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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.""
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist; that conviction has been upheld on appeal, and the Supreme Court has declined to review the case, so the current judgement stands.
That's winning?
Oh, yeah. It's Microsoft, so they can argue with a straight face that their punishment shouldn't be punitive.
And at one point in time everyone is this stupid person until they learn a *nix OS. Some of the best programmers and admins I know started with an MCSE, ugh.
Looks like the players previously too cowed to come out into the open and talk about M$ tactics are now talking: in detail and in court.
At this point, though, given how much Windows XP sucks, the FBI security warning about it, the slow rate of adoption in the corporate setting.... does it really matter what the guy from Red Hat says?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Proprietary protocols are but one of Microsoft's ways to keep customers nicely handcuffed.
Just as an example, look at the hoops the folks doing the Samba development had to jump through in order to make Samba able to mount Windows shared drives.
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neophase
Yes - that may be true - but they have done things since RH Linux was started that affected them. Part of this trial is about stopping them from further illegal actions too - they need to know what the things they've done were first - before they can implement measures to stop them doing them again in the future.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Lest we forget, Microsoft broke the law, and this is being suggested as a punishment for having done that. The question isn't "is this fair?" it's "is this an appropriate punishment for the crime that has been committed?". I think it's more appropriate than many of the punishments that have been suggested, but considering that this isn't Microsoft's first offence, I think a structural remedy is more appropriate.
-- this is not a
More importantly, what exactly is Microsoft so "guilty" of in this situation (I assume Red Hat is bitching about the Kerberos extensions). Read this article by Theodore Ts'o, one of the Kerberos developers at MIT. Microsoft changed its Kerberos extension in response to feedback on its initial design. Now it is true that it did not document the extension fully, but if you think about that article, Ts'o is really saying that Microsoft is not doing a good enough job of embracing and extending...because if Microsoft documented its NT PAC, they would have eagerly helped make it a standard.
Anyway, what Microsoft is doing with Kerberos is perfectly legal and allowed by the standard. Sure it might hurt Red Hat -- so what? Red Hat is a competitor of Microsoft!! It's not clear what Red Hat really wants from this case. Would they be happy with anything less than Microsoft going open source, releasing all their intellectual property, and a government guarantee of X% market share for Linux? If so, they are dreaming and I have little sympathy for them.
- adam
So as the governmental party bringing the case, if the Justice Dept. agrees to accept a consent decree and terminate the case, it can. And that consent decree can even include items such as (a) this consent decree cannot be used as evidence in civil lawsuits [hint: it does] (b) the consent decree can be used to prevent Microsoft's competitors from taking certain actions under the threat of DMCA prosecution [hint: it does].
So much for being "convicted".
sPh
The problem is that the states are spending nearly ALL of their time discussing issues that were not part of the initial trial, nor the appeal. Since this is the penalty phase of the case, new evidence will most-likely be dismissed by the judge, so while the topics being brought up make for great headlines ... it will amount to sensationalistic garbage come the end of this phase.
Once again.
You are limited in your actions even if they might otherwise be legal if you do them to maintain your monopoly.
Straw man.
The nine states are seeking enforcement of good old standard antitrust law that has said essentially the same thing for nearly a hundred years now. If Red Hat asks for anything beyond the scope of the law be assured that the judge (you know, someone who has actually made a career out of studying this stuff) will surely show them the door.
It's not as though antitrust law was dreamed up in the last few years just to "get" Microsoft.
> Well the last time I looked Netscape was fucking FREE
:)
But what about the first time you looked? As memory serves, Netscape had to offer their browser for free because MS started offering IE for free. MS wouldn't have been able to afford to offer IE for free had they not used their success as an OS monopoly in the browser market.
Why does it not surprise me that XP tech support lacks any knowledge on the history of their own companies wrong doings?
I'm only pointing this out because you're asking for replies, and you seem to omit the aforementionned detail in this post, which really just furthur drives home why you work for Satan
"Old man yells at systemd"
What would make much more sense to me is complete documentation of the formats used in Office, with a mandatory N-month lead time (they were convicted of monopoly, weren't they?) before implementing new, um, features [yeah, that's what they are, features...]. This would allow compatibility filters from the competing office suites, and remove the window of opportunity for new versions from MS while the others chase the changes.
Oh, and the penalty for failure-to-disclose would be public source release of Office; that would almost guarantee they behave, since there'd be legions of open-source eyes looking for any inconsistencies.
Yes, ms stole windows from apple
That is not entirely correct. Microsoft strong-armed Apple into licensing to Microsoft the "look and feel" of its operating system. However, one must examine the context in which this was done. This strong-arming occured back in 1985, when one could say Microsoft was arguably insignificant. Microsoft threatened to stop writing software for Apple if this agreement was not made, Apple gave in, and the rest is history. To add insult to injury, a court ruled that this transaction was entirely legal when Apple tried going after Microsoft for allegedly "stealing" its look and feel.
This odd set of factors, along with the stagnation of Netware in the early 90s, the low cost of PC-compatable hardware, and other such circumstances, in addition to Bill Gates' excellent business skills, all contributed to the rise of Windows. Very rarely do you see someone who is able to exploit such opportunity the way Microsoft has done.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
Capitalism? What Microsoft engages in isnt capitalism. If you look at the constituent elements in their strategies like total control of their market and 5 year plans you'll note their idea of 'capitalism' has more in common with an entirely different kind of economy. Which, of course, is why they're in court in the first place.
I don't think you understand the power of the Federal Government. Let's all look at it from the example of medical marijuana. There's a few states that have passed medical marijuana laws, being that they're supposed to, like you said, have soverign power over any issue the Constitution doesn't address (Amendment 9). But that didn't stop the Federal Government from swooping in and just doing what they wanted anyways, States rights be damned. Even though the Federal Government has no constitutional right to prohibit marijuana usage in the first place, they still used to power of Big Brother to do whatever the hell they wanted to. I know this is horribly off topic but its a very good example of just how powerful our Federal Government has become. And since its in bed with M$, there might be no stopping M$.
I don't really like the term blue print for source code,
But it's such an apt description. After all, the courts have determined that taking a machine with a bunch of switches and flipping some of those switches constitutes making a "new machine" that can be patented. Of course, you can't just flip any old switches and get them patented, but if you give some real world meaning to the switches being flipped, patent away!
Heck, I finally realized that I have been thinking about math all wrong all these years. I used to think that there was no difference between an algorithm and a use of that algorithm with real world numbers, but I must have been wrong. That's because these are two totally different things since you can't patent an algorithm running on a computer if it's just the algorithm itself, but you can patent it if it's somehow related to the real world. That simply blew me away when I finally came to the stunning realization that word problems are different and harder than "math problems". After all, I grew up thinking that word problems were easy since you were just doing the same thing as the regular math problems, except you gave some real-world meaning to the numbers being used, but man was I wrong.
That's where the blueprints come in. If the software running on the computer is somehow related to something in the real world, then it stops being a bunch of ideas and just using a machine, and becomes a Real Thing, a New Machine! And, we all know that if you want to create a complex Real Thing you'd better have some plans, and blueprints are the perfect thing for that!
Yes folks, by the miracle of modern technology, we can take two pure ideas (mathematical algorithm) + (giving real-world meaning to numbers) and obtain (A Real Thing That Can Be Patented).
It's the New Math: (Pure Idea)+(Pure Idea)=(Real Thing).
Can't you see that? So the "blueprints" analogy is just perfect.
You just don't get it and you need to go back to third grade and look at all of your math books again and understand this time that "word problems are really tough because they aren't the same as the pure math problems where the numbers have no real world meaning".
That's the most amazing thing of all. If you have a computer program that will solve some homework problems for you, the computer is just your plain old computer when you're using it to solve the regular math problems. However, the moment that you start to use it to solve a word problem, it becomes a New Machine! Because even though the steps it does are the same, since you gave real world meaning to the inputs and outputs, you have taken two pure ideas and made a Real Thing. Aren't you proud of yourself for building a New Machine just to do your math homework? I know I am.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
In theory, this would work. But don't we know the .doc file format already? It's just a collection of COM objects. The problem isn't that the file format isn't documented. It is. The problem is that you have to emulate a massive chunk of windows just to view an Excel file.
.net and passport in general. And there needs to be a whole boatload of other things done at the sales and finance level that I don't even know how to approach.
/., and as a result we forget the contradiction right in front of our faces. On the one hand, some say "Microsoft's products are shoddy" and "nothing wins on technical merit" and then other people say "if you give us the file format, we'll win". The solution to this problem is not a purely technical one. We need real restrictions on how these people operate. There is some fundamentally wrong things in the way they do business, and statutes need to be set up so that no one else can do these kinds of things again.
No... the monopoly problem goes way way beyond the simple "Document it and it'll be fine" solution. We need to get some real business and legal restrictions. OEM's need to be allowed to alter the desktop as they wish. They need to be able to install alternative OS's on their machines. There needs to be some serious inquiry in to
We tend to focus on the technical side of things here at
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."