not contain conditions that apply to its other software, up to the Internet Explorer issue between them and the European Commission which have been settled this month, not to mention being sued for the “Bing” name for their search engine.

The amount of lawsuits against Microsoft over the years made me wonder if Microsoft products are the right choice for me.  What if I start using one of their programs or services in a big project, and all of the sudden they remove it or some of its features in the next update due to legal issues? What if removing this specific feature kills my project?

I know these are very long shot scenarios, but worth the attention, don’t you think?