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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.""
I saw a Red Hat exec. on Fox News the other day talking with Neil Cavuto (sp?) about their just released financial results. He was rather unimpressive in his answers about Red Hat's results, its future, its business plan, competition from MS, etc. This is not meant as flamebait at all, but if I was a RH shareholder, I would have been very nervous after watching that interview.
As the "flagship" company for Linux, with all eyes upon it, I hope RH has some top notch execs working behind the scenes. Running a business takes *alot* more than just great coders and passion. Especially when competing against one of the most ruthless companies on the planet.
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
Quoted from The Washington Post:
This is an interesting proposal that I hadn't heard about before. Does anybody have a complete list of what the unsettling states have asked for?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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
Well
Technically, if they decide to hold out long enough, they can do nearly anything they like.
Unfortunately, most likely, the 9 states think that holding out more will eventually lead microsoft to offering those states lots of money to make them go away. (I still say the recent tobacco-company settlements in texas and elsewhere are going to have bad consequences for just years to come...)
However, they are, like, you know, sovereign states. As the representatives of the law of those states, if those 9 attorneys general just keep holding out, as long as they feel MS has violated the fair business practice laws of their states, they have it perfectly within their rights to (they can at LEAST do this much) block MS from selling software in that state.. which would be a horrible catastrophe for microsoft, not so much because they couldn't make money in that state but just because software sales in that state would suddenly become a huge source of funding for any new or existant company or companies that might want to become serious competitors to microsoft. That state would become a neat little hole in the software market barrier to entry.. and microsoft depends on that barrier to entry being impenatrable.
This has nothing to do with what the states *can* do. The states are, well, remember, *sovereign states*. They set the rules within their boundaries, except where amendments to the U.S. constitution stop them. The states can do what they like, and since microsoft has is currently in the eyes and laws of the states an outlaw awaiting judgement, the attourneys general and state courts can render judgement however they see fit.
The question is what the states *will* do-- when will the attourneys general give up and wander off, or be rotated out of office and replaced with pro-monopoly equivilents.
I don't think anyone realizes exactly how big the amount of power these states hold at the moment. Microsoft's banking almost everything on the hope that these states will eventually be placated by some settlements and turn around a couple times, forget anything happened, and go to sleep..
But if they don't.. and the states decide that justice carried out against microsoft really is what they want, and decide to exert their power as soverign states.. they can pretty much do what they want.
Yeah, yeah, like this is news.
We know that MS plays like this, Mike Tiemann knows this, and so do all the lawyers and judges hearing what he has to say.
But the events of last week showed the judge was more interested in closely following a particular legal track.
Are these allegations going to be entered into the proceedings of the court, or are they likely to be stricken out as "hearsay" because they do not very strictly address what the court wants to hear?
Maybe I'm getting the 9 dissenting states' separate suit confused with the remedy phase of the original MS trial. My apologies and hopes that someone more knowledgeable can clear this up for me...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
From what I gather, Microsoft is adding extensions to communication protocols that they developed. True? If that's the case, then so what? They are free to do so. They aren't modifying some existing standard so that it's inoperable with other products. They're not hijacking a standard (like they did with Java). So what's the problem? If Microsoft developed the protocol, aren't they free to do with it whatever they like.
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.
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
> 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!
I'd expect a lot of this kind of behavior from MS. They will do something that they claim is out of the goodness of their heart, and not required by the settlement, but actually is. However, since MS is performing the required action, there is no impetus for whoever enforces the settlement to go out of their way to prove that it -is- required. They aren't going to engage MS' lawyers just to counter some PR. Thus MS manages to turn everything it does because it essentialy has to into positive PR. If it works well enough, it could sour attempts to go after them further, because they've shown themselves to be such nice guys. Thus they use today's judgement to prevent future ones.
I don't like them, but sometimes I have to be amazed by their saavy.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
You have to look at this differently. Think about the testimony given during the sentencing phase of major trials. This testimony goes towards the character of the indicted person and to address the probability of repeat acts.
The States are using this testimony to show that not only has Microsoft broken the law, but they continue to break the law in new and innovative (sorry, had to say it that way) ways. The idea here is to say that the punishment must be harsher and forward looking to address the illegal activities and ensure that these activities are not repeated in other markets.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
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!
They're somewhat right. RedHat at first was agressive on marketing Linux. However, the last couple of years they haven't done much for promoting Linux, except testifying at MS's trial. Nowadays you hear more about Mandrake in the news than about RedHat.
RedHat must develop new products, put it's ads on TV, web, magasines, etc.
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
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."
creatively, such as what we're seeing now.
If what we're seeing now is "creative", then I'd sure hate to see what you call "agonizingly tedious and clueless".
"Provided by the management for your protection."