Public Comment Period In MS/DOJ Battle

PacketMaster writes: "Somthing that I didn't know, and perhaps many others didn't know is that now this settlement by the federal government and some of the states will go back before the judge and be opened for a 60 day commentary period by the public as required by the Tunney Act (See Sec 5,USC Sec 16). This is a great opportunity for everyone to send in their intelligent and informed opinions on the matter. If some of the major developer groups (i.e. Samba) would put together a well-thought-out and easy-to-read commentary on their concerns, maybe we as a community can affect the process. See the ZDNet article for more information." No forum for public comment is up yet (first, the proposed settlement must be published in the Federal Register), but should be in the near future.

Comments

Central website?

[Manes]

First of all, I really hope the slashdot crowd refrains from silly flames and other immature letters, like some unfortunately have resorted to in the past.

Anyways, are there some sort of comprehensive website that explains in lay-man terms what has happened in this case?

Reading court documents and simular isn't too thrilling, especially when I don't understand half of the legal mumbo-jumbo, and I also find that much of the info that I _can_ read is spread across a zillion websites.

Re:Central website?

[ThePilgrim]

Try this link

Re:Central website?

[Technician]

Be sure the read the full document of the Finding of Fact. Most of it is understandable, clear and not clogged with technobable. It is broken down into individual infractions with examples and an expination. Very convincing good read with lots of facts lined up in a neat row. If you read any John Grisham novels and enjoyed them, you won't have any trouble reading Finding of Facts from front to back. It's like reading the first 15 chapters of a Grisham novel.

Keep up the pressure

[jweatherley]

Remember M$ are still being dragged through the courts in Europe so Europeans ought to send some of those intelligent and informed opinions to their representitives too.

What bugs me with the proposed US 'settlement' is all those opt outs - the register eloquently outlines the many flaws . Once again the the excuse of 3v1l h4X0rs is used to allow M$ to hide 'security sensitive' information - who decides what's sensitive? Why M$ of course!

Davenet on MS

[serps]

Dave Winer (co-creator of SOAP among other things, so he has dealt and continues to deal with MS on the interoperability front) has a few things to say about what Microsoft stands to gain, what it stood to lose from the settlement but didn't, and a (plausible, and hopefully incorrect) prediction of what the Government stands to gain from Microsoft controlling the greater Internet. (think Hailstorm/XP plus Carnivore)

I think Dave would be a good person to provide suitably knowledgable 'public comment' for this bill. Read his blog; he's a decent guy to boot :)

Of course you can participate..

[CptnHarlock]

Noone can tell by your emailaddress where you live. You can also make up snail addresses if you need them.. When I was going to register for yahoo mail it needed my Zip code, of course it checked if it was a valid US zipcode so I used the one and only worldwide well known US zip code: Beverly Hills 902101... :) ... You can also make your opinions known to some American friend and they can put them forward for you... The choices are only limited by your imagination.. ;)

Cheers...

Some Points

[Zeinfeld]

1) The nationality of the person making the response is not significant.

Any written comments relating to such proposal and any responses by the United States thereto, shall also be filed with such district court and published by the United States in the Federal Register within such sixty-day period.

2) The act does not actually require responses to be listened to. All that is required is that they be published in the Federal Register.

3) The biggest problem with the government case is the behavior of the judge.

4) The second biggest problem is that the case the DoJ made in the trial is not the one made out on Slashdot.

5) The appeals court reversed substantial parts of Jackson's 'findings of fact'. In particular they rejected the view that they were bound to consider a statement to be a statement of fact and not a conclusion. As a result Jackson's findings of fact mean very little because most of the findings slashdotters are enjoying are conclusatory opinions that would not have been binding on the new judge in the retrial.

Somewhere along the line the DoJ was captured by Sun, Netscape et. al. The legitimate case against the MSFT licensing arrangements was not given anywhere near the attention it deserved in the trial. Instead the DoJ case was largely made on the basis of Netscape's view of the injustices Netscape felt had been done to them.

It is not surprising then that the remedy is not what many on Slashdot would want. The DoJ did not bring a case against MSFT integrating the Web browser APIs deep into the operating system. In fact the DoJ explicitly denied that it was doing so because by doing so it could claim that MSFT was lying when it said it could not remove IE from the O/S. As a result we now have a court rulling that requires the user to be able to remove the IE user interface application but not the dlls it calls. The IE platform is absolutely untouched by the settlement.