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

Best way to contribute

[overshoot]

We all know that the deal sucks, we all tend to agree that the deal-making process sucks, and most of us think that the deal-makers have serious personal problems.

Don't bother telling the Judge that part.

What we can tell her that the Court might actually listen to is this: how can Microsoft wiggle through loopholes? A consent decree is, when you get down to it, code. Legal rather than computer code, but code nonetheless. Let's apply the famous myriad eyeballs to finding bugs in the code here, and tell the Court in clear terms (as the Samba team have) just how it's broken.

Let's tell the Court what they don't know about this deal.

Re:Best way to contribute

[Surak]

What we can tell her that the Court might actually listen to is this: how can Microsoft wiggle through loopholes? A consent decree is, when you get down to it, code. Legal rather than computer code, but code nonetheless. Let's apply the famous myriad eyeballs to finding bugs in the code here, and tell the Court in clear terms (as the Samba team have) just how it's broken.

Well, that's just it. It won't be a consent decree, it will be a court-imposed penalty. What penalties the court will be allowed to give is unclear to me, but I'm fairly certain that the court-imposed penalties will be much harsher than anything the DOJ and Microsoft and 19 states were going to work out together.

Of course, the ruling itself will be like code, yes. The question is, how good is the judge at writing said code? Because Microsoft, unlike in the case of a consent decree, will have no say in what goes into that penalty whatsoever. But neither will the DOJ or anyone else but the judge really, unless she solicits their opinions on what the penalty should be or unless she adopts the consent decree in draft form, but I don't see either one of those happening.

Also, said ruling won't be available until the judge writes it. Which AFAIK won't be until *after* the 60-day comment period mandated by the Tunney Act.

So we could pick apart the consent decree, but there's no guarantee that's what she'll use and in fact it's probably NOT what she'll use.

But then again, IANAL either. :)

Intelligent and Informed, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why submit it here? Only 1 post in 100 in a Microsoft thread actually offers anything intelligent to say, with the rest merely about the evils of Redmond and the valiance of those who oppose him, with the general gist being that Microsoft sucks for such and such. This is boring to read. Hell, it must be boring to write. Don't any of you ever get tired of writing the same thing as umpteen other drones every single time Microsoft is mentioned? Posting this here is likely to result in a flood of Microsoft attacks based on poor facts or none at all.

Re:Intelligent and Informed, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

the parent post is right however, in saying that slashdot is not the place for intelligent discussion of microsoft. the editors have a blind hatred of microsoft, and the slashbots follow up with their "me too" posts.

Re:Take your chance

[SlamMan]

Sure you can, the Chineese certainly do. But seriously, if you can actually get ahold of a senator on the phone, or in person, they typically will listen to about any view point presented by anyone, be it one of thier constituants or not. Remeber, most politicians are actually good people. They got into it to make the world (or at least some specific part of it) a better place. Nobody goes into civil service for the money.

You wanted intelligent hu... punk?? ;-)

[TheMMaster]

IMHO The point still being missed by all these settlements is that if everything goes according to microsoft's plan, within 2 years they WON'T GIVE A SHIT anymore about weither or not their protocols are open or closed whatever.

What NEEDS to be adressed is the passport system and the .NET myservices. Microsoft is forcing all IU's (Ignorant Users) passports and microsoft is extremely good at forcing stuff upon people.
In the end of it, this will mean that we will simply be forced to use Microsoft products because we need a way to authenticate to microsoft servers. .NET is free, Myservices not.

I Really feel that nobody is adressing this problem anywhere, microsoft will just get small tap on hand again but nothing more...
anyone agree or am I just pouring out pure crap?

Re:Just how much waight ...

[BadDoggie]

Just how much waight would indevidual comments have.

None whatsoever, when coming from people whose spelling and grammar makes Taco look like even parts OED, "Little, Brown Handbook" and "AP Style Guide".

This is not a flame, people. If you can't/don't spell correctly, your comments will be ignored. Welcome to life. It doesn't matter if English isn't your native language -- if you plan to use it in any serious or official capacity, then use it correctly.

Yeah, I follow my own advice. I work a lot harder on anything I write in German, which isn't my native language, but is the language of the country of my residence.

BTW, non-US opinions -- except those from companies doing business in the US and affected directly by the ruling -- will also be ignored. This is a call for opinions from "interested parties": those who do related and affected business and those whom the Justice Department purports to represent (i.e., US citizens).

woof.

OTOH, ThePilgrim did manage to use "affects" (verb) properly, rather than the oft-misused "effects" (noun). Accident? Subtle humo(u)r?

Calls for a 10 questions Interview

[smittyoneeach]

Do an interview, let the /. unwashed mod up the 10 best, or at least 10 lucid, remarks, filter them through the proper suit to correct the general non-command of English you see on here, and submit.

Fantastic oportunity. Where's the central site?

[humanx]

I think this a really great oportunity to show many points of view that DoJ didn't. It's there a web site dedicated to this matter?. If not, there is a posibility that this iniciative gets buried just as another slashdot material.

Hurt the economy my ass

[codepunk]

Yes it would hurt the economy for a few brief moments in time and the a massive explosion of
growth like we have never seen before would occur. This would in turn revive the job market in the tech sector. Spending would be diversified amoung competing companies not the entire IT budget going to on company as it does today.

Re:So if Linux wins, the competition issue is moot

[matty]

First, GPL doesn't allow its technology to be used by vendors who will charge for their wares.

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your meaning, but you do know that it's is perfectly ok to sell GPL'd software, don't you? After all, that's what SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake et al do. You just can't use GPL'd code with non-GPL'd code, nor can you take it 'closed' then sell it.

However, regarding your main premise, which seems to be: Linux (and FS in general) present their own boundary to entry due to the fact that you can get the software for no monetary cost, provided you have internet access. This lack of monetary cost precludes a commercial entity from offering an alternative to Microsoft because if someone is going to switch from MS products, why would they pay when there is a (F)(f)ree alternative?

I think this concept is a valid one, but there is a reason why it is so. I think it goes right back to Microsoft in the first place (and other closed/commercial OS vendors to a much lesser extent). Windows (and now Office and Internet Explorer) have such a high monopoly barrier to entry that the only alternative product that could be created and survive is a Free one (or actually several Free ones, if you include the BSD's).

Please recall that there used to be 'traditional' commercial alternatives to Windows: From CP/M to DR-DOS, to OS/2 (and others I'm sure I'm omitting). They were all run out of business by Microsoft's predatory use of its monopoly (this point can obviously be debated, but the Appeals Court agreed with this premise unanimously, 7-0, and this was supposed to be the one court in all the US that was most likely to come down on Microsoft's side) Since there was no more commercail competition (short of $5-10,000+ Unix boxes), the market came up with an alternative that could not be killed or bought out. IMO, Microsoft created this situation by its behavior.

I believe that markets (or any large group of people) react very similarly to biological organisms. In this case, Microsoft is a bad element (I hesitate to use emotionally charged words like cancer or virus that carry their own ulterior connotations) which is controlling an inordinate portion of the market/organism, so the rest of the organism has been trying to take it down a notch or two. Finally, the only choice seems to be to "cut off their air supply" by attempting to kill their 2 main sources of revenue/sustenance: Windows and Office.

If these forces were to succeed absolutely and kill off Microsoft (highly unlikely and certainly not necessarily a good thing), then the mainstream software components we all use every day (OS, word processor, email, browser, etc.) would be Free, commodity products, and commercial vendors could focus on providing something tangible that actually requires true manufacturing: hardware (this is, of course, the main business of many of MS's competitors: IBM, Sun, Apple)

Summation: I think you're basically right, but the situation was created by Microsoft itself. Linux simply grew out of the situation as it existed. Regardless, there's certainly nothing that can be done about it now. :)

Cheers..............

Re:So if Linux wins, the competition issue is moot

[Kwil]

Equating the anti-competitive forces of MS with the barrier to entry created by Linux is not reasonable.

Does Linux add an extra hurdle? Of course. As does every single other alternative OS. The size of the hurdle depends on the features they offer. One of Linux's features is that it's free. For some, this is an excellent feature. For many, as we see by the current marketplace, this is not as important as ease of use and universality of applications.

A commercial alternative does have several advantages over a free system however. One being that improvements to the system are generally uniform throughout distributions. In Linux, developers make solutions to what they need, which is great, but trying to support these various combinations of solutions, some of which are better done than others, is a nightmare. A second advantage being a central point of reliable contact for problems and support. Companies like Redhat are trying to offer this, but they have to deal with the vagaries of supporting a system they really don't
control. Third, when money is involved there becomes a reason for complaints to be dealt with. If you're not a programmer and you have a problem with obscure function x, you're basically screwed unless some programmer person decides they're going to fix that problem. With a central point of contact, complaints can turn into action based on something other than a programmer's largesse.

These are just some of the reasons I think your statement is false. If Microsoft falls, competitive OS's will be able to arise that compete by including the features Linux does not possess. BeOS was growing for a time, so much so that they managed to convince major OEMs to include them on their systems. Had it not been for Microsoft's anti-competitve practices keeping that OS hidden from the purchasers, it may have become a serious contender in the OS world.