Slashdot Mirror
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."
Woops, there is a typo in the /. post, the correct link is
:
:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-alpha.htm
I don't HREF it because the page is very heavy (1.9 Mb) and useless.
It starts
Public Comments on the
United States v. Microsoft Settlement
Alphabetical List of Individuals or Entities Who Submitted Comments
Comments are listed in alphabetical order by the name of the individual or entity submitting the comment. Each comment is identified by the comment number, number of pages, and submitter's name (as provided in the comment).
To view a comment, go to the Master Index of Comments and look up the comment by the comment number (MTC number).
MTC-00018130 0001 (u)
MTC-00029203 0002 --
MTC-00012751 0001 1157587@concentric.net
MTC-00010476 0001 16fort36@cs.com
MTC-00028611 0001 1miler@dragonbbs.com
MTC-00021140 0001 2trash
MTC-00000850 0001 3211@usa.com
MTC-00028710 0001 78455@attbi.com
MTC-00004269 0002 a
MTC-00013489 0001 A GOP Loyalist
MTC-00019734 0001 A. Walter
and ends
MTC-00028529 0002 Zukowski, Tom
MTC-00016442 0001 Zulaski, Stan
MTC-00012479 0001 Zuschlag, Mary
MTC-00005343 0001 Zwierzycki, Walt
MTC-00000649 0001 Zygmont, Justin
MTC-00023199 0001 Zygmunt, Steve
MTC-00014085 0001 Zylanoff, Phillipa
MTC-00009122 0001 Zynski, Bud
MTC-00024478 0002 Zyphur, Mike
MTC-00008199 0001 Zyskowski, Mike
Note: Every effort has been made to accurately reproduce the comments on this web site. Some comments were converted into text using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and then tested for accuracy. Nevertheless, some differences may exist between the original document and the text version on this web site. The PDF images of these documents most accurately reflect the original submissions; the HTML versions are provided to facilitate browsing and searching.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
This system invites unnecessary load (in the form of reloads on that index file), makes it difficult to look up comments, and makes it impossible to search them. These are all problems that the worlds of library science and computer science have solved many times over, and the solutions are not being used.
Ignorance? Deterrence of public participation? Slap-dash job? Gross incompetence? The world may never know.
One wonders if any effort has been made to validate the origins of any of the comments. If it has, I guess this one slipped through.
Microsoft has 'cut off the air supply' of dozens of competitors over the years by copying their ideas and selling products at a loss until the competitor is run out of business. They've outright been proven to have stolen code from other companies such as Apple (QuickTime) and Stack. They've violated court decrees telling them not to do this, and they've falsified evidence in court (remember the videotape?). Their products are bad for productivity; look at how much time and money has been wasted fighting the viruses that keep plaguing Outlook and Internet Explorer again and again!
.NET is that Microsoft's going to make it cheap and easy for the biggest e-commerce companies to make web sites which work seamlessly with Windows, using proprietary Microsoft standards... and once that happens, Linux and Macintosh become second-class citizens. The day may come when you can only buy things from Amazon and eBay if you're using Windows XP or if you're willing to jump through lots of hoops.
And for all this, they're effectively being given a slap on the wrist and told 'don't do it again.' Microsoft has learned a very important lesson: laws can be broken. Just like speeding tickets don't physically prevent you from speeding, consent decrees don't prevent Microsoft from undermining other companies. They've learned that as long as they can drag out court proceedings, they can keep doing business as usual. It's even better if they can frame the battle as 'the evil government and evil competitors versus Microsoft's innovation, freedom, and all that's good for consumers!'
What's more, they're growing increasingly independent of other companies and outside standards. They tried to break Apple's Quicktime by suddenly dropping support for Netscape-style plug-ins; fortunately Apple was able to quickly release an ActiveX plugin. They decided that since Sun wouldn't allow them to 'embrace and extend' Java to lock users and developers into the Windows platform, they'd make their own replacement instead, and now Java support requires a separate download that most users won't bother with.
My biggest concern with
The real danger with Microsoft is that they have so much money to throw around that they can buy any market they want to buy. Whatever the Next Great Thing is to come down the pipe, mark my words: Microsoft will either buy the company responsible for it, or copy the ideas and give them away for free until the company is dead. You don't agree with me? Tell me how to compete with Microsoft. Say you have a great idea for a technology which will be as much of a leap forward as GUI's were over text screens, what's the use of bringing this to market if you know Microsoft's only going to bundle a workalike with Windows?
It's no longer possible to compete with Microsoft. They own the industry, and the government won't even slow them down.
Here's an improved alphabetical index that prevents the annoyance of having to cross reference manually:
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/mscomment/
I just realized: There's a very important lesson to be learned from these public comments.
Look at the sheer number of people who simply signed off on a form letter. Look too at the large number of people who, in their own words, condemned the antitrust suit as 'sore losers picking on nice Microsoft.'
What this means is that people have been buying Microsoft's propaganda. Lots of people. It also means that people have no idea there are any alternatives other than Windows.
More clearly than anything else I've seen, this shows the uphill struggle Linux is going to have -- or that anything will have, if it ever wants to unseat Windows.
People have been hit by Windows viruses and Outlook trojan horses, they've had to put up with all the nastiness and instability which is an inherent part of Windows, they've had to deal with exorbitant upgrade pricing and heavy-fisted licensing practices... and yet they still sing the praises of Microsoft.
As long as this continues, we will never have justice.
that different comments has exactly same content in a row?
Comment MTC-00021678
Comment MTC-00021680
Comment MTC-00021682
Comment MTC-00021678
Comment MTC-00021694
Comment MTC-00021702
Comment MTC-00021704
Comment MTC-00021705
Comment MTC-00021706
Comment MTC-00021710
What do they think? They take DOJ an idiot who wouldn't notice this? Oh wait...
I'm too tired to list them all, but I'm sure there's much much more.
(This line is inserted to get around the lame-o lameass filter, blah blah blah blah lameass filter is lame, blah blah blah blah)
This makes a nonsense of the rest of that section since it is based on the premis that OSS companies will be able to obtain licenses for Microsoft APIs and network protocols. What are they going to do with them? Since access to that information is restricted they won't be able to release the results as open source.
At the end of the day, we might as well accept that the US government (and most US citizens) would be entirely happy with a world where Windows was the only operating system which could either run on modern computers or connect to the internet.
So, basically, they wanted comments from the consumers, who the suit is supposed to protect, but they've ignored and dismissed all of the comments. They acknowledged no validity in any comment, nor attempted to seriously address any of their concerns, other than by saying, "that's not so". Being quite frank, the remedies in this proposal don't go far enough. The only way to ensure a competitive market which is beneficial to the consumer is to impose strict remedies -- preventing MS from imposing ANY restrictions on what OEM's do with the products they put on their machines, forcing MS to license at least some critical components of Win9x, NT, 2k, and XP to allow for competition with MS' "bundled" software and to allow alternate OS' to be able to use Windows software.
The ignorance of some stupid commentors is noted. "Would you rather be using anything else", and "there's nothing else easier to use" predominated among MS-supporters. Had MS not been a monopoly and had an unfair advantage with OEMs, BeOS would have superceded it by now and become the standard desktop OS.
The incompetence of the Justice Department is easily discernable through comments such as these:
174. A few commentors argue that, under Section III.C.2, Microsoft has control over what non-Microsoft products may be promoted by an OEM because Microsoft could define what "impair[s] the functionality of the user interface."(183) Section III.C.2 applies only to shortcuts, but it allows those shortcuts to be of any size and shape. Potentially, these shortcuts could be so large as to cover key portions of the Windows user interface (for example, the Start Menu). As the Court of Appeals found, Microsoft has an interest in preventing unjustified drastic alterations of its copyrighted work. Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 63. The limitation preventing shortcuts from impairing the functionality of the user interface was designed to respect this interest, while still giving OEMs considerable freedom to promote Non-Microsoft Middleware.
No, actually, its not possible to for shortcuts to "be so large as to cover key portions of the Windows user interface (for example, the Start Menu)". Even if it that would be MS' fault for design flaw. Furthermore, MS should only be allowed to sell OEM's its OS. The OEM's should have the freedom to modify it as they will. MS should not be allowed to HURT consuemrs by preventing their OEM's from tailoring their OS to their needs.
Granted, this proposal is better than nothing at all; but it doesn't go far enough to punish MS for past illegal deeds, rectify the monopolistic situation created, and prevent MS from future monopolistic deeds.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Perhaps. So now some perl-savvy Slashdotter should write a script to mirror the site into a database, and post the resulting URL. Shouldn't be more than an hour or two of work for someone who has the skills...
... just credit me and link to my site, OK?
http://weston.canncentral.org/msdoj/lookup.php
This lets you look up any comment by name, or comment ID (if you know it).
I also threw in the ability to let you look up comments by minimum number of pages.... this lets you look at "substantive" comments quickly.
The code that I used to do all this is located in the directory. Feel free to take and mirror
(Alas... I lost my mods for this thread when I decided to post this... my apologies to the parent poster and the sibling poster who made the comment about database programmers sleeping in -- at first you both amused me, and then you inspired me...)
Tweet, tweet.