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MS Settlement: Six States (And Samba) Say "Stop!"
Masem writes "The BBC is reporting that because 6 states have refused to agree to the settlement between Microsoft and the DOJ, Microsoft is conceeding that a settlement adjustment will not be possible, opening the door for Judge Kollar-Kotelly to begin rapid remedy hearings. There is a slim chance that negotiations might happen before the end of business today (Tuesday) that will allow the settlement to go after several refinements over the last few nights, but few expect any success. While Judge Kollar-Kotelly is promising to resolve the issue as fast as possible, legal experts are projecting a drawn out battle, with the additional time no longer on Microsoft's side. No word on which states were on which side, beyond MA being very much against the settlement and IL being for it." Besides the states, the Samba team has its own objections, below.
Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team have posted a brief analysis of what the current settlement proposal would mean to that project. (Thanks, jdfox.) Considering that Samba is one of the most important links between open and closed software, it's worth mulling over.
Fox News
CNN
This an interesting quote from TheStreet.com
"Under the 1974 Tunney Act, designed to make sure settlements with the government are in the public interest, a proposed settlement must be published in the Federal Register and undergo a 60-day public comment period before gaining approval. At the end of that period, the government has 30 days to respond to those comments. The court then determines whether the settlement is indeed in the public interest."
So the community needs to get organized and be prepared to speak to the settlement and why it is or isn't in the public interest.
MarkX
The San Jose Mercury reported this morning that California has indicated that it would reject the proposed settlement as well.
[place clever signature here]
Remember in high school, when they explained the concept of States Rights and how the states were reserved certain rights and the Feds others? It always got me how many dull things these addressed - water rights, highway funding, etc. The only thing I could recall where it intersected in really relevant issues was Civil Rights back in the '60s (and then, several of the states were wearing the Black Hats).
So, it's kind of neat to see Federalism jump back, with individual states acting as a check on the authority of the Federal govt (at least in areas where their rights and responsibilities overlap). Regardless of which way you think the rulings should go, it's kind of cool to see this somewhat bizarre feature of our government in action.
Man, it kind of makes me wish I had an EMAIL of my old Civics teacher...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
There's also a rather interesting like here at The Register. It discusses the good and the bad of the proposed DOJ settlement.
Some penalties I'd like to see:
1. Require open standards. No more proprietary protocols or file formats. All have to be published by the time Microsoft releases a product to the public.
2. Divest MSN, and X-Box divisions.
3. A fine of no less than 25% of Microsoft's yearly income. Not profit, income.
The fine you quote will not happen. Besides the litigation of who gets that money would be disgusting.
That said, I like penalty your 1 alot. Like it or not, M$ has shown that standards are important to communication. In addition to your penalty 2, I would like to see M$ create separate application divisions for OS's including Linux, MacOS, Windows and any others that are financially doable. The Mac division is already somewhat separate, and they create some nice stuff even if some features are crippled by M$ corporate. The version for OSX is looking quite nice and should do well. Microsoft knows that their Mac division is quite profitable and this is one of the reasons they have been given quite a bit of room. (so I've been told)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
According to this article, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and New York. have all indicated their approval and West Virginia has joined up with MA in holding off. Doesn't mention the other 4 states though.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Now would be a good time for the attorney generals to hear from the technologically literate. Do you have an opinion on the Microsoft case? Let them know! Here are their names and numbers:
California: Bill Lockyer, 800-952-5225
Connecticut: Richard Blumenthal, 860-808-5318
District of Columbia: Robert Rigsby, 202-727-6248
Florida: Bob Butterworth, 850-487-1963
Illinois: Jim Ryan, 217-782-1090
Iowa: Tom Miller, 515-281-5164
Kansas: Carla J. Stovall, 785-296-2215
Kentucky: A. B. Chandler III, 502-696-5300
Louisiana: Richard Ieyoub, 225-342-7876
Maryland: J. Joseph Curran, Jr., 410-576-6300
Massachusetts: Tom Reilly, 617-727-2200
Michigan: Jennifer M. Granholm, 517-373-1110
Minnesota: Mike Hatch, 651-296-3353
New York: Eliot Spitzer, 518-474-7330 or 716-853-8400 or 212-416-8000
North Carolina: Roy Cooper, 919-716-6400
Ohio: Betty D. Montgomery, 614-466-4320
Utah: Mark Shurtleff, 801-538-1326
West Virginia: Darrell V. McGraw, Jr., 304-558-2021
Wisconsin: James E. Dyle, 608-266-1221
...Please consider these and other criticisms of the settlement proposal, and avoid if possible yet another weak ending to a Microsoft antitrust case. Better to send this unchastened monopoly juggernaut a sterner message.
5 01.html
http://www.cptech.org/at/ms/rnjl2kollarkotellynov
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Yahoo just announced that 3 more states have surrendered (see here). The list of suspected early surrenderers was on Yahoo earlier as: New York (confirmed), Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, North Carolina and Kentucky. Since then 3 added ones have joined... :-(...
reverse engineering is allowable if it's done with the goal of achieving interoperability
According to the letter of the DMCA, it's only allowable if it's being done by a registered educational institution.
The Samba team is clearly an interested party to this case so their brief might actually be considered.
sPh
Here it is:
Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell: Analysis of the MS Settlement and What It Means for Samba. Nov 6, 2001, 08
(Other stories by Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell)
The Samba Team would welcome Microsoft documenting its proprietary server protocols. Unfortunately this isn't what the settlement stipulates. The settlement states
Sounds good for Samba, doesn't it. However, in the "Definition of terms" section it states
If Microsoft is allowed to be the interpreter of this document, then it could be interpreted in a very broad sense to explicitly exclude the SMB/CIFS protocol and all of the Microsoft RPC calls needed by any SMB/CIFS server to adequately interoperate with Windows 2000. They would claim that these protocols are used by Windows 2000 server for remote administration and as such would not be required to be disclosed. In that case, this settlement would not help interoperability with Microsoft file serving one bit, as it would be explicitly excluded.
We would hope that a more reasonable interpretation would allow Microsoft to ensure the security of its products, whilst still being forced to fully disclose the fundamental protocols that are needed to create interoperable products.
The holes in this document are large enough for any competent lawyer to drive several large trucks through. I assume the DoJ lawyers didn't get any technical advice on this settlement as the exceptions are cleverly worded to allow Microsoft to attempt to evade any restrictions in previous parts of the document.
Microsoft has very competent lawyers, as this weakly worded settlement by the DoJ shows. It is to be hoped the the European Union investigators are not so easily fooled as the USA.
A secondary problem is the definition of "Reasonable and non-Discriminatory" (RAND) licensing terms. We have already seen how such a term could damage the open implementation of the protocols of the Internet. If applied in the same way here, Open Source/Free Software products would be explicitly excluded.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Andrew Tridgell,
Samba Team.
Nice comment, but there are a few points I feel I must correct.
1.) The only reason Sun is into "pluralism" is out of necessity. They would go under if they didn't. Granted, Solaris is a stellar OS, but Sun the corporation is easily as evil, or even moreso, than Microsoft. Right now, they're just the underdog, so it's an "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation.
Ask anyone administering a large solaris infrastructure what they think of Sun's openness. Sun also has some bone to pick with Microsoft, so they'll take cheap shots any chance they can get.
2.) I think Microsoft does believe in empowering the user. They may be a bit off-course, though. I still believe Microsoft's development tools are second-to-none, and their API documentation, for the most part is excellent.
What Xbox has to do with this is Microsoft using money, mindshare, and connections from their monopoly to attempt to illegally extend their monopoly into the gaming console area, which is exactly what the whole case is about.
.Net, the Xbox, and copy protection right now, though; those are all cases of Microsoft using their monopoly in Office and Windows to leverage into new spaces.
Everyone seems to overlook, again and again, that monopolies aren't illegal, it's only when monopolies are leveraged to create new monopolies that they become illegal.
Thus, tying IE to Windows wasn't illegal per se, except that it leveraged one monopoly to create another, which is illegal.
I'm a heckuva lot more worried about
Not to mention using those monopolies to leverage each other...
Darn straight and we should all email/fax letters to our state A.G., State Resprentatives, and Senators.
Get email to the DOJ too:
mailto: Microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Californians:
mailto: piu@doj.ca.gov
Microsoft doesn't allow consumers to vote with their wallets so we need to get the word out using other means. Pro/Con, get the word out.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Reply to 1) In the spirit it was offered, this was not to say "praise be to Sun and IBM," but rather to say "Even these guys, prime targets of Big Business, at least 'get it' on the need for pluralism."
Reply to 2) Sure you get tools... if you pay. Even the purchase of Office gives you VBA... for the pricetag of OFFICE.
I'll take the APIs of Linux over Windows any day. I like universal tools and pipe-ability, where Windows continues to attempt crushing the notion of a console.
Nothing irks me more about APIs than Microsoft's peculiar notion of the 'device metaphor.' In OpenGL, you draw a triangle just as you'd expect... feed it three points. In DirectX, it's make a vertex buffer, connect a feedback call, pipe the points into the vertex buffer, initiate a buffer execute, yadda yadda...
Real Operating systems give you the basics of at least writing scripts. (In Linux, a surprising number of 'user-friendly apps' are nothing more than shell or PERL scripts.) When Bill Gates said goodbye to the command prompt, he said goodbye to a lot of programmers.
CNN is reporting that "Iowa, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and West Virginia - as well as Washington, D.C." are pursuing further litigation.
The latest version of the BCC story says talks between MS and the states continue, even though the deadline set by the judge has passed. Latest count given is 9 states for, 9 against.
I hear about it all the time.
One of the things I hear about is that IBM was investigated for antitrust, and that this put a damper on their anticompetitive behavior, and *that's* how the market was righted.
Silly libertarians, always rewriting history.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
A little off the topic but has anyone else tried to get to MSN Music using a non-IE browser lately? You will be told to go get IE.
Even though MS is opeing up MSN.com on the face-front, there are still portions of the site that are locked out to non-IE browsers.
I believe this is called an amicus brief, or friend of the court brief. They are quite common in cases of wide interest.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I've heard that the result of the anti-trust probe into IBM and the resulting litigation resulted in IBM being under serious restrictions regarding just what they could release on the market, in addition to how they could continue to practice business. I've heard that they were/are actually prevented from delivering some of their technologies and products.
Microsoft is trying to avoid the exact same thing. Currently, IBM is an amazing source of research and technology, but they're not so amazing anymore when it comes to their influence on the industry and financial status.
The parties intending to continue legal action include nine states - Iowa, Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and West Virginia - as well as Washington, D.C.
_ ru ling/
http://money.cnn.com/2001/11/06/technology/msft
The Microsoft situation is very similar to the "robber barons" of yesteryear. Both examples show monopolies rising in a brand new industry, and both demonstrated the need for open standards.
All the railroad companies used different rail gauges so that a city couldn't switch railroads even if they wanted to. The funny thing is, the emergence of open rail standards occured WITHOUT government intervention. The customers were pissed royal that they had to switch trains every ten miles because the rail gauges changed. Make a standard gauge and suddenly the monopolies no longer had a lock on the towns. But it wasn't the government that instituted the standard gauge, it was the industry itself.
But there is one crucial difference between the railroad barons and Microsoft. The railroads owned the infrastructure (the tracks). Microsoft doesn't own any infrastructure. They are more akin to a steam engine business providing the trains that run on the rails. Today I can surf the web, read my email, play my games, and a whole bunch other stuff without once having to ask Microsoft for permission or having to use any of their products. Such was not the case 150 years ago with the railroads.
p.s. If your into conspiracy theories, evidence suggests that the railroad monopolies were already hitting the hard times when the feds stepped in, and that it was the railroad barons that got the anti-trust stuff moving so that they could *keep* their monopolies. Looking at the rail industry today, it seems that they were successful.
p.p.s. How come nobody for breaking up Microsoft is for breaking up the local telcos and cablecos? They are much more akin to the railroad barons, since they DO own the infrastructure.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
has anbody noticed the Microsoft .NET Passport DOES NOT SUPPORT Netscape 6.1? But surely they're not still trying to monopolize the browser market, are they?
Uhm, unless the document isn't stored on your own hard-disk/floppy/whatever, this will usually work:
strings < some.doc | less
You see, all that stuff you talk about is just GUI fluff ;-)