All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

Sundance writes: "The DOJ has published their answer to the Tunney Act comments on the Microsoft settlement. The gist of it is that, basically, they like the settlement agreement the way it was written and won't change much of it, if at all. Choice quote: "A number of commentors are concerned that Microsoft will deny disclosure of APIs and Documentation, or licensing of Communications Protocols, to open source developers on the grounds that the developers do not meet the "reasonable business need" or "authenticity and viability of business" criteria of Section III.J.2.(441) The United States believes that the requirements in Section III.J.2 are no broader than is necessary to prevent misuse or misappropriation of intellectual property." I guess that crimes pays, after all -- provided that you're rich enough to start with." hbo adds: "The comments are indexed by comment id. There is also an alphabetical list of commentators. To find a particular comment, look it up in the list, then find the comment id in the index. Finally, click on the particular comment to view it."

Comments

MS sucks....

[Repran]

....the life out of the software industry.

Informal sampling of comments

[jrbrtsn]

I did an informal sampling of 15 randomly selected comments, and did not encounter a single pro-Micro$oft comment. It looks like the DOJ is simply choosing to ignore these comments.

Our only hope is that Judge Kotaler-Kelly is principled enough not to accept the proposed settlement as satisfactory. I she stands up to these goons, I will vote for here as President in the next election!

Go Judge K-K!!!!

Re:Obfuscated Indices

[Jerry]

Why do you skirt the obvious?

The WHOLE purpose of such a convoluted access (i.e., sans hotlinks) is to make access as difficult as possible. For the vast majority of dialup connections it will be too time consuming to look up and/or read comments. I have DSL and even using it is laborious.

This situation is NOT by accident! A useful method would have been to put the comments into a searchable database. They knew that, but it would have made cross checking too easy, and their tissue of lies could be blown away by a gradeschool student doing simple comparisons.