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Red Hat CTO Testifies at MS trial
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann testified on behalf of the 9 states in MS's trial. From the article on SF Gate: "Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Michael Tiemann said Microsoft adds 'extensions' to critical communications methods that computers use to transmit security information, print, and perform other tasks. Those extensions are proprietary to Microsoft, he said, and despite recent actions Microsoft has not been forthcoming in releasing details of those changes.""
At this stage, the states needs to justify their proposed penalties. That's why Tiemann is there. To give the current state of the software industry and to explain why the states proposed penalties (in this case, full disclosure) is appropriate. It is not to discuss new violations or prove whether M$ is still a monopoly.
So? What is wrong with using proprietary software? IBM has token standards (proprietary), Cisco has routing protocols (IGRP+EIGRP: proprietary). Do I need to go on?
Just because something is proprietary doesn't mean its bad. Also, we don't need everything to be open. Some people actually like to make money off of ideas.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Yes, you can find the complete non-settling state's proposal here. This is a redlined version as they made some alterations on this from their original one (not to be confused with the sellout DoJ/MS crafted settlement).
Enjoy, fun read!
This is another article on the testimony, this time by Reuters at Yahoo.
It mentions the barriers Microsoft tried to impose on getting linux pre-installed on a system.
I've read the word zealot used in reference to Linux people, but I understood it when I watched the interview a couple of months ago with Tiemann, Ballmer, and some of the other big names. I forget the particular open source event it took place at, but I remember feeling embarrassed for the guy because of the way he was acting. He was lashing out at Ballmer and MS and in that particular situation it was totally unprofessional.
I wouldn't accept his testimony for anything other than blind/passionate MS hatred.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. This is called the "remedy" phase of the trial. That means that the reaction to a guilty finding of antitrust law is not punishment. It's a remedy to bringing back competition to the market. So the *only* thing that the judge has to order is something that she believes will bring a remedy to the problem of non-competition w/in the market.
Now, of course, Microsoft is guilty of being an illegal monopolist. So they're subject to a huge number of civil suits. Punitive damages (i.e. punishment) may be part of those trials. But the result of the antitrust trial will be a remedy, not a punishment.
This is significant because the standard is only to restore competition to the market. AFAIK, that's all that antitrust law calls for, and it seems like something much less painful for Microsoft than punishment.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I have noticed a trend in Microsoft's approach to 'standards' and that is that they completely ignore the 'spirit' behind the idea of 'open standards'. One of the key reasons to define open standards is to promote system interoperability. This interoperatility allows two different systems to interface with one another.
Microsoft has begun using open standards as a multi-edged sword: First, to leverage the scalability of these protocols. Second, to save them the 'innovation time' required to develop their own protocols. Third, as a rallying cry/advertising claim/defense against criticism.
The problem is that they are not using the standards to promote interoperatility.
There are two strong examples of this: Windows2000 authentication and Kerberos. Microsoft decided to exploit a (graned) 'user-definable field' in the kerberos packet to store custom information for their authentication scheme. Perfectly legal. But then they listed the contents of the field (as they use it) as proprietary and therefore shutting out any other Kerberos server to provide authentication to a Microsoft client.
A second example is in the Exchange 2000 server. All of the Exchange servers are now capable of using SMTP as their inter-server communication protocol. In fact, they have implemented the SMTP Pipelining RFC (1854) to increase message rates between servers that support that extension. Again. All very valid. Then they also created what they call ESMTP: Encapsulated SMTP. This is different from the ESMTP standard: Extended SMTP. Encapsulated SMTP makes the body of the message proprietary mime type and only another Exchange SMTP server can decode that message. No other server can read it.
Where these aren't technically extensions to the protocol, they do violate the GOAL behind the open-protocols, which is what makes me believe that Microsoft might be even more malicious than people may believe them to be, and that all of these 'exploitations' are so subtle that the court, the general public, and even a lot of systems people will completely miss, untill it is too costly to remove the components from their infrastructure.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
You obviously have been out of touch for the last 5 years or so. Otherwise you would know that monopolies play by a different set of rules. Microsoft has been determined to be a monopoly and has been convicted of monopolistic behavior. The remedy is supposed to help competition return to the relevant market(s). Sometimes it's done in a heavy-handed way (like the AT&T breakup). Sometimes it's done more creatively, such as what we're seeing now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer