Comment Re:How are HTML5, CSS and JS not proprietary? (Score 2) 95
That's only true if you want to run controls that were written for windows. If COM and OLE were supported on other platforms, then presumably people would write COM/OLE components for those platforms, and those would run fine on their platforms.
Back in the 90s, there were some other systems that supported COM/OLE (IBM and Sun Microsystems for example.)
CORBA is practically the same thing, and is available everywhere. The problem with CORBA is that is a typical design-by-committee mess. It ended up way too complicated, even compared to COM/OLE.
The problem that COM and CORBA both solved (or at least tried to solve) still exists, with no commonly accepted solution. The "standard" binary interface between components on every single platform is the C function. That's the only code that can be called directly from (almost) every language without creating "bindings". Not even C++ code from different compilers can be mixed in the same program, because C++ doesn't define the binary interface.
Something like COM or CORBA is still needed. If we had it, and it was universally available, you could expose more than just C functions at the binary level (without bindings or without recompiling everything).
Because of all the years of bad press, nobody is going to believe it, but COM was and is a good idea, and it's completely unencumbered by patents or licensing issues. Being able to combine components written in different languages (or even just different C++ compilers) is a good thing, and is too complicated without something like COM.