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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
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."
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.
I agree with you on almost every point in your post.
It's kind of a Catch22, isn't it? By helping to punish Microsoft, RedHat and other competitors are actually doing the same thing that they accuse Bill & Co. of doing - gaining un-fair advantage by means other than technical superiority and value to the consumer. Doing this could be construed as approving of Microsofts methods. However, by doing nothing, they would be giving tacit approval to Microsoft's methods even more blatantly. Neither is really acceptable IMHO.
One way around this is to declare that standards, and any extentions to accepted standards, should be documented, no matter the IP involved, no matter who's doing the extending. If it's a standard, it's a standard, period, full stop. If you want to keep your IP that extends that standard, don't use the word standard, or don't call it "standard". (This is the same equalising effect that the GPL has.) Fairness to all that way.
From what I've seen, most of the industry is mad at Microsoft for their arrogant attitude and failure to not "play nice" with others. I remeber Ballmer saying he couldn't believe that the rest of the industry didn't rally around Microsoft when the DOJ went after them - and I thought "You're either a liar, an idiot, or think that I'm an idiot, Monkey Boy. Fuck you."
When Microsoft drops that huge lever (with significant mechanical advantage) attached to Windows, other industry players may actually accept their role in the industry.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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
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.