Slashdot Mirror
Respond To The Tunney Act
Jeremy White writes "Two nights ago, I was discussing the Microsoft Antitrust trial,
and the comment period required by the Tunney Act, with someone
who cares as deeply about this case as I do. The person
I was talking to had an inside connection that knew the tally
and basic shape of the comments actually being sent in about
this case. I learned that
it's time to stop procrastinating, or Microsoft buys this one."
This is the real link http://www.codeweavers.com/~jwhite/tunney.html. I'm sure the editors will fix this and I'll just labeled as a troll - oh boy...
Wheeeee
Or for a link that works...
- Blah blah blah, missing scientist. Blah blah blah, atomic bomb. -
On Jeremy's site it states that Monday is the deadline -- but no date! I hope it's this upcoming Monday...
The only reference to what the Tunney Act is, and it's a broken link. Try this one instead.
It is funny to see, when 4 out of 5 posts so far comments on the broken link in the story, and 3 of them posts the real one (a toughy to figure out).
:)
Now I am gonna sit around waiting for someone to actually have an opinion about the matter too.
Looking at Dan Kegel's letter the one thing that's striking me about this issue is...
Microsoft is global company causing global problems not just to the development process inside the US but outside it as well - especially as alot of open source projects have a wide range of international contributors, but as things stand only US points of view can be submitted to the courts.
While I agree that as this case is being brought in the US weighting ought to be given to US residents as this affects everyone people outside the US ought to have some scope to feed comments into the process. I know the EU is looking at (or are they still?) bringing its own case against MS but again this only will take account of EU concerns.
For matters of this nature which are truely global a global perspective needs to be presented.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Article here.
Microsoft says that it does not have lobbyists pushing its interests in the pending antitrust case, but that stance probably glosses over the indirect influence its lobbyists have had on the current administration.
Link to US DOJ.
Article by Cringely
Dont forget to send in comments to the US DOJ
--Metrollica
In one of the pages that are linked to, you can read that the deadline is January 28th, 2002.
I sent this email from my Hotmail.com account ;)
How hard was that? It does specifically what Mr. White asks, which is to submit a vote against the current settlement. It took 5 minutes. Heck, it took longer to write this comment than that.
-- Dan
Do it like this.
Open a new topic: Send Your Comments On The M$ Antitrust Trial
Allow the normal Slashdot moderation process to weed out the bullshit.
Deliver all the 3 to 5 comments to the judge "in personam" printed out on paper.
Use the power of this constituency, its literacy, eloquence and intelligence to make a difference.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
A mirror (please, Swedes only ... I don't have a fast link) can be found at http://mupp.malfunction.org/~zaleth/tunney.html
I just recieved one.....
I send you this file to seek your advice.....
settlement.doc
No wonder they are getting a large number of favorable responses.
O,ok this is getting to be an old bit, but it's funny!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have been talking about sending in email for a long time. I kept thinking about it, but I didn't send it till Monday night.
Microsoft is probably paying people to send email in support of them. We need to stand up and fight back. When Lawrence Lessig was interviewed he said that the people on slashdot are politically apathetic. This has to change. This is not that hard to do, now is the time to tell your feelings to the judge or whoever reads those comments. It is just one email. We can't just stay on the side making comments about how much Microsoft sucks. If we do that, and don't participate then we are helping M$. Even if it doesn't change the ruling, it will change what is in the public record. If there are 10,000 times the number of bad as good in that record, then no matter what ruling is made, M$ has had a loss. You have to compete against hundreds of dead emailers, but lets at least try to compete.
If you roll your eyes at this and say, whatever, then you have just decided not to stand up to M$. M$ will be proud of you for taking their side, by opting out.
Tantris
This is a better reference to the Tunney Act.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
and send an anti-Microsoft/DoJ settlement email to the DoJ. You don't have to be articulate or even polite. Numbers count here, sending just "NO to Microsoft" is enough.
And register it will. By law, all public comments submitted must be published in the Federal Register. And the judge in the case will read them, each and every one. Come on, get off your ass! What's two minutes cost for inscribing your opinion in governmental granite for all posterity? Send all those bastardos up in Redmond a real message!
Given the relatively large number of registered users to this site, I'm sure that this story could conceivably affect the net number of comments. I wonder, however, if the effect will actually be in the intended direction of the story's submitter...
Feel free to copy/paste/send:
---
Regarding the Microsoft settlement, I don't believe that the current proposal provides adequate reparations to those injured by Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Hundred, even thousands, of small companies have ceased to exist over the decades because of Microsoft's business practices.
Similar to the settlement against AT&T, Microsoft should become a government regulated Monopoly, until its market share drops to an acceptable level (40%, for example, assuming one of it's competitors is now also at 40%). This must be true for all Microsoft product lines, before regulation is lifted.
Even after being found guilty of being an illegal monopoly, Microsoft's behavior has not changed. Regulation of their behavior, with the threat of severe criminal penalties for failure to comply, is the only remedy that I can see will curtail them. The market must be able to return to a state of competition.
Imagine the damage to the United States if Microsoft were to fail, as Enron failed. The risks of a monopoly are greater than merely the loss of competition.
Thank you for your time.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I'm not from the USA. Would it make a difference if I send them a comment, or would they discard it because I'm not a US citizen?
Lawyers?
I have read over the proposed Microsoft Settlement, and am NOT in favor of
it, in its current state. The settlement does not, in any way, penalize
Microsoft for its past infringements of the law. For many years, OEMs have been under control of this corporation, and simply "formalizing" this law in a document is not enough. Microsoft has been declared guilty of past wrongs, and must now be held accountable in some measure. The current proposed settlement is unacceptable. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
My name
My addr.
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
Does anyone know if comments from non-US citizens are accepted?
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I noticed, in reviewing the reference materials, that under the proposed settlement, Microsoft gets to keep secret (no obligation to publish or document) anything having to do with security. As soon as I saw that, the recent Gates memo "redirecting" corporate efforts made more sense -- Bill's just herding the troops into a safe harbor sanctioned by the settlement, so they will not need to change their basic practices.
(it was intended to strike a conservative note)
Dear Sirs:
I am writing to give my comments on the Microsoft antitrust settlement.
I believe this settlement is counter to the interests of the American public, deleterious to the American economy, and not adequate given the findings of fact in the trial.
Microsoft's anti-competitive practices are counter to the law and spirit of our free-enterprise system. These practices inhibit competition, reduce innovation, and thereby decrease employment and productivity in our nation.
Microsoft's monopolistic practices cause the public to bear increased costs and deny them the products of the innovation which would otherwise be stimulated through competition.
The finding of fact which confirmed that Microsoft is a monopoly requires strict measures which address not only the practices they have engaged in in the past, but which also prevent them from engaging in other monopolistic practices in the future.
It is my belief that a very strong set of strictures must be placed on convicted monopolists to insure that they are unable to continue their illegal activities. I do not think that the proposed settlement is strong enough to serve this function.
Imagine if the criminal law was like this: imagine if you were paralyzed realizing anything you did good could end up causing you to be sentenced to jail.
Were you worried about writing this sentence too well? Or were you simply reading Ayn Rand during English class, instead of paying attention?
This happened last time when the government requested comments on patents. Slashdot posted it and how many responses were there? Something like 5. I think there are more than 5 slashdot readers. Here is what I sent them below, at least cut and paste it or someone elses to show you have a vote against Microsoft:
----
The current proposal for the Microsoft settlement will not prevent Microsoft from staying a monopoly in the computer industry. Microsoft employees are spreading this around as "..a victory over the government." If the government shows they are incapable or unwilling to stop Microsofts monopoly over the software industry, who else is there to stand in Microsofts way?
Since the trial has started Microsofts grip on ISP's and hardware vendors has slowly loosend up for fear of how it would be represented in the case against them. Once Microsoft accepts the current settlement they will go back to their previous methods of forcing the industry to accept their software and force out competitors, but it is not their previous methods the software industry is only worried about. By recieving the current settlement this will show the industry that even the government and it's laws cannot stop Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft will be able to expand their practices beyond strict EULA's, enforcing proprietary "standards" and harrassing/buying out small companies. They will be able to stretch more laws, find more loopholes and choose more "un-ethical" business means knowing that the most powerful system that could have stopped them was not powerful enough.
Once again I say that the DOJ and US government should be putting a stop to Microsofts monopoly. By forcing them to release their file formats, source code, protocols or something similar that will allow other companies to compete with them. But the current settlement simply shows that the government no longer has the power to enforce the laws that control our capitalist country.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Yet another letter...
I am against the proposed final judgment in US vs. Microsoft. I feel the damage Microsoft has done to the software and OS marketplace is incalculable, and the proposed settlement does little to correct it. I don't feel the settlement levels the playing field for competing operating systems or office software, and would like to see a much stronger penalty imposed. The proposed settlement does not sufficiently relieve Microsoft of the ability to leverage hardware and computer manufacturers unfairly against competing products, nor does it adequately open the Windows API to programmers.
<name>
<location>
Why don't you post your comments here, and perhaps some of us U.S. citizens will mail them in on your behalf.
I've already sent an email, and "signed" the petition, but I don't see why I can't submit another email.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You rail on about the injustices of Microsoft, yet when you have an opportunity to do something about it, the majority of you sit around with your collective finger up your ass and don't do a damn thing.
You either have the strength of your convictions, or you don't. And the majority of you don't. It's just fun to join in the anti-Microsoft mob.
Does it make sense for me to send an email aswell?
Okay now that I'm gauranteed -2343 Flamebait, the two of you that will see this can hear me out. Windows works pretty good, I work with it daily and would actually prefer OSX but I'm mostly happy. A lot of the junk (stability, strange cruft) that was part of the 9x days was delt with in 2000, XP looks good so far. I can do everything I need to do with 2000 and it NEVER crashes on me. Office fills every need I have and also chuggs along just fine.
The so called predatory business pratices are also crap, I think about expanding my own business along the ideas in the "Halloween Document" all the time. The only reason MS got shafted for it was their market position.
Two things need to change about MS, file formats that are ubiquitous (sp?) need to be opened. I don't like Star Office now, but I see potential, they should be given a chance. Secondly, embrace and extend must die, if they are going to try use standards they should stick with them. With these two changes I think life would be a lot more cheery for all of us. As long as Microsoft's software can be engineered to interoperate I'm happy.
Here's the thing though, how do you do this through the court system? How can a judge say that a format or standard has a big enough share that this needs to be done? Word would qualify but does .wma? Will .wma next year?
I aplaud the effort of the DOJ in this mess, they have done a pretty good job considering the wall of crap that was in their way but I don't think it will amount to much. The last time they tried it was a total failure and I doubt this will ammount to much. There is just no way for a court to affect positive change here that I can see.
Some guy who worked for a company hired by Microsoft called my office and asked to speak to the head of IT. He then said that I would be getting something in the mail if I hadn't already detailing the settlement for Microsoft. He then said this trial is costing taxpayers every day that it continues and it should be stopped. He told me about the public comment period and to go to their site which would submit a comment for me to the DOJ. I told him I would be much happier if Microsoft just crumbled and told him where he could put his propaganda. He said, "But taxpayers are the ones suffering here." and I said "Well Microsoft could just close their doors now and save us all the pain." He hung up. I forgot the name of the website but if I get that info in the mail I will put the info up somewhere. Jerk.
Click Here and Copy + Paste the Text Below
I have read about the proposed settlement, and I am not in favor of it in its current state. Please consider this a vote against the current settlement, as well as a vote to seek a settlement that is more favorable to Microsoft's competitors.
You Name
Your Address
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I just sent this out to friends and business associates. It might be a little late, but I was hoping to raise awareness - maybe you might want to do the same, if you haven't already.
. htm) allows the public to enter statements of record before a Judge renders a final decision in regards to an antitrust case, to ensure that that decision serves the public interest, and to minimize political lobbying and other forms of corruption in the process.
y =c net
y =c net&tag=rltdnws
e nt -levy120301.shtml
m e= article&node=&contentId=A44814-2001Nov5
s t. html
y =c net
, 3_ 916741,00.html
-------------- cut here --------------
The Tunney act (http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/foia/divisionmanual/ch2
The MS Antitrust settlement is currently in this "public opinion" phase, and it will expire on Monday, the 26th of January, 2002. This is your last chance to state an opinion, in favor or against the settlement.
We're all very busy people - but, please consider the importance of this case, as the ruling will control how most of us do business for the foreseeable future. I implore you to take a little time from your hectic schedules, read the facts of the case, and the analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed settlement, and prepare a letter, fax or email to your government, stating your opinion for the public record.
Some contact information:
Send email to: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov, with a subject of "Microsoft Settlement"
Send Faxes to: 202-616-9937 or 202-307-1545
Send Physical mail to:
Renata B. Hesse, Trial Attorney
Suite 1200, Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Here are some resources and articles about the antitrust case, and the remedy phase. I've tried to find articles and sites supporting both sides of the argument, but it's proven difficult to find pro-MS opinions on this matter. The good folks at MSNBC were nice enough to provide one, though.
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-settle.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-275317.html?legac
http://www.msnbc.com/news/650754.asp?cp1=1
http://www.kegel.com/remedy/
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-276837.html?legac
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/comm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagena
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-802195.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft-antitru
http://news.com.com/2009-1001-275324.html?legac
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,
Please, take a little time to do this today - when you get back to it, it may be too late! Also forward this or send a similar mail to anyone you can think of that might have an interest in the outcome of this case.
-------------- cut here --------------
Hope this helps!
Since I can still get 7 more Karma points, I decided to post my letter. Anyone who likes it is free to use parts of it in theirs.
=====
To whomever this concerns,
I understand that I have the ability to comment on the proposed settlement between the Justice Department and Microsoft.
I have been using computers daily since the mid-eighties, when my father brought home an early portable IBM computer. I hope to earn my livelihood by working in the computing industry. Consequently, this issue is centrally relevant to my life.
It is widely believed by those familiar with the case that the proposed settlement is completely inadequate. It will do little to punish Microsoft for it's plainly illegal conduct in the past, and virtually nothing whatsoever to prevent future violations of antitrust law. As a consumer, it infuriates me to be forced to pay for increasingly expensive software that diminishes in quality with each release. I applauded the Clinton administration's investigation of Microsoft. Their case was an effort to protect consumers and promote economic growth by restoring fairness and competition to the computer industry. Now that the DOJ is under new management, it has essentially abandoned it's pursuit of Microsoft, suggesting that the DOJ no longer has any concern for either economic growth or the public good.
The United States is a successful nation because its free markets encourage firms to compete for customers by producing high-quality, low-cost goods. This system needs to be protected from monopolists who gain so much power that they can destroy the competitive nature of the markets in which they participate.
I urge all parties involved to reconsider the proposed settlement. Microsoft deserves more than a slap on the wrist for it's destructive abuse of it's monopoly power. More importantly, American consumers need to be protected against future abuses.
Thank you for your time,
Stephen C. VanDahm
Spartanburg, SC.
Hi,
I am a US Citizen and I feel that the proposed settlement of the Microsoft anti-trust
case will do nothing to change the monopolistic practices of Microsoft.
Any settlement which does not severly restrict Microsoft from simultanious operation
in the OS and Internet, and Applications market will do little to create a fair open
computer software arena in which competitors have a chance.
I recently upgraded a computer from Windows 95 to Windows XP. Windows XP is an
advertising platform for additional generally unrelated Microsoft products and services.
As a specific example the "Passport" advertizement is a carefully worded almost lie.
When you attempt to connect to the internet the XP system prompts you popping up a
window saying that you MUST have a passport to browse the internet. This is untrue and
the average user will be unable to distinguish between the actual wording that says
you MUST have a passport for the use of MICROSOFT services the the wording I used above.
There are numerious other advertising features embeded in XP which present Microsoft
products and services as the necessary for use of the OS or Internet. These presentations are unfair and continue to bolster Microsofts monopolistic position in the software market.
John Roll
Computer Software Engineer
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
john@cfa.harvard.edu
In 1985 they were sitting on their asses collecting revenues for years old technology because of per-processor licensing. They didn't start putting companies out of business until a couple of years later.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Remember M$ "artificial turf" campaigns of a few months ago? MS had thousands of supposedly unbiased folks writing in to persuade lawmakers. They continue this same tactic to the point that letters in favor of the judgment far outnumber those against.
The time is now. Just do it. Carpe diem. Bite the bullet. Get it over with.
I've been recieving weekly urges to comment from MS's FIN lobby...
.
Update: Settlement News; Public can Comment in Antitrust Matter; Class-Actions Suit Returns to Litigation; Deadline Nears for Public Comment on Antitrust Settlement
The Tunney Act review period, during which the Department of Justice seeks public comment on its proposed antitrust settlement with 9 states and Microsoft, closes Monday, January 28. The settlement is not guaranteed until after the review ends and the District Court determines whether the settlement is indeed in the public interest.
The provisions of the agreement are tough, reasonable, fair to all parties involved, and go beyond the findings of Court of Appeals ruling. Still, while consumers overwhelmingly agree that settlement is good for them and the American economy, and overwhelmingly want to move beyond this litigation, nine states have refused to join the settlement. Some, including Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, are urging citizens via email or Web site to submit their comments to the DoJ during the Tunney review period. While Microsoft commends these public officials for involving citizens in a decision that will affect them so profoundly, your voice is more important now than ever before to ensure that the DoJ hears the full spectrum of opinion on this matter. Concerned citizens already have begun submitting their comments about whether the Microsoft case should be settled or further litigated. The Department of Justice will take all public comments and viewpoints and include them in a report for the District Court to consider. Please send your comments directly to the Department of Justice via email or fax no later than January 28th. Whatever your view of the settlement, it is critical that the government hears directly from consumers. Please take action today to ensure your voice is heard. Email: mailto:microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov . In the Subject line of the e-mail, type Microsoft Settlement.
Fax: 1-202-307-1454 or 1-202-616-9937
To find out more about the settlement and the Tunney Act review period, go to the Department of Justice Website at: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-settle.htm
Thanks for taking the time to make a difference.
Class-action Lawsuit Returns to Litigation
Friday, January 11, U.S. District Judge J. Fredrick Motz rejected a settlement that would have resolved more than 100 private class-action lawsuits filed against Microsoft in the wake of the 1999 decision issued by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson during the trial court phase of the federal antitrust lawsuit. Under the proposal?s terms, Microsoft would have given disadvantaged public schools more than $1 billion in funding, software, services and training, and around 1 million Windows licenses for renovated PCs.
Microsoft, who sought input from educators on specific terms of the agreement, will review the court?s opinion and at the same time move forward with the next steps in the litigation while we continue to look for reasonable ways to resolve the matter.
For more information on the class-action lawsuits, go to the Freedom to Innovate Web site at www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate .
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
When Lawrence Lessig answered your questions he said "Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical. You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder." I agree with Lessig and I challenge the Open Source Community leaders to rally the troops; yell from mountain tops. Where are the figureheads of Open Source when we really need them? Sleeping under their desks again, I presume.
I kept meaning to send an e-mail about the Microsoft judgment, but this article was the reminder I needed. I wrote and sent off my e-mail just a few seconds ago. I thought it'd be interesting to see how many people did the same. If you did end your procrastination and send off that e-mail, why not reply to this post ("me too" is fine) so that we can see how many people this really affected?
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
May as well post the comments I wrote back in December.. I never put them up anywhere -- I figured others would have much better comments than me. I'm sure there are, but the style I wrote mine in is different from what I've seen other post. Maybe some folks will get some new ideas..
Anyway, here it is
Should I write a letter or just
buy some Microsoft stock?
[ does this make me a troll? ]
this is not a sig
Hmmm, wonder what would happen if I used Word to type my letter.
"It looks like you are writing a letter to the DOJ.
Would you like help?"
Talk about a conflict of interest... How do I make this thing dissapear?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
.ditto.
the history of the world
Read your own source - this is ESR supporting the Findings of Fact, not the settlement offer.
This better work, heh...
Title: "Please Break Them Up"
To Whom It May Concern,
As a concerned citizen and computer user, I found the verdict in the Microsoft
anti-trust trial reprehensibly one-sided and a disservice to the Cause of Justice in
America.
I urge you to reconsider the verdict. MS having control of the operating system
already gives them a monopoly on the desktop. Allowing them to leverage that
monopoly to give them unfair advantage in each and every (previously) competitive
market on the desktop really stifles innovation, no matter what Bill Gates and Steve
Ballmer say.
I actually believe that, in your zeal to protect and preserve entrenched businesses in
America you are killing the pioneer spirit of entrepreneureal endeavor, and so the
decision to kowtow and cave completely to Judge Penfield's decision, no matter
how emotional he became (I believe he was sorely tested) can only be construed as
political and Machievellian, in these jaded times.
A breakup of the company is the only viable solution. C'mon, Justice Department,
you had the courage to do it in the early 1900's, why can you not see the light now?
Please reconsider your terrible and biased decision in the interests of your true
consitiuency, the American people.
Thank You,
Michael Patrick Kenny and family
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
DoJ will be receiving a glut of multiple emails sent by single individuals, probably from both sides (tho prob more from M$).
Surely "they" know that a single person can have more than one email address. This may affect the weight that such comments have.
I don't know how they are going to address this issue, but to help show them that your comment is from a unique, existing US citizen, include your physical address in your email. It can't hurt.
Better yet, walk out to a blue maildox on the street and mail a letter today to
Renata B. Hesse
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Physcially-mailed voter/citizen comments have a much greater impact than those sent by other, "low effort," methods (e.g. telephone, email, grabbing a rep's collar on the street and raving madly).
I would like to register my objection to the proposed settlement in the United States vs. Microsoft case.
The biggest problem I see is that the settlement is not a structural remedy. Oversight remedies have been tried against Microsoft in the past, and they have coded arounded them, lobbied over them, and legally maneuvered past them every time. The only thing that hasn't been tried yet, and that has a hope of working, is to break them up.
Breaking Microsoft up into OS/Applications/Other divisions wouldn't break their monopoly, but it would make it more difficult for them to use their OS monopoly to create new monopolies in other areas, which they are doing with Windows XP even as I type this.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Dear Judge,
.. terminate the illegal monopoly". the proposed settlement does nothing of the sort. Its attempt to open the "API" (programming interface) of the Windows operating system will merely reinforce the monopoly, not terminate it as the court called for. Also opening the API is not enough: Microsoft plans only to open a mere a subset. Complete and full disclosure of ALL the source-code is the only "opening" that would suffice to terminate the Microsoft monopoly.
The proposed settlement is a bad one; please reject it and have the DoJ and the states go back and draft something that will address the facts found in the District court case.
A unanimous US Court of Appeals agreed that Microsoft had illegally kept its monopoly position by preying on other software developers and computer manufacturers. The bottom line is that Microsoft operated illegally, and any settlement or resolution of this case should make sure the company cannot continue its anticompetitive behavior. Unfortunately the proposed solution does not do this. In many ways, it actually reinforces Microsoft's monopoly, and does nothing to restrain Microsoft from acting illegally again in future markets.
Indeed, Microsoft has already shown they intend to continue to piggyback off their illegally obtained operating system monopoly to crush more markets. As an example, look at the "give away" of millions of dollars of development effort in their Media Player, which is unnecessarily "integrated" into WindowsXP - and is targeted at the RealPlayer product line, in order to crush it, in the same way they did the Netscape Browser. Microsoft, unlike its competitors, simply rolls the development cost into their illegally obtained monopoly operating system, and undercuts the competition unfairly. Yet the proposed settlement does not address preventing this sort of monopolistic behavior at all. Remember, developing a media player, a browser and other software costs money, and Microsoft leverages their monopoly to mask these costs while smashing competition unfairly. The Circuit court in it s 7-0 decision, and lower courts found this "bundling" illegal and monopolistic, yet the settlement does not address this in any sort of meaningful fashion: it allows Microsoft to tightly integrate and bundle its media player, its web browser, and myriad other applications into the Windows Operating System, instead of competing freely against external applications.
Also, the proposed settlement contains no provisions to remedy the unlawful monopolization of the operating system; nothing that will produce competition. Remember that the Circuit court ordered that a remedy must "unfetter the market from anticompetitive conduct... [and]
Finally, the proposed settlement does nothing at all to address the issue of effective remedy along side enforcement. the proposed penalties are ludicrous - an extension of terms that they have already violated is hardly a punishment. Fiduciary penalties must be applied, as well as structural ones. Also, the solutions proposed for "competition" are heavily dependent upon Original Equipment Manufacturers for implementation - the same OEMs who are partners and part of Microsoft's business plans (Such as Dell and Compaq).
In sum, this settlement is wholly inadequate, and should be rejected and the DoJ and the States should be directed to follow the rulings of the Circuit Court and lower courts when crafting a settlement, instead of ignoring the findings of fact and law, and currying favor with an unrepentant lawbreaking monopolist.
Regards,
MyReal Name
1234 Mystreet
Mytown, CO Myzip
(My) Phone-Number
my@email
---
Change is the essential process of all existence.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
The comments required by the tunney act are a big deal. If cogent objections are made, the prosecution has to justify to the judge how the current remedy addresses those objections or the judge can reject the remedy.
m
.Net, and other applications. This opens an important window
y _f iling.pdf
t m# vh
m
y _f iling.pdf
For whatever it's worth, here are the comments I submitted in mid december. There's some good links, as well as some discussion of specific issues with the proposed final remedy.
------------
Dear Sir/Madam,
This letter presents my response to the revised proposed Final Judgement
to resolve the United States' civil antitrust case against Microsoft,
which is currently up for public review. I am a citizen of the united
states, and a resident of Ithaca, NY.
I. Critique of Proposed Final Judgement
The proposed Final Judgement that the US and Microsoft agreed to on
November 6th appears to have the best intentions, and addresses many of
the major issues raised by the case. Unfortunately, I feel that it falls
short of being an effective remedy.
I agree with many of the points in the following critique of the proposed
final judgement, and it is more complete than my own statement will be.
Please review the statement on the antitrustinstitute.org website at:
http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/recent/149.cf
There is much to consider in that document, the points in the proposed
final remedy that I consider most important to review are that:
1) it makes no attempt to address "ill-gotten gains" garnered by
microsoft through its anticompetitive practices. This is a serious
shortcoming because the company's illegal tactics have placed it in a
very advantageous position in the industry. In order to make anticompetitive
behavior unprofitable, there must be substantive punishment that reduces
those gains.
2) the anti-retaliatory clause is insufficient. Section 3.A.1 specifies
that Microsoft shall not retaliate against and OEM for "developing,
distributing, promoting, using, selling, or licensing any software that
competes with Microsoft Platform Software or any product or service that
distributes or promotes any Non-Microsoft Middleware;".
Section 6.L defines Microsoft Platform Software as "(i) a Windows
Operating System Product and/or (ii) a Microsoft Middleware Product."
As I read this clause, it still allows retaliation against OEM's for
developing, distributing, promoting, using, selling, or licensing,
software that competes with other Non-Platform Microsoft Products, such
as Office,
for Microsoft to continue its anticompetitive practices.
3) the api disclosure provision in section 3.D is impossible to enforce.
The only way to ensure that microsoft isn't hiding undocumented API's is
to audit the source code. No body with sufficient manpower has been
appointed to do this. A more appropriate solution would be to require
disclosure to API's AND source to ISVs, IHVs, IAPs, ICPs, and OEMs. They
could then audit suspect code themselves, and present an informed
complaint to the Technical Committee, which could verify and investigate.
4) The only punitive measure specified to discourage Microsoft from
non-compliance is a 2 year extension of the terms of the judgement. If
Microsoft is not complying with the judgement anyway, this is an
extraordinarily ineffective punishment.
II. Support for Plaintiff Litigating States' Remedial Proposals
(December 7, 2001)
The proposal filed by the state on December 7th, 2001 is a much more
complete remedy. The proposal is available on the web at:
http://www.naag.org/features/microsoft/ms-remed
1) It addresses the Microsoft's ill-gotten gains in section H by Open
Sourcing the code to Internet Explorer. The Court's Findings of Fact,
issued on 11/5/99, state that Microsoft successfully used its monopoly
power to increase the market share of Internet Explorer. These findings
of fact can be found on the US Department of Justice webpage at:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.h
By Open Sourcing the code to Internet Explorer, Microsoft is deprived of
the gains associated with their anti-competitive behavior. Additionally,
consumers and the entire computing industry benefit by augmenting the
publically available software infrastructure of the internet.
2) Section E offers a stronger anti-retaliatory clause which covers all
microsoft products, and not just Platform Products.
3) Section C offers an API Disclosure provision that is enforceable. ISV's,
OEM's, etc are provided access to source as well as API documentation.
This will allow them to inspect suspicious code and present well informed
complaints to the Technical Committee.
4) Section O offers excellent punitive measures in the event that
Microsoft does not comply with the Judgement.
Additionally, section L of this document provides excellent protection
against Microsoft co-opting and breaking standards compatibility, as the
findings of fact show it did with the JAVA standard. This topic is not
addressed in the Proposed Final Judgement.
III. General suggestions
Unbundling microsoft middleware/products/services is a superior solution
than requiring alternatives be bundled as well. The latter has the effect
of favoring a small number of well established middleware/products/services
by creating large barriers of entry to new middleware/products/services
that are not included in the OS distribution.
Mandating that Microsoft offer licenses to third-party companies to port
its applications to alternative Operating Systems is a superior solution
than requiring that Microsoft maintain ports of particular products to
particular OS's. Determining whether a port of a given application to a
given platform can be profitable is difficult and should be decided by
the market. Microsoft should not be allowed to lock-out existing markets
by not porting applications and not allowing others to do so. However, is
it not feasible to expect Microsoft to port every application to every
platform. There is not always a demand.
There should be a reward in the event that microsoft makes every effort
in good faith to comply with the judgement. Perhaps make the judgement
applicable for 10 years, with an option to terminate the measures in 5 if
microsoft makes efforts in good faith to comply.
IV. Relevant Links
1) The Proposed Final Judgement (11/6/2001)
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f9400/9495.htm
2) The commentary on the Proposed Final Judgement at antitrustinstitute.org
http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/recent/149.cf
3) Plaintiff Litigating States' Remedial Proposals (12/7/2001)
http://www.naag.org/features/microsoft/ms-remed
V. Closing
Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope an appropriate set of
remedial measures can be decided upon soon.
Mike Lococo
Coordinator Computer Facilities
College of AA&P
Cornell University
Of course there is nothing illegal, and probably not even unethical about such activity: this /. story is an attempt at exactly the same thing. But the MS effort is considerably better funded and organised, and this should be mentioned when the results are summarised.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I am a software engineer in San Diego California. And as such I am very much involved with compuers. What I have recently heard about the Governments choice to settle the Anti trust case against Microsoft is disheartning. I expected that the government would take put the consumers who have been harmed by microsoft first. In the last 5 years I have purchased 8 new computers, each one came with a Microsoft operating system, of those 8 I still use 3, but only 1 is running a Microsoft OS, os as part of their bundling requirements I effectively purchased 8 copies of the same software to run on one computer. I believe that as part of their selltelment Microsoft should be required to follow open standards prevented by law from extending those standards in a closed fassion. For example, the Keberos spec, which they embraced then changed so that their OS' would not interoperate properly with other operating systems such as Solaris and Linux. They should also be required to open their standards for many of their products such as the networking so that SAMBA can be made to work proplerly with windows.
Also I feel that Microsoft should be required to open the source of the operating systems they are no longer supporting, thus allowing anyone to fix the problems that Microsoft will no longer fix, I am not suggesting that they give away their current or previous OS (XP and 2000/ME) but rather that they open windows 95, 98 and NT which they no longer support.
.sigs suck, thus nothing here.
To Whom It May Concern,
I feel that the current settlements proposed to remedy the Microsoft Anti-trust settlement are not going far enough.
What essentially is happening is that they are not even receiving a slap on the wrist for criminal action. For Microsoft to make sugestions to settle the case would not be prudent. Microsoft has shown from its past actions that it cannot be trusted.
Microsoft has ZERO accountability in their gurarantee of software quality. This would not be as great of an issue if their software was not in virtually every home and office desktop. Unfortuntately, their stronghold on computers available for us to purchase at the local store virtually forces us to buy their products. If MS Windows crashes, and am lose irreplacable work worth money, can't Microsoft be liable for these damages? If virtually everybody drove Ford cars with Firestone tires, and those cars crashed at a rate of twice a day, I am sure that Ford and/or Firestone would be held accountable. To make matters worse, it seems as if a substantial part of their revenue comes from the "support" of their products.
I am not asking for Microsoft to open their source code, or anything of the like. None of that will not so us any good. Plenty of good software is already written by non-Microsoft companies and individuals.
I am asking that Microsoft be watched, or even regulated as any large company/utility is. I am asking that there be a Federal Department overseeing single companies with more than 50% market share of any single software arena. This can range from Operating Systems, to Office Productivity suites. If the same company has the greatest market share in more than one category, then they should be watched on both fronts by separate entities.
Please ensure that a settlement not only punishes Microsoft for their anti-competitive behavior, but also prevents FUTURE anti-competitive infractions. Microsoft can be seen rearing a bad seed: they will continually test their limits with authorities, and if their acts go unpunished by those in charge, they will continue to act the way the have, only this time they will push their limits even more.
Please keep in mind, Microsoft did not become #1 because of their "quality software." they became #1 by ignorance, intimdation, and brute force. America's technological future is at stake.
The proposed settlement will not prevent Microsoft from maintaining its monopoly in the computer industry. The findings of fact clearly described a pattern of corporate behavior that evidenced little respect for antitrust law or public sentiment. Though the proposed remedies themselves may be adequate, the enforcement measures will not provide enough incentive for Microsoft to fundamentally alter its behavior. History demonstrates that Microsoft will not alter its behavior unless it is clearly in its competitive interests to do so. The proposed remedies attempt to force Microsoft to change its behavior in order to reduce its power in the market place. This will not succeed.
The only measures that can be effective are those that immediately change the competitive landscape, and then free Microsoft to struggle for power in this new, more level playing field. I agree with the court that a structual remedy is cumbersome and not likely to be effective. A technilogical remedy, with objective, quantifiable measures, is the only remedy that can be both effective and in the public's interest.
The competitive advantages of an operating system monopoly are twofold. First, Microsoft negotiates from a very powerful position with OEMs and ISPs. Second, their application software can be developed with special knowledge of the operating system and (optionally) devivered with the operating system to gain better market penetration. Any remedy must address both of these monopolistic advantages.
While I do not claim to be able to construct a better remedy myself, I think it is clear that any remedy must involve forcing Microsoft to open all of its APIs and file formats. Any time two pieces of MS software communicate out-of-process, the protocol for their communication must be public. Enforcement could come in the form of a court-appointed authority that had the right to demand to see the source code of any MS-published software and compare the documented APIs to the source code. If they were not the same or if the source code is not delivered within a few days, MS should be fined 1/356th of it's profit (this can be calculated after the fact at the end of each quarter) per-day until it satisfies the requirements. This would ensure that the applications of Microsoft's competitors have the same opportunity to succeed on the Windows platform as those of Microsoft itself. Microsoft may maintain its operating systems monopoly, but it will not be able to use to establish new monopolies in other market segments.
Thank you very much for reading and considering my comments.
Regards,
Personal information and summary of industry qualifications
To all those expressing their well thought out and intelligent opinions here:
In this case you are wasting energy and time that could be much better applied by taking that post and putting it into and email and sending it to microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
subject :
Microsoft Settlement
As stated in the linked page, the number makes as much difference as the quality... but i'm sure the esteemed readers of Slashdot can produce both.
So, instead of nuking some poor smoe's personal webpage, lets each drop a note to the DOJ letting them know how we each feel about the settlement.
Flex your clout rather than clout your cynicism.
From Dan Kegel's paraphrase of the proposed final judgment:
1. This agreement lets Microsoft keep secret anything having to do with security or copy protection.
Now Bill's emphasis in making security a part of everything makes sense!
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
I am a citizen of the United States, and a computer professional with 22 years of experience in the field.
. html).
Having read the proposed remedy, I am deeply concerned that it will not address the pattern of misbehavior that Microsoft has been engaged in consistently for the past decade. I also believe that the proposed remedy does not address the concerns of one of the major potential and actual competitors that Microsoft has: the free software/open-source software communities.
While I am not in full agreement with some of the rhetoric, I agree with the first two of the three remedies proposed by the Free Software Foundation (which can be found at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft-antitrust
A summary of these is:
1) Microsoft would be required to publish complete documentation for all programming interfaces and file formats, and would be prohibited from using any interface or file format which is not fully-documented.
2) Microsoft would be required to use any patents in the field of software for defensive purposes only.
In addition to providing a level playing field for *all* Microsoft competitors, the two proposed remedies above would be far less administratively burdensome, involve much less involvement by the government in Microsoft's management, and would go a long way in preserving Microsoft's "freedom to innovate".
Thank you for your consideration of my views in this matter.
Tadas Osmolskis
(my snail-mail address omitted)
This page accidentally left blank
There's a 95 % chance you're going to read through all of these comments and then never get around to writing anything. You know this and I know this. Have more respect for yourself than just sitting there and preaching to the choir.
Oh, and if you're sitting there modding people's posts up and down without having submitted your own opinion, what gives yourlazy ass the right to judge the opinions of someone who actually has an opinion and the motivation to say something meaningful about their opinions to someone who can do something about it?
Yes, I'm going to piss off 95% of the slashdot crowd, including 95% of the moderators, but I've got karma to burn, especially for a good cause. (Say what you will about burning karma on a loosing battle.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
If you know an American citizen, you can always send them a link to Dan Kegel's site and ask them to sign his petition.
Thank you for this moment to be an active citizen, I'll be brief.
Here I sit, working for a Fortune 500 company, using Microsoft's Outlook email client, the number one propagator of modern computer worms, viral or not. I am, by trade, a UNIX Administrator, but am forced to use the very product that causes myself and my company's resources so much energy to clean up after, time and time again.
When, in computer's short history, did we become subservient to the software? I believe it was when it left the hands of researchers, academia, and hobbyist, and left the "courts" of peer review. Not that our company doesn't generate a large portion of its revenues from developing closed source software, but our products are designed by engineers according to procedures of peer review and built upon accepted standards that were borne of the purpose of interoperability between computing efforts. Microsoft, with it's constant onslaught of Embrace and Extend, and/or simply annihilation of its competition via acquisition, and its understandable position of subservience to it's shareholders to ever maximize its shareholder value, expose themselves to no such review.
Indeed, they mustn't, for to do so is to open themselves to litigation by those shareholders. In this capitalistic republic, what investment firm doesn't own a piece of Microsoft, and in that light, what Market participating American? Microsoft is forced to continuously break the law for the purpose of self-preservation unless a stronger motivator ( government regulation ) suppresses the ability of its shareholders to litigate.
The proposed settlement does nothing to curb Microsoft's future actions, certainly does nothing to reprimand past actions, and the proof of both is that even in light of Judge Jackson's findings, and the proposed settlement, it hasn't changed any of it's illegal monopolistic leveraging. That alone should be proof that the proposed settlement is entirely un-enforceable, and in-effectual.
-Dan Garthwaite
Science Applications International Corporation
An Employee Owned Company
Opinions stated in this document do not reflect the opinions of SAIC, it reflects the opinion of one of SAIC's many employee owners.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
My name is John Holmes Dean III and I am a 25 year old computer engineer. I have been programming since I was ten on a wide variety of computers; Apple IIe, Commodore Amiga, Macintoshes and IBM-PCs. The purpose of this letter is to highlight the technical inefficiencies of early Microsoft software and come to the conclusion that given a level playing field, no informed consumer would pick Microsoft's products based on quality. I will then talk about the time that Microsoft took over one hundred dollars from me in exchange for nothing in a move that stifled competition in a education setting (similar to the settlement Microsoft has currently proposed).
Between the years of 1987 and 1996, I was an active user and programmer of Commodore Amigas. The Amiga, which never achieved more than a low single-digit market share, occupies an interesting niche in computer history. Released in 1985 (one year after the ubiquitous Macintosh) to great fanfare, the Amiga was the first true "multimedia" computer. At a time when PCs had EGA (16 colors) and Macintoshes were black & white, the Amiga was capable of 4096 colors on screen. The Amiga had 4 channel 8-bit digital stereo sound when the PC had internal speakers and the Macintosh had 1 channel. The Commodore Amiga shipped with Workbench 1.0 which was a pre-emptive multitasking, graphical user interface operating system.
I spent my teenage years engrossed with my Amiga. Because Workbench could do pre-emptive multitasking (a form of running multiple programs where the operating system gives and takes processor time away from the individual programs), I would commonly use my computer to download files over my modem, listen to digital music files and play games at the same time. During this time, Microsoft's flagship operating system was Windows 3.X. Windows 3.X used a form of multitasking called cooperative multitasking. Each program had the responsibility to relinquish control of the processor to the next program. Cooperative multitasking is the same form of multitasking used on Macintoshes before Mac OS X and is considered an inferior method. It was hard to impossible to get multiple program to run correctly at the same time on early version of windows. When it was possible, the systems requirements were far greater. Windows 95 had a limited form of pre-emptive multitasking that was a mix between pre-emptive and cooperative. Windows uses a single letter for drive names. Windows uses the 8.3 naming convention. Windows, to this day, can not really name a file more than 8 letters long. "Long" file names are stored in the "information" field, which no longer exists, obviously. Windows 3.X involved 3 steps to make a disk or CD-ROM appear on the screen, whereas you only had to stick the disk in on the Amiga/Macintosh to have it appear on the screen. Windows 95 and greater still requires one step because after you insert a floppy or CD-ROM, you must still double-click on 'My Computer' to see it. 'Plug-n-Pray' is a term used to describe Microsoft's 'Plug-n-Play' system. The DOS command line was inferior to Workbench's CLI (Workbench had a command line as well) because you couldn't copy and paste. there was no history and no command pipe. I can nit-pick forever when it comes to Windows, however I will admit that most of Window's problems are related to its MS-DOS ancestry and the many, many shortcomings of the IBM-PC architecture.
My other hobby was being a "troll." In internet terminology, a troll posts highly controversial statements to illicit as much feedback as possible (called "feeding the troll"). The term troll had not yet been invented, but I took great pleasure in posting messages to IBM-PC and Microsoft electronic bulletin board systems explaining how inferior IBM-PCs and Microsoft Windows really was. I would of course receive tens if not hundreds of responses, all of which I would respond to-- beginning debates which would last for years. I convinced no less than a dozen people of the truth, all of which purchased Amigas and some of which are still life-long friends.
To this day, I have not purchased Microsoft software with one exception. When I was earning my Electrical Engineering degree at the University of Texas, Microsoft signed a deal with the University to provide copies of Microsoft software at $5 a CD. The cost to the university was 100 million dollars which was added to each student's "Computer Fees." In that respect, Microsoft stole nearly $25 a semester from me for five semesters so that I could have the honor of buying Microsoft software for $5 a CD. I hated and despised this move by Microsoft because Microsoft knew that this was the only way to get a college student like me to pay for their software in the first place. Furthermore, because students could get Microsoft Visual Studio for $25 (5 CDs) all programming classes began using Visual Studio because other compilers such as Borland and Metrowerks (where I can currently employed) could no longer compete, even with student pricing. I watched the programming classes at UT go from Metrowerks only to Visual Studio only in the course of two years.
Microsoft's settlement will allow Microsoft to achieve the same goal in the secondary and high school education market. By giving out Microsoft software for free, students will learn and become accustomed to Microsoft software and not made aware of the alternatives. The proposed Microsoft settlement amounts to nothing more than an exclusive advertisement contract between education and Microsoft.
In conclusion, I have personally seen the negative effects of Microsoft and IBM-PCs on the computer market. Microsoft took ten years to produce a product that (almost) met the capabilities of Workbench. Furthermore, Microsoft signed a deal that forced me to give them money just to continue my education. I now work for a Microsoft competitor where I will do my part to bring the giant down. I hope the Department of Justice does theirs.
John Holmes Dean III
That's not what I meant.
The responses of "Put your money where your mouth is." are aboslutely true, so here's my contribution. Even if the DoJ remedy is implemented, I can at least say I tried.
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is Scott Ricketts, I am a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force, now a civilian, and I would like to comment on the ongoing proceedings in the United States vs. Microsoft remedy phase now underway.
I would like to begin, by saying that I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems Technology, I have been a computer user since 1982, and a personal computer enthusiast since 1992. I am currently employed as computer professional, and the majority of my work involves using and designing programs for use on Microsoft operating systems and development platforms.
I would first like to comment on, what I believe, the good that Microsoft has done for the personal computing industry. Microsoft has successfully created standard Application Programming Interfaces that have allows software and hardware makers alike to create devices and programs that can easily and successfully interface with devices created by other programmers and designers without ever seeing or touching the other person's work. I feel this standardization is what helped the personal computing industry become the giant economic and social force that it is today.
However, in creating these standards, I believe that Microsoft has overreached the bounds of common decency and abused the defacto standards they helped create. Previously, the United States settled with Microsoft in regards to their practice of Original Equipment Manufacturer licensing fees and contracts and the bundling of Internet browsing software designed to increase the market share and adoption of Microsoft proprietary technology. This was to prevent what the United States government saw as Microsoft's abusing of its monopoly among personal computer operating systems and productivity software.
The years since that settlement have seen Microsoft grow in its demands towards Original Equipment Manufacturer and the recent exclusion of non-Microsoft Internet browsers from Microsoft websites. In my opinion, this does not reflect the behavior of a company that understands its duty to not abuse its position as a monopoly.
In reading both proposed settlements from the Department of Justice and the remaining states, I feel that while neither goes to the lengths that I would recommend, the states' proposal goes much father in the right direction in reaching a state whereby Microsoft's position cannot be leveraged against any potential competitors again.
The Department of Justice settlement has, to my mind, a major flaw that prevents it from being considered as an acceptable remedy. Microsoft has shown, by its conduct regarding the previous settlement, and its behavior that was upheld by the appeals court which branded Microsoft an illegal monopoly, that it will, whenever possible, circumvent rules, laws, and any barriers that prevent it from controlling its areas of interest. There are no provisions for actually punishing past or future infractions of the law by Microsoft. If Microsoft continues to abuse its position as an illegal monopoly, the Justice Department's remedy merely lengthens the term of surveillance. The states' settlement, however, provides a very exacting and appropriate punishment: disclosure of computer source code for the offending program. This would be an extremely painful measure for Microsoft, as they view their copyrighted and closely guarded computer source code as their crown jewels: very simply this is how they generate revenue. If that revenue stream is blocked, or they are forced to reveal how their programs work, that opens a new area for competition.
Microsoft has shown repeated contempt for legal agreements, hiring armies of legal minds to comb over documents trying to find potential weak areas. In 1996, when Netscape Navigator was the number one Internet browser, Microsoft signed a licensing agreement with a company called Spyglass. In exchange for a small sum of money upfront and a portion of each sale, Microsoft would receive the computer source code for Spyglass' Internet browser. This would allow Microsoft to quickly get a functional and full-featured browser into the marketplace without a lengthy development delay. However, the anticipated revenue stream Spyglass expected never arrived. Why? Because Microsoft chose not to sell their Internet browser, they gave it away for free. This allowed them to not pay further royalties to Spyglass, achieve quick market penetration for their product, which they could then use to leverage their proprietary technologies (such as ActiveX) into defacto standards.
This deal, I think, creates a very compelling picture of Microsoft's corporate character. In an interview regarding past dealings with Utah-based software company Novell, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer smugly commented "They made a mistake, they trusted us." I am writing this letter in the hopes that my government does not make the same mistake that Novell did. Any settlement must contain explicit, detailed language that leaves no room for ambiguity, and exacting, painful punishment for future and past infractions.
Thank you for time.
Scott RickettsMy address
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
This was linked to in a story a while back. I'm pulling from it for my letter.
Nader
LAMP hosting on Debian, SSH, no bandwidth cap, PayPal accepted - http://secondbrainhosting.com/
I write to express my dissatisfaction with the Proposed Final Judgment (PFJ) for USA vs. Microsoft. While time limitations prevent me from conducting an exhaustive review of all the aspects of the provisions of the Final Judgment that I find to fail the public interest, allow me to focus on two particular issues that are of crucial importance:
1) The exclusion of Microsoft's handheld version of Windows (i.e. Windows CE and variants, Windows for Automotive, Windows NT Embedded, and Windows XP Embedded from the definition of "Windows Operating System Product" delineated in Section VI, Item U of the PFJ;
2) Provisions of Section III, Item J which give Microsoft broad discretion on determining which parties are eligible to receive API, Documentation or Communications Protocol information.
1) Handheld and embedded operating systems
I have been working as a user of handheld devices for almost ten years and have been an applications developer for three of those ten. It has been very clear to me that portable devices will be a fundamental domain of computing technology, perhaps even replacing the desktop computer as a central unit of processing, in the near term. While there are various players in the handheld and mobile marketplace, Microsoft is a competitor that has historically used its weight to stifle innovation in this marketplace until it was ready to embrace it.
In terms of its APIs, the embedded versions of Microsoft's operating systems are modeled closely--sometimes even ported directly--on its Win32 API for desktop operating system development. These versions of the operating system, designed to be stored in quickly-accessible RAM or ROM rather than on disk, and with an apparently closer connection to the hardware in which they're operating, are not significantly technically different from the existing desktop Windows technology, save for their portability. Microsoft itself, when advocating for the Embedded version of its operating system, argues that this close tie provides one of the main reasons why developers should adopt its solution:
The versions of the Microsoft OS for handheld and mobile devices, (Windows CE and derivatives including Windows CE for Handheld PC, Windows CE for Palm-size PC, Windows CE for Desktop PC) are tied equally closely in Microsoft's eyes:
Microsoft's own behavior in the handheld and mobile marketplace reflects similar actions to those presented in the Court's Findings of Fact, including concerted action to protect applications barrier to entry by performing ongoing modifications to its handheld data storage methodologies, by modifying established connectivity protocols (including the infrared communications protocols between competitors' handheld devices), and by maintaining its own data transfer protocols closed, thus thwarting the efforts of middleware vendors and non-Windows handheld device manufacturers to provide connectivity solutions that make full use of the capabilities of users' desktop computer hardware to connect with mobile devices.
Because of the rising capabilities and reduction in size of microprocessors, along with the quickly falling cost of flashable (rewritable) ROM and high-capacity RAM, it is very likely indeed that what we call embedded or mobile systems today will come to replace wholly desktop-based solutions for everyday users in the near and mid-range future. Embedded systems will (and do) reside in automobiles, household appliances, communications devices, and just about every other type of device that uses electronics to perform complex functions.
Allowing Microsoft to extend its monopoly into the embedded and mobile marketplace while remaining unfettered by the consequences of its previous anti-competitive behavior in the desktop operating systems marketplace is detrimental to the public interest.
2) Viable Business requirement
This point is much more brief, but equally important. In giving Microsoft the power to determine that a company "meets reasonable, objective standards established by Microsoft for certifying the authenticity and viability of its business" before receiving API and Documentation, or Communication Protocol information, it effectively gives Microsoft the power to exclude open source and free software developers from building systems that are fully interoperable with existing solutions provided by Microsoft, mostly because these developers are not engaging in "viable business". Indeed, many of these companies are not engaged in business at all, but are working through the concepts of sharing and widely disseminating usable code and applications. Powerful and open public goods such as the Internet and Linux grew through this kind of non-business activity. This item effectively shuts out the public interest in interoperability and standards compliance by giving Microsoft the power to define what is authentic and viable. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's rhetoric regarding Linux as a cancer demonstrates their predisposition to exclude open source systems from any and all consideration for interoperability and access:
Aside from Mr. Ballmer's odd reasoning that an operating system for which the source is open and available to anyone is not in the public domain, his reasoning that open source licenses are not commercially viable makes a statement of predisposition that I have no doubt would be used as legally acceptable parameters, under the PFJ, to thwart public efforts at building an interoperable, free operating system.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft will have to atone for its extensive history of anticompetitive behavior. However, it is clear to me, and to those of us in the technology industry who have seen Microsoft as a company uninterested in cooperating, that this PFJ would do little to force that atonement and would do much to provide Microsoft a legal platform from which to continue its anticompetitive behavior.
Sincerely,
***Foucault is watching you..***
To Whom It May Concern,
I would like to express my displeasure with the Microsoft antitrust settlement proposal. I feel that the single biggest issues affecting competition are the facts that 1) Microsoft has an effective monopoly of the "office productivity suite" class of applications, and 2) they make it very difficult for other vendors to interoperate with their product (Microsoft Office). Potential new vendors must support the Office document formats because they are the de facto standard, but they are undocumented, and thus it is almost impossible for any potential new vendors to support them well. As a result, the consumer has little choice but to buy Office, and because it only runs on Windows, he has no choice in operating systems either.
I feel that any effective settlement must include the following conditions:
The effect of these conditions would be to allow other vendors to develop a product competitive to Microsoft Office for the first time in years. This in turn would open the door to competition in many other areas.
Mike Simpson
Read my keyboard review.
In addition, I would add that the pricing for Microsoft's products must be strictly based on volume (to prevent Microsoft from "punishing" vendors who sell competing products) and to make their agreements with resellers public (to prevent secret agreements from damaging the public).
I'm not anti-Microsoft.. I just want to make sure that there is opportunity for competition. Capitalism, to work effectively, requires competition.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Don't forget that the RPFJ allows MS to selectively release info, based on whether MS believes somebody's "business model" is worthwhile. Since MS has made its feelings about Open Source business models well known (through Mr. Mundie and Mr. Allchin), what are the odds that MS will use this loophole to deny information to OSS developers?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I've sent in my comments regarding the antitrust too, but I thought I'd share a little info on what the federales are likely to pay attention to. I've got a relative at Sequoia / King's Canyon Nat'l Park, and they recently had a comment period on prohibiting snowmobiles in the park. This relative was one of the people sifting through the comments, and we talked then about how it was done. While the federal courts may do things differently, the following was the experience I heard about.
My relative said that form letters / chain letters / spam / one sentence responses were all completely set aside and virtually ignored. Despite the link in the story here where the guy says it's the number of complaints that count, it's complete BS. It's content that counts. What the park superintendent and NPS officials were interested in were the original responses of people who'd thought about the situation and expressed their opinion, no matter what that opinion was. They cared not a bit what the content of the response was, only that it seemed to be something someone thought about. Copies of responses, like the cut & paste jobs people are advocating here, were tossed except for one copy because they really represented the writing of only one person.
Then, these functionary-types sift through all these filtered responses, and place them in about a dozen separate stacks, from vehemently against to completely for, and everything in-between. The numbers of responses in each stack was counted, and a "summary report" of what the people in each stack thought was made, and responses the functionaries agreed should be seen copied and forwarded to the big-wigs. The Superintendent and NPS officials then read the summary reports, the selected reports, and the superintendent, since he's actually at the park, came & read a number of the nonselected responses in the stacks & prepared his short report on the people's response to the proposed rule.
I guess the point is that the comments definitely count, but they shouldn't be forms or cut & pastes, and should represent your own feelings on the matter. Think about it -- if all you're willing to do is cut & paste or pass on someone else's words, what credence should you be given?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
It would be nice if you guys stated which version of Netscape you were using. Netscape 6.x really minimizes many of those issues. It has its own set true enough, but it is much more competitive (and embeddible) overall than NS 4.x.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I work for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and when the public is invited to send comments they are merely counted.
In fact, at the Fed, no-one even cares, because the comments won't make a lick of difference.
But hey, it might be different with the DOJ. FWIW, I sent my own comments and I hope like hell it can help to make a difference.
JLucien.
Audere est Facere
Rather than a few words, I kinda submitted a manifesto.... hopefully the DOJ got it, 'cause I sent it from my Hotmail account, and who knows what they're filtering ;)
To whom it may concern,
As a server engineer, I am constantly faced with the undue burden that
Microsoft places on my IT department. According to the terms of their varied
licensing agreements, it is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to
be able to perform my professional duties. Although I am not well versed in
law, I would like to point out some examples of how their anti-competitive
business practices hurt the IT industry, and the population at large:
1) When negotiating with Hardware Vendors, it is often difficult to purchase
a server or desktop running a competing operating system. Although I could
purchase, for example, a high end server from Sun, in many cases it would
make financial sense to purchase a less expensive Intel-based machine with
an alternative OS preinstalled on it, or a "blank" machine which I could
then install upon the OS of my choice. Since MS leverages its monopoly power
against hardware vendors, I usually have to pay for a license of Windows
that I will never use.
2) In cases where it is deemed necessary to utilize a Microsoft operating
system or product (for example Microsoft Exchange), IT professionals, are
forced to also use Microsoft Outlook, which invariably means that they are
also forced to use Microsoft Windows if they choose to use the Intel
platform.
3) As a result of Microsoft's lack of attention to the stability and
security of their products, an inordinate amount of time (therfore money) is
spent patching and repairing their products to minimize downtime and to
recover from catastrophic failures, viruses, and unauthorized entry into
systems that the IT department is ultimately responsible for. While constant
vigilance is required of any IT department regarding the maintenance of any
software or hardware product, Microsoft's monopoly in this arena allows them
the lattitude to be negligent without fear of reprisal from their customers.
4) As a result of Microsoft's monopoly, end users cannot easily mix and
match technologies to suit their particular needs. This is especially
infuriating when one considers that many people are dissatisfied with the
quality of their products and services, but have no choice but to continue
using them, due to the fact that their standards prevent people from taking
their existing work and moving it to another system. Microsoft Office is an
excellent example of this, where I cannot easily use a Word document with a
different word processing package, because much of the work I had already
done would need to be re-created. As a hypothetical situation, consider the
scenario where Ford or General Motors created cars that crashed frequently
or were overly easy to steal due to design faults; they would suffer because
the car buying public would simply switch to a competitor. The public would
be satisfied in this case because their transportation needs would be met,
without being forced to still contribute to the offending company. In other
words, if we are dissatisfied with Ford, we could buy a GM without having to
buy Ford gas, Ford oil, Ford air-fresheners, etc. Free competition would
guarantee that any company would ultimately be responsible to ensure that it
produces a quality product with the satisfaction of the end user in mind.
5) Upon inspection, the prescribed remdies are too narrow in their focus to
prevent this sort of behavior in the future. For example, many of the
remedies are in regard to Microsoft software as it is applied to Intel
hardware, however it is painfully obvious that they have many interests
outside of the Intel marketplace, to which the remedies would not apply.
Microsoft could just as easily switch their focus to, let's say, Apple and
abandon the Intel platform. Because so many people are dependant on their
software, they would have little choice but to follow them and be subjected
to the same behavior that they currently employ. Ultimately, anyone who
chooses to create a competing product revolving around the Intel platform
would find themselves with very few customers. Organizations would find that
they now have the added burden of throwing out their existing hardware for
which they will get no return on investment, and be forced to spend
additional money to switch to Microsoft's hardware vendor of choice.
In closing, I realize that I'm stating the obvious, which countless others
have noted before me. However, if my two cents worth can contribute to a
positive outcome in this matter, I'll sleep better at night knowing that I
still have freedom of choice.
Sincerely,
My real name
Insert witty comment here
Its amazing how you can tell what I am doing ...
Yes, I've sent my own comment off already, stressing the national security aspects of the failure to stop Microsoft's lock-in tactics leading to overwhelming market dominance of insecure software. I am considering whether I should write and submit a revision.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Due to Microsoft's prolonged maintenance of their monopoly power, most corporations that would reasonably be classified in those groups have been severely weakened. The strongest realistic competitor to Microsoft's products today come from the world of "open source" software.
The open source software community functions on a completely different economic model than Microsoft's traditional competitors. They develop and distribute software at no cost, operating instead on a model of service and support. Absolutely key to this model is inter-operability with Microsoft's line of operating systems. While open source based software organizations have produced products with strong feature sets and security, due to the open nature of their product they simply cannot benefit from any judgment that allows Microsoft to not disclose inter-operability information for any reason.
In particular, Section III, paragraph J. item 1, allows Microsoft to restrict access to compatibility information that "would compromise the security" of certain information. Microsoft would have the public believe that security information must be secret in order to be secure. This is patently false and has been proven in the security community. As an example, Microsoft's IIS web server software has had a long history of regular security breaches, despite the complete in-availability of it's security information outside of Microsoft. In contrast, the Apache web server, the full source code of which is publicly available, has not had a major security breach in 4 years. Open inspection of Microsoft's security information is key not only for inter-operability, but for consumer protection as well.
Of greater concern is section 2(c) in the following section, precluding those who do not "meet(s) reasonable, objective standards established by Microsoft for certifying the authenticity and viability of its business". Microsoft has stated clearly that it does not believe open source software development has a role in the software industry. On the contrary, several companies have been established on open source software. Further, said software was in development several years before these companies even attempted to become "viable" businesses. Microsoft would not have acknowledged software such as sendmail, apache, or Linux as authentic and viable business at the time of their development. Today, Sendmail, Inc., The Apache Group, and Linux companies such as Red Hat, Caldera, Suse, and Mandrake are in business based on that software. Apple Computer and Hewlett-Packard are testaments to the fact that two people in a garage is a "viable business" in this industry. I doubt if Microsoft would certify the authenticity and viability of today's origins of tomorrow's corporations.
I have more concerns about the other specifics of this judgment, but the final summary is this: It provides for to much control of interpretation and application to the convicted perpetrator itself, Microsoft. This judgment provides little realistic relief for traditional competitors, no relief for open source competitors, and no hope for either home or corporate consumers wishing to extricate themselves from Microsoft's history of oppression.
The entire software industry is poised for a drastic change in market economics. Open source software is proving to be a disruptive technology that offers an enormous opportunity for independent software developers to thrive if, and only if, Microsoft is not allowed to hold them at bay with continued anti-competitive practices.
Here ya go, straight from my sent items folder:
The Proposed Final Judgement in the Microsoft Antitrust case is flawed in several ways. I will address one flaw that affects me personally.
Sections III D and III E are good sections in that force Microsoft to allow competing software developers equal access to information reguarding system API's and communication protocols. However, I feel that these sections should go farther than they do in two ways.
First, file formats should be included. Microsoft has a history of using incompatible file formats for coerse users of Microsoft software to upgrade to newer versions. This same tactic same tactic can be used against competing software packages that attempt to interoperate with Microsoft products.
Second, the only entities entitled to access the information made available by sections III D and III E are "ISV's, IHV's, IAP's, ICP's and OEM's". Granted that the definition provide for ISV is fairly broad (anyone involved in software development), the Final Judgement should make this information availble to the general public. As it stands, PFJ excludes private citizens who do not get paid to work in the software development field. As an owner of a Microsoft Operating System, I would like to be able to create software for my own personal use that will interact with my system correctly.
Thank you for taking the time to read my comments, and for your consideration is this matter.
My Real Name
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Wether you think MS is satan or god this arguement should make some sense. What do you think: (btw this was my letter. Flame on if you must)
Under the Tunney Act, I wish to comment on the proposed Microsoft settlement.
This settlement is widely perceived as a non-punishment for Microsoft. By
allowing this settlement to go forward, the government sends the message that it
is ok to break corporate law because you will not truely be punished for it.
Many computer enthusiasts and business people are watching the outcome of
this trial and will base future behaviour around the outcome. If Microsoft is
given a non-punishing settlement, people wil reason that it is ok to commit a
crime so long as you have the the clout to avoid punishment. The courts must
enforce a real punishment on what has been proven to be a real crime.
If the courts do not enforce a truely behaviour changing penalty on Microsoft
the rule of law over corporate america will be drastically weakened. A
capitolist system depends on the rule of law to ensure a level playing field and
promote competition. The people of the United States have charged the justice
system with ensuring that level playing field. Please do not let us down.
I respectfully submit my comments on the proposed settlement in the case of United States v. Microsoft Corp. Unfortunately, I feel that the proposed settlement does little to put an end to Microsoft's monopoly, and has no provisions for enforcement.
I would strongly recommend that Microsoft be forced to publicly document the API's for it's various Windows operating systems, and that it be required to make publicly available any changes to those API's at least six months before releasing software based on those changes.
Publicly documenting the Windows API's does not mean that anybody could easily replicate Windows or reverse-engineer it, but it would mean that other Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) would be able to compete on equal ground with Microsoft's own software running on Windows. This is an effective solution because while it still allows Microsoft to innovate and create new products, it also means that Microsoft cannot further leverage its monopoly by giving it's other projects unfair access to secret software code.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for considering my opinion.
Real Name
Real Address
-- Sent from a computer.
Is there a finished version of this document?
http://www.kegel.com/remedy/remedy2.html
I like the work done by Mr. Kegel and wish to contribute my affirmation of his analysis... I just need a completed document to agree to.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Here's my contribution:
---
I am writing to register my disappointment at the proposed Final Judgement settlement in the U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust case.
The most glaring deficiency of the proposed settlement, of course, is that it is utterly ineffectual at even elaborating on the existing legal restrictions that antitrust law places on Microsoft. Doubtless the DoJ has been flooded with explanations of these problems, but I refer you to Dan Kegel's excellent essay on the subject (already submitted as a Tunney act comment, and archived at http://www.kegel.com/remedy/remedy2.html) as the most intelligent elaboration of the settlement's loopholes and problems which I have seen. Because Microsoft has a record of finding such technical loopholes to legal restrictions (or, failing that, ignoring the restrictions outright), it is my belief that the proposed settlement will do nothing to prevent Microsoft from continuing it's current use of the Windows monopoly to maintain and extend that monopoly market share through illegal licensing and exclusionary agreements.
In order to prevent Microsoft from abusing it's control over monopoly software products in the future, nothing short of uniform licensing for all it's products will suffice. Microsoft must not be allowed to license it's products differently to different customers, because even in the most benign cases of such special licensing it has and will continue to hold special pricing and special allowances as a bully's stick with which to control the behavior of other software and hardware companies. When I can get a Windows license via Dell computer more cheaply than I can get it from a retail store, I am coerced into buying from Dell (and other major PC assemblers), and they in turn must agree to whatever illegal restrictions Microsoft imposes or risk their very survival. Microsoft is aware of this power they have, and they use it. It must be removed. Microsoft must be required to release it's software at a constant price for any customer, OEM or individual, and they must be prevented from allowing any restrictions on the use or resale of that software beyond what is allowed by copyright law. Nothing less will suffice to prevent the continued illegal exploitation of their market position. Even this restriction is necessary but not sufficient; it should be added to the proposed settlement and should not replace it.
There is one thing that I feel must be added to Mr. Kegel's comments, hich in his essay was completely absent: even if the proposed settlement were completely free from loopholes, it would be insufficient. Microsoft repeatedly broke both U.S. law and court orders, and has profited to the extent of tens of billions of dollars and dozens of destroyed and crippled competitors in the process. If the only punishment they face is a set of restrictions designed to make the continuation of these acts harder, then they really have not been punished at all. The settlement against Microsoft must "deny to the defendant the fruits of its statutory violation", or it does not act as a disincentive to further violations at all.
The most direct way of enacting such a punishment is simply to fine Microsoft at a level commensurate with their criminal gains. Fortunately, Microsoft holds a cash (and cash equivalents) reserve of over thirty billion dollars, and so such a fine could be levied without requiring any business-disrupting liquidation on their part. Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that they are motivated by money and not by the law; they will cease illegal behavior once it becomes financially unwise, and not a moment sooner.
---
Roy Stogner
"I don't like Windows, and it pisses me off that the whole world isn't using Linux! To Hell with my political ideals, Go Big Brother!"
And then, of course, you get the language police after you for any minor typo. Stupid nerds.
I fear the Microsoft antitrust trial is deeply misunderstood, by the prosecution and the public at large. The consequences could be dire if a settlement is reached too early and in Microsoft's favor.
This case has a lot in common with the trials of the railroad monopolies. By their end, public infrastructure in the form of superhighways and was at hand. People no longer depended on the railroads as the only means of transportation cross country, and federally funded interstate roads provided an alternative to moving people and goods only by tracks. The introduction and assistance of cross country roads from the government helped resist the price fixing from the railroads and gave people a choice. Ultimately that choice resulted in heightened interstatecommerce and heavy population of the west coast of the United States.
Like the railroad companies, closed source operating system companies will always gravitate towards monopolistic unified control. This is in part because of the difficulty of building a new operating system infrastructure (building a new set of cross country tracks) and partially because it lowers the parent companies costs. Any remedy must be ongoing until the United States congress sees fit to address the cost of building, obtaining, or securing a open source software infrastructure.
Any assistance from the government helps drive back the very real market force of fear of obsolescence, which helps repair the psychological damage caused by previous competition being wholly futile. Compare the argument, "why should I buy a car when there are plenty of trains and there are no roads" to the modern application obsolescence quandary, "Why should I buy an operating system when there are no applications, and Windows is free?" (Windows is not free, but that is the public perception).
Like moving goods, only when people can choose to manipulate information in the fashion which proves most efficient for them will the free market flourish. At the least, Microsoft license terms and prices must be predictable and uniform for however long it takes for a federal infrastructure to be made readily available for use by Americans. Then the market can choose once again.
Thank you for your time.
Matthew Newhall
President of LILUG
Long Island Linux Users Group
president@slashdotified.lilug.org
http://lilug.org
My physical address
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Why wasn't the deadline put in the headline for this article? There is nothing in this headline or the Slashdot text that conveys a sense of urgency! I had to read the linked article or reader comments before I was aware of the deadline.
Or from extending the same logic and copyrighting the file formats for MS office files, and that any attempts to sell software that decodes them outside of M$ operating systems are a violation of the DCMA, etc.?
Or am I just paranoid?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Have MS be forced to issue detailed, complete interoperability specifications for any software they release {3,6} months before the release date (with exceptions for patches). This would open up Orifice, etc. to true competition.
John 17:20
I have two issues with the current Microsoft settlement:
1. Section III.E limits the disclosure of Commications Protocols to the
entities described in Section III.I. This is insufficient. A provision
must be made such that these Commications Protocols are fully documented
and available to anyone. Specifically, the current wording excludes open
source software projects.
2. A new provision regarding disclosure of file and filesystem formats
should be added. By doing this, the barrier for entry for competing
applications is lowered. This measure would not inhibit Microsoft's
ability to innovate since the file format of an application is seperate
from the features of the application. Additionally, disclosure filesystem
formats would promote Operating System competition by reducing the cost of
switching from one Operating System to another. Finally, this disclosure
must also be available anyone. Specifically, open source software
projects must be included.
Thanks,
---------
Yeah it does. NS 6 is a leap forward for Mozilla in general. The GECKO engine works really well with the newest Mozilla releases.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
To whom it may concern:
The settlement offer is awful.
Microsoft has built a massive Great Wall of Control around the software industry, and they guard the portcullis. To all who would pass through, these bandits put forth the following edict: No Innovation Shall Pass That Is Not Microsoft's. And all who pass through must pay a fee to the gang who runs it.
The settlement offer maintains this Great Wall of Control. The settlement offer ensures that Microsoft alone decides what technology the people will be allowed to use. The settlement offer ensures that the software industry in America is not free.
The leader of the people of the land made a stand against the bandits, and defeated it -- yet rather than destroy the Great Wall of Control, assuring freedom and prosperity for his citizens, will he now offer a truce to these bandits? These thieves? These self-appointed censors of ideas?
More is at stake here than the jobs of American citizens. America's ability to compete with the rest of the world in software is at stake; because if we do not allow our own citizens to innovate, some other country will. And such steps are clearly beginning in Europe and Japan.
This settlement harms industry. This settlement harms individuals. This settlement harms America. We have already lost so many good ideas due to the Microsoft Bandits; how many more can we afford to lose?
Heres a copy of my letter:
Preface:
The US Constitution makes it very clear that copyrights are not an inherent right, but merely a short term incentive designed to bring information into the public domain after a limited monopoly on copying is granted to the makers of a creative work.
Suggested Punishment:
It should be self evident that Microsoft has violated this trust, and as punishment the government should no longer be required to enforce their copyright holdings on the Windows NT/95,98 operating systems, Internet Explorer, and possibly MS Word.
This would be a very simple, but fair and effective punishment that would be self enforcing, require no oversight, and would provide intense motivation for this to never happen again.
please atleast use your own words and opinions. personally if i were the ones looking at these letters i'd throw out anything that had "m$", "freedom to innovate", etc. in it... i figure most of the people writting will be "encouraged" by the people who have real stakes in this and the "me tooers/what he saiders."
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Monopolies are inherently evil. Examine past history, and try to find an exception.
Monopolies that abuse their power are not only bad, but also illegal. This is proper. Personally I think that being a monopoly should be illegal in and of itself (and that monopoly should be defined as possessing more than 50% of any market), but that's not the way the law reads.
Yes, companies should be prevented from becoming too large. If they hit the limit, they should be allowed to continue growing by splitting into two (or more) independant companies. What's wrong with that? That's the way cells work, and cells working together can create relatively huge entities. Like you. But just try to find a single cell that size.
OK, so it's not a strong reason for preferring that approach. But it involves less government control than most of the other acceptable options.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The original poster isn't dual-booting, and that makes all the difference in the world. Windows doesn't play well with other non-windows OSes. Give W2k a machine all its own and it'll be a lot more reliable. I can't count how many times scandisk interpreted whatever LILO was doing as damage to my boot block that needed to be repaired...
I play Nerd-Folk!
Okay,
#include flame_retardant_suit.h
Please donot mod me down immediately. Here's what I'm suggesting... what if we setup a virus that proliferated via outlook, etc. whose payload was that it wrote out coherent-sounding anti-M$ email, emailed the links provided, then replicated. Perhaps it can even email them consistently, with a rotating style (think markhov chain).
Okay, if this fails (the recipients know that they're being spammed via virus), we can at least invalidate the email angle of the M$'s campaign.
And here's the scary part... what if M$ is already doing this???!! Hell, they have access to their internal "bugs" far more easily than we do.
Think about it...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
[Not any better than the others here, but it's yet another example for those who are seeking one....]
... Publicly Available Software includes, without limitation, software licensed or distributed under any of the following licenses or distribution models, or licenses or distribution models similar to any of the following: GNU's General Public License (GPL) or Lesser/Library GPL (LGPL); The Artistic License (e.g., PERL); the Mozilla Public License; the Netscape Public License; the Sun Community Source License (SCSL); ..."
I am writing to express my opposition to the proposed settlement in the Microsoft antitrust trial. As a scientist, I spend much of my time developing data analysis software for multiple platforms, including both UNIX and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. My work is thus directly affected by the current proceedings, and I am concerned that a judgment be reached which is in the best interests of myself and other science and technology professionals.
I am particularly concerned that the Proposed Final Judgment does not adequately address the problem of Independent Software Vendors who ship Open Source applications. The Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1 SDK EULA, for instance, states in part that
"...you shall not distribute the REDISTRIBUTABLE COMPONENT in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software. "Publicly Available Software" means each of (i) any software that contains, or is derived in any manner (in whole or in part) from, any software that is distributed as free software, open source software (e.g. Linux) or similar licensing or distribution models
This and other similar EULAs severely limit the potential for software makers to build Open Source software which is compatible with, or which makes legitimate use of, Microsoft tools. Since scientific software is often "Publicly Available" as per the above definition -- in keeping with the duty of scientists (especially those with public funding) to make their work available to American government, business, and academic institutions -- it follows that such behaviors on the part of Microsoft serve to impair the ability of the scientific community to meet its public responsibilities. Given the finding of fact that Microsoft holds a monopoly on Intel-compatible PC operating systems, it is espectially important to guarantee that Microsoft will not be able to use its monopoly power to control Independent Software Vendors. The Proposed Final Judgment does not succeed in accomplishing this.
The United States Department of Justice was in the right to take action against Microsoft initially, and -- as a taxpayer -- I certainly hope they will see that justice is served. The Proposed Final Judgment, however, is insufficiently strong to prevent the abuses which resulted in the initial action, much less the potentially actionable practices already proposed by Microsoft in the coming years. A strong judgment, possibly including the breakup of Microsoft, is the only viable means of restoring the benefits of free competition to the American software industry.
To Whom It May Concern:
As a programmer and IT professional, I have been following the anti-trust case against Microsoft quite closely. It is hard to believe, after all the evidence presented during the trial, that the currently proposed settlement is even being considered. I think Microsoft demonstrated very well after the last anti-trust suit against them that they will not abide by the spirit of an agreement, but only by the letter (and even that is arguable). Microsoft reduced the previous consent decree to a meaningless and inneffective piece of paper simply by changing their contracts with OEMs slightly. It had no significant effect whatsoever on their business practices. With that in mind, I believe that any settlement with Microsoft must be made air-tight. I like the idea of a committee to oversee Microsoft to ensure compliance with the eventual terms set either by a settlement, or by the court. I simply can't see any reason why Microsoft should be allowed to select any of the people that will make up the committee, though. Microsoft is utterly unrepentent and quite ruthless. It would be folly to give them any opportunity to set the committee up for failure.
As for the terms of the proposed settlement, I believe that they will not adequately address the situation in a manner that will allow competition and innovation to thrive in the industry. Specifically, there are 2 areas that concern me the most:
1) Microsoft's APIs, file formats, and protocols.
The complete documentation for these must be made public. Any future changes must also be made public in a timely manner. This should allow other companies to produce products that can compete with Microsoft's products by removing a major barrier to entry, namely that no company can afford to convert all of its existing documents into a new format in order to take advantage of a non-Microsoft office suite or other applications. Currently anyone using Microsoft products is effectively "locked in" to those products because they cannot be easily converted to another format. While some programs exist that can read and write documents in Microsoft's formats, they are not entirely compatible and often fail on complex documents due to a lack of complete documentation available from Microsoft. Network effects are a particularly difficult barrier for companies seeking to enter a market dominated by another. Anything that can be done to reduce this barrier can only help to create more opportunity in the market.
Microsoft has apparently inserted a clause in the current proposed settlement that would allow them to refuse to publish a format, protocol, or API if it would be a security risk. Since virtually all of Microsoft's formats, protocols, and APIs have some security component to them, I'm afraid they will use this clause to effectively nullify that portion of the settlement. Security features should work regardless of whether their mechanism is known or not. If this clause remains in the settlement, it should be modified to give the decision-making power to the oversight committee or to the court, and such decisions should be expedited so that Microsoft cannot introduce further delays to the application of remedies in this case.
2) Microsoft's business practices.
Microsoft must not be allowed to enter into deals with OEMs, ISPs, or other businesses that would create disincentives or prohibit those companies from offering non-Microsoft products or services to their customers. Since the vast majority of the desktop computing world currently uses Microsoft products, OEMs, ISPs, and others must be able to offer those products to consumers. To allow Microsoft to continue to take advantage of that situation by prohibiting those companies from offering alternatives, either by outright prohibition, or by economic disincentive, is to allow Microsoft to continue to hold the industry hostage.
If these concerns are addressed by the eventual settlement or court ruling, they should remove most of Microsoft's ability to abuse it's monopoly power to the detriment of the industry. I feel that a healthy IT industry should consist of competing products from a variety of companies, all able to interoperate with each other, with no single company able to leverage it's dominance in one area to bolster it's position in another.
Respectfully,
(my name and address)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Ok - for those of you who want a little help - clip and paste this into an email and edit it to suit your tastes. I sent mine a short time ago.
_________
I am writing to register my objection to the proposed Microsoft settlement. I do not believe the current proposal serves the interests of promoting competition or remedying the impact on the Amercian consumer.
Specifically, I believe the current proposal will stifle competition by giving Microsoft a leg-up on competitors under the guise of a settlement. Permitting Microsoft to settle the matter by delivering Microsoft products to school systems, which traditionally tend to favor other vendors (e.g., Apple), would be tantamount to state-sponsorship of the extension of Mcirosoft's monopoly.
Instead, Microsoft should be required to make payment in cash, and then permit the school systems to direct the use of these funds in the (hopefully technical) areas of its choosing.
Futhermore, I believe the amount of the settlement is grossly inadequate to remove the incentive for Microsoft to continue its practices. I believe Microsoft will treat the settlement as a "cost of doing business", much as any other "administrative overhead".
Finally, I believe the settlement should include requirements for Microsoft to provide open access to interfaces between its products, and to provide an unbundled version of Windows (no Internet Explorer, no Windows Media Player, etc.). These actions are needed to afford competitive products, including open source alternatives, with an environment in which they can compete on a level playing field with a competitor which controls the incumbent desktop operating system technology. Without true, timely and open access to interoperability information, the barriers of entry for alternative commercial and open source products will be too high to overcome the leverage held through its desktop operating system monopoly. To truly avoid a recurrence of past practices, an oversight committee of some sort is truly needed.
Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely
in the "groundswell of support" for Microsoft's illegal monopoly.
I'm surprised more /.ers haven't mentioned it.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Well, just to clarify the point, Microsoft did not win in the marketplace. Microsoft won by exploiting restrictions that the US government places on the creation and distribution of software (while simultaneously skirting or violating those counterbalancing restrictions that Bill et al found distasteful). Microsoft would not exist at all if the government did not create and enforce the strange stuff called "intellectual property rights". ...
The only justification for having these rights is that without them, people wouldn't create the stuff that we want, whether software or pharmaceuticals or whatever. This is also true of all corporate activity. We aren't required to allow corporations, you know. We only do so because they are useful to all of us, not just to their overpaid managers and their stockholders.
With these concepts in mind, it's pretty obvious to me (since I don't worship at the altar of private property) that society should construct and manage the rules of intellectual property for the benefit of society. Period.
The little rant about people not being able to AFFORD drugs is a great launching point for a debate about the nature of markets and the unfree, government-granted monopolies called patents. Because the drug company has a monopoly on the drug, there is no relationship between the cost of the drug and the price of the drug. The drug company will charge the particular amount that generates the greatest net profit. To illustrate, if Merck had a drug that cured brain cancer, and if Bill Gates had brain cancer, Merck could easily, and according to these ranters ethically and morally, set the price of the full course of treatment at 50 billion dollars. Suddenly (and arbitrarily) nobody on Earth except Bill would have "earned" the right to have their brain cancer treated. If Bill were then run over by a truck, suddenly tens of thousands would have "earned" the right to treatment. Ah, dream a little dream
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
> How, exactly did Microsoft cheat to get where > they are today? By following through on an offer > to create an operating system some umpteen years > ago? If that's cheating, then... well, I'm a > cheater, too. You should read the Findings of Fact from the trial (at http://news.cnet.com/News/Pages/Special/Microsoft/ findingoffacts.html). This details specifically how they broke the law in more than 300 bullet-points.
I am writing to comment on the Proposed Final Judgment in the Microsoft anti-trust case.
The current judgment calls for very limited restriction of Microsoft's actions, actions which are the subject of the suit and which have been found to be in violation of US anti-trust law by a federal district court and a federal appeals court.
Those actions have severely hindered competition in the computer software industry. Any settlement must aggressively address the reestablishment of competition in this important and crippled industry.
The keys to software competition are the API's and file formats used by Windows operating systems and productivity software. Without access to those sources of Microsoft's monopoly, other companies cannot effectively compete.
A settlement which restores competition to computer software will be concerned primarily with:
* enforcing equal and open access to the W32 APIs and Microsoft Office file formats (standardization, publishing, and documentation)
* and the right of competitors to sell compatible operating system and productivity products based on those APIs and file formats.
A secondary concern with the PFJ is language which addresses competing "commercial" vendors. The fear of many is that this language fails to protect not-for-profit software projects from anti-competitive behavior. As not-for-profit computing has been equally harmed by Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, the PFS must explicitly grant not-for-profits equal remedy and protection.
Finally, it is appropriate that the company be punished for its illegal activity with fines. Fines should be set as a reasonable percentage of Microsoft profit for the period since the company violated its prior consent decree with the court to the present.
Thank you for considering my concerns,
x
I skipped the details and just went for the throat.
Wishful thinking, but... oh well. Mine was:
To Whom It May Concern:
The proposed settlement is unacceptable and does not serve the
interests of the American People.
The biggest problem is this: A criminal should not be allowed to profit
from their crimes. The remedy should include a punitive measure to
deprive them of all illegally (as determined in the findings of fact)
gained revenues to date.
If this is not done, then justice is not done and the problem is not
remedied.
Thank you,
(name, profession, city)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You are complaining that Microsoft does not allow you to distribute their software as open source?! What exactly gives you the idea that distributing closed-source software as open source software is legitimate?
[sarcasm]
Wow, I guess if it weren't for all that unfair EULA crap, we could write a program using the MS Platform SDK and GPL Windows itself. Finally, it would be legal to reverse engineer NT 5.5 from the binaries. After all, it is free software, right?
[/sarcasm]
Get real.
But mine was settlement.vbs
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
please take the time to send in your own response before taking time to post in this forum. That said I feel compelled to share my frustration about the apathy most americans are showing about this crucial issue. Microsoft is a bad company, this is evidenced by their actions and the findings of the court. They are about to wheedle their way out of this with a "settlement" that gives away absolutely nothing. What kind of punishment / future incentive to change is that???? An analogy about "settles for the children". Microsoft is giving away money that they have printed. Their software is priced at RETAIL, a price they set yet schools can currently buy it at over 80% off this price. GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!!! And what are the vast majority of us doing about this? Sitting brain dead in front of the idiot box a.k.a television. Does that mean that we deserve the garbage that microsoft is about to dish out to us? No it does not. It is well past time that Microsoft played fair and payed dearly for their past infractions. Make it hurt them badly and perhaps, just perhaps they won't do it all over again.
Microsoft shall be required to disclose all application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used by any software sold or given away by Microsoft that is not included with Windows 98, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Windows CE, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, or any subsequent Microsoft operating system implementing portions of the Win32 API, as well as any Microsoft Middleware component that is offered for free download by Microsoft, including Internet Explorer ("add-on code"). Microsoft shall further be required to provide public documentation of these application programming interfaces, available to software developers at a reasonable cost, at a similar level of detail to Microsoft's existing documentation of public APIs, not to exceed the per-page cost of said documentation. Microsoft shall further be obligated to fully disclose the effects of API calls made by its add-on code, including the side-effects of specifying particular arguments to these API calls.
The technical committee or any third party shall have the authority to inspect Microsoft's add-on code, in binary form, and documentation to verify compliance with this provision.
Nothing in this section shall compel Microsoft to provide any such add-on code for free for use with non-Microsoft operating systems; however, no add-on code sold for any monetary cost (including "Microsoft Office") shall require the use of a Microsoft operating system for execution of said code. Further, nothing in this section shall limit the technical committee's rights to examine source code as set forth in the agreement.
I also fully support the position of Dan Kegel, et al, in their forthcoming letter regarding the settlement.
Christopher N. Lawrence
Ph.D. Candidate and System Administrator
2000 Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress, 1st District of Mississippi
Oxford, Mississippi
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
To Whom It May Concern,
Dear Sir/Madam,
As a computer programmer and user of thirty plus years I feel deeply disturbed, not to say
belittled and insulted, that in the Microsoft anti-trust case my voice counts for nothing, simply because I am not a US citizen.
In the days of economic globalization, which has so many vested advocates in the US, and in
the case of a multi(supra)-national corporation, which has been, arguably, proven to engage
in restless, relentless and on-going predatory behaviour, such exclusion, solely based on the
fact that I do not have a vote for the US Congress smaks, indeed, of imperial 'folie des grandeurs'.
Because of the deliberate policies of Microsoft, right now tens of millions of non US information technology users suffer on a daily basis, by being denied access to alternative and/or supplemental products by ruthless economic and political pressure.
One can only hope that the more realistic approach of the European Community, (which contrary to the US, is quite used to deal with multi-cultural sensitivities on a daily basis)
will find a way to put an end to what I can only call, ingnorant bullying.
If this means having to stare down a bit of grand-standing about economic sanctions by the US and the WTO, so be it.
It will be a small price to pay to hand US politicians (as opposed to the peoples of the US)
a bit of their own medicine, and make them realize that when the crunch comes, we will
all hang together.
Subject: I send you this file in order to have your advice
.... "Found" that account number you "lost" at Gewerbebank Zürich. B.G.)
Body: To whom it may concern.
We, the undersigned, are writing today to vehemently oppose the current settlement in the Microsoft Anti-Trust case. I feel that the current proposed settlement does not address the failings of Judge Thomas Penfield Jacksons erroneous conclusions and fully vindicate the actions committed by Microsoft in the past, nor ensure their ability to commit similar actions in the future.
A great man (perhaps A. Lincon) once said that the software industry is build on innovation and that consumers need this software innovation to survive (I'm paraphrasing of course). This has never been more truthfull than it is right now, in these days of economic uncertainty. Microsoft is in a unique position due to it's "Market Leading Position(tm)" created by a "Natural Monopoly(tm)" to bring these innovations to the "Consumers(tm)". As you are probably well aware, Microsoft is the only company on the planet that produces working software (the reason it has it's "Natural Monopoly(tm)") so it is the only company able to bring "Consumers(tm)" worldwide the "Software Innovation(tm)" that they need to survive in these hostile ecconomic times.
Furthermore, the settlement does nothing to protect Microsoft from frivilous lawsuits designed to allow evil corporations (such as AOL/TW, Lindows.com, The Federal Government of the United States of America, Europe, et.al.) to profit, aiding in the denial of "Software Innovation(tm)" from innocent "Consumers(tm)", thus risking the death, destruction or at the very least, horrible disfigurement of the very people that information technology was designed to protect.
So in closing, I would like to remind the courts to take into consideration, the people for whom this ruling matters most, the "Consumers(tm)".
Yours Sincerely
Llib Setag.
Evets Remlab.
Mr. Snrub.
(P.S. I have
I'm sure the courts will realise the clever Irony (oh ok, the poor sarcasm) and interpret the letter correctly.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
Sections IIID and IIIE should explicitly require said APIs and Communications Protocol to be made available to the public, without restrictions on disclosure or fair use. I am afraid that with the current wording of these sections, Microsoft will have too much power to limit access to said APIs and Communications Protocol, and thus inhibit interoperability. Interoperability is essential for fair competition, but Microsoft has been deliberately trying to inhibit interoperability by having proprietary standards. I am otherwise satisfied with the proposed final judgment.
Repeal the DMCA!
22 January, 2002
Renata B. Hesse
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
Suite 1200
601 D Street NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Ms. Hesse,
I am writing to add my name to the list of people opposed to the Proposed Final Judgement in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case.
As a software developer with 11 years of business experience, I have watched Microsoft's rise to dominance in several markets and been dismayed by many of the techniques it has used to attain and maintain dominance at the expense of other companies, competing software platforms and consumers such as myself. Still, while I have often found Microsoft's techniques distasteful and unethical, I am far less concerned about remedies for its past behavior than I am about ensuring that the same types of behavior are prevented in the future.
From my reading of the Proposed Judgement those remedies that actually work against Microsoft would be ineffective against a company determined to bypass them and would not even constitute significant obstacles in that bypassing process, further in many cases the remedies and definitions seem to have been specifically crafted to make them effectively nonexistent or to actually strengthen Microsoft's position in current or potential future markets. That Microsoft will work to bypass the original intent of the Judgement is clear for both technical and business practices - even during the course of the trial and settlement negotiations it continued to use tactics that should be blocked by a solid agreement.
As an example, the future direction of Microsoft's focus has just this month been declared to be security, while under the Proposed Judgement anything related to security need not be disclosed even if such would otherwise be mandatory. Under a strict reading, if Microsoft adds even rudimentary security interfaces to its APIs then none of those APIs need be disclosed and there is no penalty for not disclosing them -a requirement for receiving documentation for those APIs is that any business needing it must meet Microsoft-developed standards of business viability; non-businesses need not apply at all because access will simply not be available.
Overall, I feel that the Proposed Final Judgement is deeply flawed and should be substantially revised to remove these flaws before being accepted. A software and content monoculture such as Microsoft clearly wishes to have in place harms all of us in the long term, including Microsoft and its investors.
Sincerely,
Alan J. Miller
Des Plaines, IL
fencepost
just a little off
I object to the Proposed Final Judgment in United States v Microsoft Corp, Civil Action No.
98-1232 (CKK)also now referred to as "Track I", and would like to
expressthose objections herein. Under the Antitrust Procedures
and Penalties Act (15 U.S.C. 16(d), the "Tunney Act"), the court is required
to consider public commentary before accepting any settlement.
I should preface my comments by saying
that I am a long-timeuser ofMicrosoft Windows, Internet Explorer,
and Microsoft Office; in fact, I'm using them to research the subject and write
this message.
Everyone can agree that Microsoft isa very successful corporation,
andI amnot against businesses being profitable. Idraw the lineat a
companydemonstrating themselves to
bearrogant and beyond reproach, even bordering on flippant,when faced
with thescrutiny ofthe United
States Department of Justice.Microsoft is this
company.They
haveshowntime andagain, regardless of any
finding or judgment,that they
willcontinue to do as
theyplease.
Although you are
probably familiar with the following points, they illustrate how Microsoft has
shown nointention of acting lawfully:
year 2000. Even though later upheld by
U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in 1995,Microsoft
essentially ignored it. Result:The
competingNetscapebrowser
is all but gone today,left with a dwindling market share. Consider this alongside a later discovery
thatvarious Microsoft software code had the phrase "Netscape engineers
are weenies!" hidden inside.
Case No. 2:96-CV-645 B; Dist. of Utah - Central Div.,
CalderaInc. v Microsoft Corp., the court ruled in 1996
that "Caldera has presented sufficient evidence that the
incompatibilities alleged were part of an anticompetitive scheme by
Microsoft." The resulting settlementwas
confidential.
Microsoft $1 million a day in 1997 for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows
95, in violation of the consent decree. A preliminary injunction was
issued against Microsoft, who appealed and then offered computer makers old or
"broken" version of Windows 95 without Internet Explorer.
DoJaskedthat Microsoft beheld in contempt for failing to
obey the order.
Which brings
us to 2002. Ostensibly, the purpose of this action is to punish
Microsoft for breaking the law,
andkeep them fromviolating it again.But simply making them sign something, promising
they will no longeroperate
illegally, in no way prevents them from actually doing
it, as evidenced above.As stated in
United States v E. I. Dupont de Nemours & Co, 366 U.S. 316, 232
(1966), the Court of Appeals said, "The
suit has been a futile exercise if the Government proves a violation but fails
to secure a remedy adequate to address it."
Worse yet,
the Proposed Final Judgment (PFJ) is flawed in several ways. The two
items that concern me most are:
define "middleware" to mean application software that itself presents a set of
APIs which allow users to write new applications, without reference to the
underlying operating system. Yet Definition J defines it in a much more
restrictive way,allowing Microsoft to exclude any software from
being covered by the definition, merely
by changing product version numbers. For example, if the next version of
Internet Explorer were named "7.0.0" instead of "7" or "7.0", it would not be
deemed Microsoft Middleware by the PFJ.
retaliate against any OEM that ships Personal Computers containing a competing
Operating System(OS) but no
MicrosoftOS. Is it a coincidence that Dell quietly stopped
offering Linux as an operating system choice on its build-to-order systems in
August 2001? If a company of Dell's size can't offer a
competing OS, who can (or will)? This
wouldcurtail consumer choice,since not everyone has the technical
prowess (nor necessarily the time) toinstall a differentoperating
system. This is especially true of users who, for the first time, are
just beginningto use computers and the
Internet.
Before acting on the Proposed Final Judgment, I implore you to
considera fair alternative. The
settlement sought by State of New York, et al., in Civil Action No. 98-1233
(CKK)before the U.S.
District Court for the District of Columbia is a good starting point. The
States' proposal is different from the PFJ as a whole, but it contains many
elements similar to those of the PFJ, with small yet critical
changes.
Very truly yours,
Come on, what part of "is it a coincidence?" don't you understand as opinion/speculation?
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it wasn't clear because of the admittedly craptastic formatting job I did on the message. Otherwise, it wasn't stating fact or making representations, and I think that's obvious.
Specifically, Monday morning. So plan to get it there by the 27th.
I've sent my letter via snail mail, and an email copy. Have you?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
A group of people who assemble and work together in any manner which suits them is a partnership, not a corporation. There is a big difference. The biggest difference is limited liability, although the lawyers finally got tired of working without that and created the LLC, which is essentially a limited liability partnership.
Corporations are a legal invention that stimulate economic and technological progress by:
a. sheltering stockholders from liability, thus encouraging investment
b. creating a manageable system for joint property ownership. without this, transferring ownership of part of the business from one person to another would require resolving the ownership of EACH AND EVERY ITEM OF PROPERTY assigned to the business. This can be a legal nightmare even for a small business. it would prevent the creation of a truly large business, and it would make it more difficult to invest in either new or established businesses.
c. providing a stable institutional structure that doesn't depend on the health/participation/reliability of any particular individual or group of individuals.
Imagine that we simply struck from the law books ALL of the law relating to corporations, including the laws that charter them. In other words, corporations would cease to be independent, meaningful legal entities. (This is how the world was for most of the 6000 years of Western Civilization). Now, if Alice and Bob start a business together, and they need to buy a building, the names on the deed are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. If, in the course of doing business they violate a contract and are taken to court, the defendants are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. And, significantly, if they are negligent and do harm, the responsibility for reparation falls squarely on Alice and Bob, and the money in their personal bank accounts -- not whatever money happens to be left in AliceAndBobCo's bank account. This is the "natural" state, in which people are held individually and completely responsible for their activities in society
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to do business in a modern way. We needed something to lubricate the wheels, and we created the corporation to do that. (BTW, the first corporations were chartered in ancient Rome, and the law governing them was created explicitly to serve the needs of non-stock charitable organizations that needed to be able to hold property and enter into contracts. They were not capitalist institutions, as there were no owners. The joint-stock corporation is a much more recent development, coming and going over the last 500 years.)
Since the whole thing is just an invention intended to serve our social needs, it is perfectly proper for us to make the rules exactly what we want them to be. Nobody is ever REQUIRED to form a corporation. They can always do business as a sole proprietor or as a partnership. (We also have laws defining these sorts of business relationships, so even they enjoy privileges absent in a "natural" state of law that treats all human interaction as just that -- interaction between individual humans.) This will, of course, limit the scope of their success; but if they want to remove that limit it is perfectly fair for the rest of us to add whatever restrictions we like.
The same point applies to intellectual property. It's an invention of society intended to serve society. Since a patent is something that clearly only exists because "we" say it does, the terms of the patent and the rights it bestows are entirely up to us. If we want to limit the profit the company can make, why shouldn't we? (We already do: Patents last for 18 years, an entirely arbitrary period.) They wouldn't make any profit at all if we didn't pay for the police and the justice system that will enforce their patent. If we want to insist on sliding-scale prices so that poor/middle class/whoever people aren't priced out of the market by the power that monopoly pricing gives to the patent-holder, why shouldn't we? Since most of us are either poor or middle class, we'd have to be insane to support a system of intellectual property that excludes us from its benefits.
A side note on the morality and beneficiaries of intellectual property is that the principle immediate beneficiaries are rarely the individuals who do the thinking. The beneficiaries today are mainly the managers and shareholders of the corporations for whom the "intellectuals" and "artists" work.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
My first point would be to put these points aside (for a minute) and point out that the people most vocipherously arguing agains Microsoft tend to be technical people (whom I'll refer to as 'nerds' from here on out). Why is that, you think? I'd say two reasons.
One - self interest. A lot of nerds either at the technical level or at the business level (competitors) are damaged by Microsoft's success. None of these arguments you make would apply here - they simply want more money. No high minded ideals, no lives saved by Windows XP being cheaper or having more competition.
Two - they're dirty nerds. By which I mean they're so fascinated by their craft that it overcomes their other [typically] more important ideals, like politics and belief in a free market. I don't see as many 'normal people' complaining about Microsoft, do you? These people just love their OS's and they hate Microsoft because it's too plaebian (sp?) for their tastes.
I actually semi-agree with your main points. Microsoft has no rights that aren't granted by the people in this society. Noone has demonstrated any harm to society from Microsoft that would warrant restricting those rights. Only whiny competitors and dirty, geeky nerds.
I am Michael Warot, US Citizen by birth, programmer, technician, and currently I am the Manager of Information Systems for Live Marketing, a firm in Chicago, Illinois. I have been programming computers almost from the day I first encountered them back in 1979. I have witnessed firsthand the personal computer revolution, the explosive growth of the software industry, the commercialization of the Internet. I am writing this in the hope that my voice, along with others, can make a difference.
My view
I feel that the proposed settlement is not an appropriate remedy for the behavior of Microsoft. The settlement still classifies insiders and outsiders. The only truly effective way to remedy the situation is to force Microsoft to open all of the source code for its products, and those of its subsidiaries (which would no doubt be introduced to attempt to hide the source code from the public). This approach may seem radical, but it offers benefits to both Microsoft, and to the public at large.
1. Opening the source code, and the subsequent documentation of the various protocols that we have been forced to use (remember, Microsoft IS a monopoly), will allow the peer review of the software, and a subsequent enhancement of the value of those protocols to both Microsoft and the public at large, as value is added by all parties as a part of this process.
2. Since Microsoft is the defacto standard in many environments, its massive market share, and trusted brand name will continue to grow if its standards can be adopted on novel and innovative platforms, to which it can surely adapt its software with the rest of us.
3. The proposed settlement limits its scope to Microsoft and OEMs and ISVs with whom it has a legal contract, this allows the inclusion of restrictive language into those agreements which would quickly subvert the intended purpose of the settlement, buy creating a new barrier to entry. If you allow the public to interact without these restrictions, the barriers to entry will remain lowered, and innovation can once again be introduced by all players, into the marketplace.
4. The public should have the right to inspect the details of the software on which our national security has been increasingly dependent. Hiding this source code from the public creates an artificial barrier to entry for those peers who wish to study the software to help improve it. It effectively eliminates peer review, which is the only truly effective approach to increasing security.
5. Anything less than full and open disclosure of all software source code and protocol documentation is not justice.
I hope this helps you to understand my perspective on this important matter. I hope that all parties will agree that a more open atmosphere will be beneficial to all parties, and the best approach in the long run.
Michael Warot
532 Florence Ave
Hammond, Indiana 46324
Email: mwarot@livemarketing.com, mike@warot.com
Voice: (312) 787-4800x111 (work)
Web: http://warot.com
Unfortunately, I must disagree. I'm not sure whether I'm a dirty, geeky nerd, or a whiny competitor, or both, but I do know that Microsoft has harmed both me and the people I have worked for by producing software that doesn't work properly. I have probably spent hundreds of hours working around Microsoft bugs/features. Some of these would have likely destroyed a company that didn't enjoy the advantage of being IBM's business partner.
It would be thousands of hours, but I've been fortunate enough to do most of my work outside the MS domain. I have claimed in the past (without any real analysis, I admit) that the historical cost to the economy of Microsoft's monopoly entirely dwarfs the company's market capitalization (nevermind the actual amount of money it has ever earned).
I should note that as a young geek I had no particular animosity for MS. I had a generalized contempt for the quality of their product, but I figured, hey, if people are stupid enough to buy it that's their problem. I even interviewed for a summer job back in 88 or 89. The fact that Bill Gates was preposterously wealthy even though he seemed to possess extremely mediocre talent -- of any kind -- was just one more annoying injustice in a universe characterized by injustice. No, he doesn't deserve all that wealth, but then, neither does the Emir of Kuwait.
It was only when the gory details of MS's strongarming of OEMs started to come out that I got hot under the collar, and I've stayed pretty steamed ever since. MS's miscellaneous undermining of standards and deliberate thwarting of interoperability have certainly represented real damages to many American consumers and businesses.
I bought a Next computer sometime around '92 or '93, and I was pretty jazzed when NextStep came out -- but it irked me (and puzzled me, until I learned the ugly truth) that nobody would sell me a PC that didn't have a Microsoft OS already in it.
At about the same time, for miscellaneous reasons, I found myself compelled to earn my living working on MS systems, and MY GOD WHAT A NIGHTMARE. It was at this point that my generalized contempt for MS turned into a very personal anger. Make no mistake, there's a small chunk of BG's wealth that can be assigned directly to a large chunk of frustration and suffering by me.
So, I repeat, I don't know whether I'm whiny or whether I'm dirty, but I do know that my life would have been better if Bill Gates had wrapped his Porsche around a tree on the way to negotiate PC-DOS with IBM. I'm not saying I would have been a wealthy software multimillionaire, because I was never on that path. I just would have suffered less.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/Artistic.html
See particularly clauses 5 and 8. You could look at other licenses named in the EULA as well, but this one happened to be handy....
-Carter
Here is the letter that I sent to DOJ. Consider it GPLed, and use it in any way you find productive.
... the APIs and related
Mike O'Donnell
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 18:10:54 CST
To: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Subject: Microsoft Settlement
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 18:10:54 -0600
From: "Mike O'Donnell"
Renata B. Hesse
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Ms. Hesse:
I would like to comment on the proposed Final Judgment in United
States v. Microsoft, as provided in the Tunney Act.
I find that the proposed judgment is insufficient by a large margin to
restore healthy competition in the computer operating systems and
software application markets, so it is not in the public interest and
should not be affirmed by the court.
The proposed Final Judgment attempts to remedy Microsoft's established
illegal anticompetitive practices by prohibiting particular forms of
conduct involving overly restrictive licensing terms, terms that vary
in order to reward those who accept and punish those who contest a
Microsoft monopoly, and terms that make switching to competing
products more difficult or more costly. It also prohibits certain
forms of retaliation against OEMs who support products competing with
Microsoft's products. It also requires Microsoft to disclose APIs and
communication protocols for its products under certain circumstances
and for certain purposes.
It is inherently difficult, and perhaps impossible, to remedy
Microsoft's particular forms of illegal anticompetitive behavior
through conduct remedies. Both the underlying concepts in which
conduct remedies are defined, and the particular anticompetitive
techniques used by Microsoft change far too rapidly, and Microsoft
itself has far too much influence on those changes, for them to serve
in the foundation of effective conduct remedies.
The remedies in the proposed judgment refer to concepts of "API,"
"operating system," "middleware," "application," "platform software,"
"top-level window," "interface elements," "icons," "shortcuts," "menu
entries." The definitions of these concepts are not robust and
timeless. Compared to concepts in other branches of business and
engineering they are relatively ephemeral, controversial, dependent on
rapidly changing technological context, and subject to deliberate
manipulation by Microsoft. For example, an "operating system" in the
1960s was a software system to organize the basic functionality of a
computer, and it contained little or no user interface code. In the
1970s "operating systems" often contained substantial collections of
utility applications and rudimentary interactive user interfaces
called "shells." In the 1980s, the X Window system was created as a
form of what is now called "middleware" to provide a graphical
interactive user interface, used widely in conjunction with Unix
operating systems. Apple and Microsoft created similar graphical
interactive user interfaces, but defined them to be parts of their
operating systems, rather than additional middleware. In the near
future, distributed and network computing are likely to make it quite
difficult to determine the boundaries of a single operating system. In
the past, Microsoft appears to have deliberately manipulated the
boundaries of such conceptual categories to create and preserve a
monopoly position, and I expect it to continue such practices in the
future. The proposed judgment provides definitions that narrow these
already problematic concepts even further, making them even more
vulnerable to deterioration due to technological change and to
manipulation by Microsoft.
Furthermore, the particular conduct requirements in the proposed
judgment are far too narrow. Every one of the requirements is weak in
some way. For example, consider the requirement to "disclose to ISVs,
IHVs, IAPs, ICPs, and OEMs, for the sole purpose of interoperating
with a Windows Operating System Product,
Documentation that are used by Microsoft Middleware to interoperate
with a Windows Operating System Product." Microsoft and other software
vendors like to treat their Applications Product Interfaces (API) as
intellectual property. But in good engineering practice these are key
parts of the warrantable specifications of a product. This holds in
particular for operating systems and middleware, which by their nature
are especially intended for, suitable for, and often useless without
interaction with other software products. APIs define the quality of
that interaction, but they do not provide it. The implementation of an
API in program code (which is naturally protected by trade secret,
copyright, and patent law) provides the quality of interaction
defined by an API. Without access to the complete API, the licensor of
an operating system cannot employ the system freely in the way that
good software engineering practice suggests. With complete public
access to an API, a software company may still protect its
implementation of the API, which contains the real value that it has
created. Keeping an API secret does not correspond to keeping the
inner workings of a product secret. Rather, it corresponds to keeping
the precise function accomplished by that product secret.
So the public interest calls for the widest possible dissemination of
API documentation. But the proposed judgment explicitly calls for
disclosure of APIs "for the sole purpose of interoperating with a
Windows Operating System Product," and only the "APIS and related
Documentation that are used by Microsoft Middleware to interoperate
with a Windows Operating System Product." This excludes the use of
information about the API to provide competitive platforms for running
Windows-compatible software. Keep in mind that Windows-compatible
software does not necessarily come from Microsoft. Microsoft benefits
from the value added to its operating system products by a large
number of less powerful software houses that create Windows-compatible
software. By holding the Windows operating system API secret,
Microsoft in effect keeps crucial information about other companies'
software applications secret, denying those applications the value
added by competing operating systems on which they may run.
Compare the Windows market (and the preceding DOS market) to the
Unix/Linux/Posix market. Microsoft uses secret and changeable APIs to
effectively eliminate competition to provide alternative operating
systems running Windows applications. A competing operating system
must use different APIs, and therefore cannot support all of the same
applications. By contrast, the Posix standard is a completely public
API for Unix/Linux. Various companies, such as Sun Microsystems,
compete to provide different implementations of the Posix
API. Consumers may run Unix/Linux applications on any of these
operating systems.
Similarly, in the hardware market for processors, the specification of
the x86 instruction set architecture (the hardware analog to a
software API), is public. As a result, AMD competes with Intel to
implement that architecture, with immense benefit to the public
interest. Similar publication of standards in the overall
functionality of personal computers led to the immensely beneficial
competition among makers of IBM-compatible PCs. The failure to
disclose Windows operating system APIs destroys the possibility of
similarly beneficial competition among vendors of operating systems.
Very similar considerations to those raised above for APIs apply to
communication protocols (for which the proposed judgment provides
limited disclosure) and to file formats (not covered in the proposed
judgment). Note that Adobe made full public disclosure of its
PostScript and PDF formats, compared to Microsoft's secrecy regarding
Word formats, and that this disclosure served the public interest
immensely by promoting the wide availability of PostScript and PDF
printers and viewers.
There are many other detailed shortcomings of the proposed Final
Judgment, including the remaining conduct restrictions and the
enforcement methods. I expect that other correspondents will treat
some of them.
Sincerely yours,
Michael J. O'Donnell
Professor in Computer Science and the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division
The University of Chicago
Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute of
The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
This is not correct (thank goodness). The DOJ must respond to the Specific Objections which your EMail raises. Since this submission raised no issues, the DOJ can merely respond "we appreciate your irony, thankyou".
There are many areas in which the proposal is defective. For example, my personal favorite is the fact that, although end users and OEMs are allowed to remove Microsoft "Middleware", they receive no financial benefit for doing so (i.e., they are forced to continue supportting Microsoft's tactic of destroying competitors by "cutting of their air supply" via "free" middleware. The development, distribution, and advertising of these "free" middleware software Products and Components is subsidized by excess revenue which Microsoft generates from the monopoly Operating System (which, as shown by findings of fact, has become overpriced in ways which cannot be sustained without monopoly power.
How does the DOJ imagine that OEM's will take on the trouble and expense of removing Microsoft "middleware" and "icons" in order to integrate non-Microsoft competing Middleware when the Windows versions are already included for "free"? This "remedy" is appallingly inadequate.
Among other remedies, the Final Judgement MUST require Microsoft to implement a reduced price schedule for reduced-priced versions of Windows which exclude unwanted Microsoft middleware.
The DOJ must respond with reasoned responses, so we need to send reasoned and substantialcomments concerning inadequacies of the proposal. Don't forget to check out the definitions at the end, many of which are equally appalling!
the moment he bought it (NOT the moment he died as you insist) there would no longer be further profit in it unless the price came drastically down
... based on principals and not pragmatics
Actually, what matters is the moment at which Mr. Gates no longer requires the therapy. If the therapy requires 2 years, that's how long others will go without. Unfortunately for your argument, my example was an extreme one meant to make the problem crystal clear. In the real world, there is an unending supply of people who can afford to pay much more than a particular therapy costs. New people get the disease every day.
The point is that there is no invisible hand when a company enjoys a monopoly. The economic theory of free markets suggests that in a free market the price of any good will sink to the marginal cost to the producer of creating an additional unit of that good. Why? Because if producer A won't sell it for that price, producer B will. After all, as long as their cost is being covered, they might as well. (Note that the theory supposes that there is a "reasonable profit" which any producer automatically includes in calculating the marginal cost of a product). In another time and place, I'd be happy to argue that there is no particular justice to that price either, but nevermind, I don't have to. Because in a monopoly there is no such pressure on producer A. So producer A can find a place on the demand curve that shuts out people who are willing and able to pay more than it costs the company to produce the good. These people aren't shut out because they aren't productive enough to fairly compensate the producer. They are shut out because the producer can make more money by restricting the good to a wealthier (or more desperate) population.
It takes great amounts of wealth and research to find new medicines, someone has to foot the bill.
Well, yes. But since the pharmaceutical companies receive monopolies, there is no connection at all between the cost of the research and the price of the drug. And if I were to suggest that patents should somehow link royalties to the cost of developing the therapy -- including amortizing the costs of dead-end research on other therapies -- you would denounce it as some sort of fiddling with the market. (Nevermind that these costs are largely overstated. I've seen several reports indicating that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on marketing than on research.)
And it is pretty damn obvious how terribly intervention works: sure you can make it sound all nice, you can even claim that people have a *right* to the object of their desire (say medicine or whatever). But ever since the US government began coercing health care providers and invaded it, controling ever aspect of it they can get their grubby little hands on, it has been on the decline. Look back to the history of the US just before the government destoryed health care: ANYONE who had a decent job could afford good health insurance for a very reasonable sum.
You cannot demonstrate the truth of anything in that paragraph. It's run-of-the-mill "the government always screws up" political rhetoric. For whatever reasons, it's important for you to believe that it is true. In order to believe it, you must decide without evidence that the corporatization of the health care system is irrelevant, that the pharmaceutical monopolies are irrelevant, that the value of basic research done by the NIH is outweighed by whatever other inefficiencies you choose to blame on the government, that environmental factors that cause new and nasty diseases are irrelevant, that the evolution of antibiotic-resistant disease strains due to factory-farming techniques is irrelevant, etc. etc. etc.
(Back when the government regulated the telephone company anyone could afford a telephone, but few could afford very much long distance. After deregulation, pretty much anyone who could afford a telephone could afford as much long distance as they wanted, but lots of people could no longer afford telephone service. When I started college, my monthly phone service cost about 1.5 hours of minimum wage labor. Today, it costs about 5 hours of minimum wage labor.)
it is not the government's concern how people dispose of their "property" rights
The history of intellectual property is exactly about a balanced approach to principle and pragmatics. More than all other sorts of property, intellectual property is the invention of modern governments. It emerged both out of a sense of justice and a desire to encourage invention. Justice, however, is never an absolute thing. It is always about balance. Society (via government) grants the protection of intellectual propery. Society can put whatever conditions it chooses.
Again, imagine the world before the existence of intellectual property laws. Alice figures out a way to pump water out of the ground to fertilize her field. Her neighbor Bob notices and emulates the technique. Alice tells Bob he "owes" her 10% of his crop. Can you imagine Bob's response? He would laugh her out his yard. And if she went into the village demanding justice, she'd be driven out of town with stones.
I will state this unequivocally. If I fell ill, and if there were a known therapy, and if I could produce that therapy myself, I categorically deny the right of the originator of that therapy to hold my health and life hostage to an abstract principle. Any government that would defend such a principle would have abandoned me, and everyone else like me, and as such would have absolved me of any requirement to subjugate myself to its rules.
Beyond this simple thought experiment, the "principle" you espouse is not shared by very many people in our society, and has been explicitly rejected by our courts repeatedly. When slavery was made unconstitutional, the government revoked your right to enter into a contract in which you enslaved yourself. You apparently believe that those who did so put pragmatism over principle.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...