Adobe's gonna have a lot harder time proving that XPS infringes on its territory, after the Justice Department announced today that Windows Vista and IE7 passed a thorough anti-trust review.
According to the report, Microsoft and the technical committee have been offering a downloadable program that is designed to help Microsoft's competitors in the fields of Web browsers, e-mail and instant-messaging clients, and media players to make their programs "Vista-ready" before the new operating system ships.
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Since the last status report filing in May, government attorneys said they received 25 complaints alleging antitrust concerns about competing middleware but said they concluded that none of those gripes had merit.
I'd like to think that puts the Adobe matter to rest, but I doubt it. My take: if they didn't want Microsoft to make a PDF exporter for Office, they shouldn't have made it a royalty-free standard.
But something tells me that Adobe will press on anyways.
As a side note, the original name of "The Technical Committee" was "The Visually Appealing Committee", but the name was rejected after the lawyers failed to adequately define "appealing".