Microsoft Corp has shot itself in the anti-trust foot in a big way with the terms of a non-disclosure agreement that developers receiving pre-release copies of Chicago have been asked to sign: the agreement required software companies to prevent any employee working on a product for a competing environment from seeing Chicago, but backed down after WordPerfect Corp complained that it doesn’t want its employees who are working on the OpenDoc interchange standard to be subject to the Chicago restrictions – Microsoft had asked that WordPerfect employees working on OpenDoc to be barred from examining copies of Chicago for three years, and agreed to drop the provision; it said it would also delete if from agreements already signed by Borland International Inc and Lotus Development Corp if they asked it.
