Reddit reviews Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk)
We found 3 Reddit comments about Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Of course certain Microsoft applications did deliberate use APIs that weren't publicly documented to achieve things there were otherwise impossible.
Any and every bad developer was able to use the same publicly undocumented APIs. The furver started after they were publicly undocumented in Windows Undocumented.
Just because a bad developer is working at Microsoft when he wrongly uses an undocumented API doesn't make it Microsoft's fault.
Copyright law harms you no matter what you do.
Why did Microsoft get a monopoly on desktop computers? Because "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". By being able to have a copyright on binary code, Microsoft was able to hide secret functions in its operating systems that allowed them to create much more efficient office software.
I think that, different from patents, copyrights should exist for software, but only on the source code. Compiled executable code should be protected only as works derived from the source code. The only way a binary file should be protected is if the author could prove it was obtained from compiling published source code.
Most of the value will be for companies trying to make software that will compete against Microsoft products.
Remember the sentence "DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run"? It has always been a Microsoft speciality, make a public API for the OS that's less efficient than the secret API they use in their own products.
That's why books like this have to be published.