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Microsoft Case Proceeds
YeOldeCurmudgeon writes "This story just posted on Yahoo: Federal Judge Denies Microsoft Motion to Dismiss Antitrust Case. Microsoft's motion to dismiss the suit filed by the 9 dissenting states was denied. The judge agrees the states can sue." An article in the San Francisco Chronicle summarizes the case's current state and what's coming up next.
M$ should be forced to pay one million ... no one billion dollars to the FSF.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
RMS should be appointed to their board of directors
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Hooray! The Microsoft case continues! Kudos to the judge who agreed the states can sue. This is a happy day for the good guys, because although the war against the EVIL EMPIRE hasn't yet been won, this decision brings us one step closer to a world of freedom, without the limitations and problems Microsoft sees fit to impose on the good people of the world.
This is a happy day for the BSDs, for Linux, and for all the freedom-loving people of the world.
Somebody explain to me why it takes 1187 pages to say "this case can go on" and why it takes this long to figure out a punishment.
This should be all very, very simple. provisional punishments like "you will now allow people to take off IE" does not stop MS from behaving anti-competetively.
I mean, just fine them! in fact, fine the crap out of them. You are found guilty of anti-competitive behavior, you choke up 80% of your profits for the next two years (as from SEC filings) or 10% of the company net worth -- which ever is higher. if you do it again, 90%/15%; third time -- dissolution of charter. (third might be a little harsh, but again, we are following the "simple" route of spirit)
-- when the share holders suddenly realize that, wow, my $$ are going away because the corporate lawyer / managers are screwing up by doing illegal stuff, i don't think they will be happy about the anti-competitive behavior anymore -- i mean, $$ drives the company, so hit it where it hurts; not some bs settlement that they can just circumvent later.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What I found interesting was the Judge's characterization of Microsoft's motion as misrepresenting the holdings of the cases it cited in support of the motion to dismiss.
That's a powerful statement from a judge and should be taken by Microsoft as a warning. It seems that the last thing they should be doing is demonstrating to the Court a complete and utter disregard for truth and for the law.
That's the kind of thing that makes a judge mad and judges are bad people to have mad at you.
Exactly! Can you please tell me how you can avoid buying Windows XP now when you are buying Toshiba notebook?
Read em here
Please note, this is a joke.
Now go back to your daily lives.
Hear hear. Microsoft wouldn't be able to do half the crap they get away with if certain large customers simply refused to use their software anymore.
Finding God in a Dog
I mean, not to sound like I am against the trial, but the length has realy made me apathetic. am I the only one?
True capitalism = lots of similar companies = jobs for everyone who wants one.
I work for the government, BTW, so I have a bit of an inside view, here.
The Gov is a big enough purchaser of computers, that this could be feasable - why not build their own? Set up a factory somewhere, and build custom government computers, assembly-line style. Only include hardware and software that's needed, and save money all over the place. Most computer dealers include crap the Gov doesn't need, so it'd work well, probably.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
You're right. Microsoft lost and was found guilty in federal court of monopolistic pratices, but they outlasted us and outlasted the administration that beat them and got the next one to give them exactly what they wanted, including a free pass to keep doing business as usual. Lets not let those few states still fighting them conflict with our short attention span. We might as well realize that no matter what the court says, Microsoft will do whatever Bill damn well pleases.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That would be trivial to implement and verify. And they would have nothing to complain about since that just enforces the status quo.
Any M$ app/OS on anything BUT an x86 box and Gates and Dancing Monkey Boy kiss their assets good bye and rot in jail for as long as the app/OS is available on anything but the x86.
Steve Jobs will just have to learn to like OpenOffice or StarOffice.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Since the mid 80's, the 'operating system' has been extremely important to Microsoft. Making sure everyone adopted Windows 95 and 98 was extremely important for the success of the company, as it locked them into the current architecture (2000/XP etc). This has meant that operating systems are VERY important to MS.
.NET, the operating system is not as important as it once was.. in the future, a proper .NET program will run on any system that has a .NET compatible VM and the correct class libraries!
.NET allows Microsoft's software to dominate on EVERY PLATFORM, and this is a great thing for them. A very clever move, and it may make all this antitrust case very irrelevant.
This may not be the case for much longer. With the advent of Linux, operating systems have been somewhat commoditized. With
Believe it or not, in 5 years, you could see Mac/Linux people buying, and running natively, stuff like Office and Visual Basic.NET, thanks to Microsoft embracing the concept of the virtual machine.
I think Microsoft is going to bank on the success of its virtual machine (.NET) and this whole new platform-independant architecture. Even if Microsoft was forced out of the OS game.. it's not a disaster for them. They still have the critical mass of users to sell software to (Office, etc), and a critical mass of developers used to developing for their platforms.
In essence,
mogorific carpentry experiments
Bad form to reply to one's own post, but.. just remembered.. there's a discussion about Microsoft and possible VM strategy from today here.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court
Which Microsoft Anti-trust trial have you been watching? Microsoft has already been found guilty of abusive monopoly prcatices, and the case didn't even deal with their most damaging practices; their OEM agreements. In fact, their appeal has nothing to do with overturning that verdict, that appeal was rejected. This one is about trying to reduce the punishment.
I agree about not buying their software, though.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
sed s/.NET/JAVA/ | sed s/Microsoft/Sun/
I don't think so Tim...
In essence, .NET allows Microsoft's software to dominate on EVERY PLATFORM
.NET whether they like it or not. If you want to stick with Microsoft, .NET is not an option, it's what you'll have to use.
.NET implementation.
.NET's virtual machine and class libraries can do WAY more than what Java can.
.NET is just a VM/platform, whereas 'Java' was both the JVM *and* a language. This limited extension capabilities, as well as the conversion of older software. You couldn't load up your old C software, and get it working in Java.. with VB.NET, VC.NET etc.. this is a possibility. People have already created FORTH and COBOL compilers for .NET!
.NET may not be a success, but it has several very important things going for it, and Java had none of them. I mean.. come on.. Sun hardly had millions of users in 1994! Microsoft has got .NET out quickly, and is saturating the marketplace, ensuring their success into the future.
sed s/.NET/JAVA/ | sed s/Microsoft/Sun/
I don't think so Tim...
Microsoft has many advantages now over Sun in 1994.
For a start, Microsoft has an extremely large user base who are going to end up using
.NET is already being ported to other platforms. Ximian are working on something for GNU/Linux, and MS even released their own source code demonstrating a FreeBSD
Java was on lots of platforms, but it was VERY limited in what it could do on each one.
Java limited people to one language, a language that many coders didn't like.
Either way,
I might not love Microsoft, but I have to hand it to them.. they're speculating, and I think it's the right one.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I can't wait for my day in court one of these days. I'm going ALL-OUT Microsoft Defense(tm)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
An interesting point, but one that is easily answered.
.NET. Okay, some things like 'Windows Forms' are a bit proprietary, but there's still tons of documentation for it. The Ximian guys are even going to be spinning their own compatible version.
.NET solution.
.NET framework on them. This means people can go out and buy Microsoft Office 2005, and it'll run on their PC, Mac, or Linux box. What has Microsoft lost here? Nothing really, infact, they're likely to gain market share.
.NET. Microsoft will lock coders into .NET with its own development systems.. and Microsoft won't care what operating system the resultant programs work on, as long as Microsoft is making money on a) the dev tools, b) sales of its own software across multiple platforms, c) sales of its server software across multiple platforms, and d) the 'faithful' who will stick with Microsoft's own OS.
Microsoft has totally opened up the specs to
But it doesn't matter if the users aren't running Microsoft's VM. Unlike in the old days, Microsoft is not going to get rich by selling its platform anymore. It's going to stay rich by providing the best
Let's jump ahead 3 years. Let's say that Linux and MacOS X have a perfect compatible
Look it in terms of the browser war. Microsoft gave away the browser, but locked developers into its solution with proprietary coding styles. Many pages only appear correctly in IE nowadays! The same will happen with
mogorific carpentry experiments
.NET is being considered serious by many groups who are not Microsoft advocates.
.NET after the Parrot implementation is done.
.NET environment, but not necessarily be strapped to Microsoft's OS. Microsoft doesn't seem to disapprove of this, and in fact highlights how you can port .NET to other operating systems!
For example, it has been mentioned in the Parrot FAQ that Perl 6 may well be developed for
Ximian's Mono project also goes a long way to demonstrate that there are plenty of people who want a
mogorific carpentry experiments
To me, application domination is acceptable- you can always dethrone an application by superior features. People are conscious of applications, they aren't infrastructure. In my mind, as long as something doesn't carry data or isn't infrastructure, it can be proprietary in its methods.
.Net from becoming a moving target.
This doesn't mean that open applications aren't great- what I mean by this is that we do not suffer nearly as much from closed applications as we do from closed infrastructure systems and closed file formats.
.Net has infrastructure elements, but those are remarkably well documented, and the need to standardize will keep major elements of
A
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
who had been given this case came to hate MS, in much the same way as the previous judge had. She hated them because they lied, they cheated and they were trying all kinds of tricks to sway her viewpoint.
Now imagine you were really set to hit them upside the head with a nasty verdict. What would be the smartest thing in the world to do. Right... keep quiet about it. Never give a hint or whiff that you felt that way, or you'd never get your chance to apply a verdict at all. You'd know the previous judge really f*cked up when he talked about the case, so you wont make the same mistake. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to guess what you were planning on doing.
This is clearly conjecture on my part, but god it would be nice if it was true.
counter-point to myself, to make this interesting -- MS does derive a significant portion of its income from pure investments because they have so much (oh, so much) cash, so
Clever point. You can make more cash from cash, so Microsoft could, in theory, keep making a profit every year even if they had absolutely no products and just made wise investments.
There's an idea.. they can give up software, and invest their money into Linux and cream the profits off of the next generation of computing!
mogorific carpentry experiments
I'm sorry but you are _way_ off here. If Microsoft is really betting on making alot of money directly with .NET then all I've got to say is good luck! Sure they can make money, but the corporation/profits will only be a tiny fraction of there current self. And do you honestly think that Office 2005 will even matter anymore? I hate to break it to you, but the office software market is only going to decline/homogenize. The webservices crap has yet to materialize and no one is making a ton of money there. IMHO, the technology/software sector is going to grow ever more boring over the coming years as linux/OS/FS moves in and commoditizes the market. At the very least, if you're looking for exciting developments, do not look at office software for chrissakes ;-)
I understand the point you're trying to make, but... I can already buy Office for Mac.
Sure thing Rilpley. Can you give me one reason people tie their work up in bloated, secret, propriatory formats that change once a year so that your previous work must be redone? Oh, that's right, people used Word because that's what the friendly M$ agent gave them in business school, then later it was the only comercial package that you could buy from a large retailer like Dell. So now with so many free alternatives available, you think people are going to continue to flog themsleves with M$ crap?
M$ is going to have to legislate themselves out of their current predicament. Their usual anti-competitive marketing policies will simply destroy their old friends. FUD is failing them as more people free themselves, and dumping is NOT something they can continue forever. Without some kind of horrid digital rights denial laws, the coomiditization of OS is the death of M$ and friends. If the feds want money from M$ they had better fine them or regulate them like tobaco. Otherwise M$ will slip away like glass bottle makers.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
They should do time.
Sling them in the slammer.
Probation after 12 months.
Computer no touchee for at least 3 years.
Why is that not too hash?
- They have created software which is so faulty that it's caused losses to other people counted in the Billions of Dollars. ( The cost of time needed to clean up after all the viruses and worms. )
- They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars.
- They have totally abused their monopoly position, and thus seriously impeded the progress of innovation in the data processing industry.
- They are now demanding money from people on a regular basis to provide continued access to their programs. In my country that's called a protection racket.
Those are the reasons why they are nothing more than a criminal gang and should do time.That's the part we're on, figuring out punishment. You see, first you find out whether or not they are going to be punished at all (they are) and then you figure out just how to do it. It might be slow, but things are happening and they will be punished.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
courts to microsoft: Your corporation has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Close or Ignore?
Microsoft has been clicking "ignore" for a while, but it looks like its no longer working. Lookes like they'll have to click "close"
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
Every piece of MS software I've used has been lightyears ahead of most other competing SW -- free or not, with the exception of Vis InterDev, Media Player, and VJ++ (ugh -- use JBuilder :-).
The REAL problem is that the reason they can develop such powerful software by paying for research/large dev teams and backing it is because they are already a juggernaut monopoly that needs to be checked. Because of that they shove it down everyones throats by patenting "intellectual property" as a reason to keep their formats closed while using things like undocumented APIs to gain tighter intergration.
I still say split MS into a SW and OS companies.
why run from Vincenzo?
He came to hate them too. And went too far as a result. MS turned that to their advantage, just as they did Jackson's missteps. Neither Jackson's or Sporkin's humiliations will be lost on this judge. She will be as careful as she can possibly be.
I think the first two came to hate MS because they could see clearly the utter contempt MS has for the justice system, or anyone else that might get in their way. MS is still at it in this new courtroom. Lies, half truths, FUD, remorselessness, arrogance, self-serving "compliance" and disrespect for the intellegence of the bench are usually not part of a winning formula in court. Eventually, MS will find a judge that does not get provoked, but simply hammers them with the law. Hopefully, this judge will be the one.
And you are 100% wrong. C# code is compiled into DotNet byte code, which is executed through a virtual machine. It works exactly like Java.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
My favorites:
...
1) Forced full and free release of all fileformats they created and will create in the last+next 10 years
2) Held liable for security flaws (this is one for another trial
3) Forced standards compilance for html
4) Some huge powerfull comittie above their head, that needs to approve the defaults and quality of all releases. Install ms haters in it
5) Absolute forbidden to arrange per-oem deals, one price policy, clear and open
6) Full refunds for all ever-bundled software!
...
1 and 5 seem to be the most feasible...
Of course, there is still bill-torture, per crash refunds,
...is that nobody ever does anything about it... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Your entire argument is sound, and what we would expect from a monopolistic MS. I would, however, like to think that maybe they're going to chill out a bit in the future, and leverage free operating systems for their own benefit.
Businesses can change. Just look at the story about Sony selling songs on the Net for 99 cents a pop.
mogorific carpentry experiments
.NET is already being ported to other platforms.
FUD. Of the roughly 1200 classes in Dotnet today, less than 200 are part of the ECMA standards (CLR, C Sharp). Most of the Dotnet functionality is contained in APIs such as Windows Forms and ADO.NET and these are not standardized, and are covered by a number of patents. Ximian may be attempting to clone them but any use of these components will entail risk. This is not the case with the Java (J2SE, J2EE) platform, which is well established on Linux and other OSes.
Two things:
Firstly, Microsoft has submitted a few of the .NET specs to ECMA. However, ECMA is a standards organistion that, unlike say the IETF or W3C, allows patented "standards". This means that Microsoft can, and almost certainly do, have patents on key parts of the .NET infrastructure. And that means that they can stop anybody they like from building a .NET implementation, if they so wish.
Secondly, I'd say Windows Forms is one of THE most important parts of the whole framework. Why did Java fail on the client side? Well, the general lameness of the MS virtual machine didn't help, but largely it was because the AWT sucked hard, and Swing was just as bad, except slower. The Java GUIs were always bad, basically. Also, if you look at the Windows Forms disassembled code, you'll see that really it's just a big wrapper around GDI+ - do you honestly think that MS will say "Whoa, we'd better not add feature X to WinForms because Linux/Mac doesn't support it". I mean really, is that likely?
But it doesn't matter if the users aren't running Microsoft's VM. Unlike in the old days, Microsoft is not going to get rich by selling its platform anymore. It's going to stay rich by providing the best .NET solution.
Providing the best .NET solution is easy when you own .NET
Let's jump ahead 3 years. Let's say that Linux and MacOS X have a perfect compatible .NET framework on them. This means people can go out and buy Microsoft Office 2005, and it'll run on their PC, Mac, or Linux box. What has Microsoft lost here? Nothing really, infact, they're likely to gain market share.
3 years? That's optimistic. Wine has been in development for 10 years or more, and they still haven't got a complete implementation of the windows APIs! I think it's pretty likely that Microsoft, with it's huge teams of developers, can outpace any Linux development team at .NET compatability. Maybe there will be .NET for the Mac, in fact I expect there will be, but that'd be bad news for the Mac in the long term too..... I know one thing though, MS hates Linux, never forget that. I seriously doubt they'd want to see a fully working .NET on Linux.
Oh, one last thing. Microsoft seems to have an institutional hatred of rewriting stuff. They did it for Windows, because Windows 9x was such a piece of trash, and now they say they're doing it for IIS, because IIS is getting its ass kicked by Apache. They once tried to rewrite Word though, the project was called Pyramid iirc, but it got cancelled early on, and written off as a huge mistake.
If one day a .NET version of Office does appear, what will it be? A port? A transition to Managed C++? Office bear in mind is surprisingly insular, and uses a lot of its own code which is already present in Windows. A proper, fully paid up .NET version would be a huge undertaking. Then they'd have to do IE, and then they'd hit problems with VM performance and so on. I think hoping that Microsoft, after all these years, will suddenly become "enlightened" and give away a large amount of its intellectual property and try and make money selling the best products is, well, massively over-optimistic.
Predicting judges' rullings from comments is difficult, but the language used here is as telling as we're likely to get.
The first rule of litigation is, "Don't piss off the judge." Microsoft violated this repeatedly in the original tri8al, and then drew a lucky break when the judge that they had utterly alienated (hey, judges get upset by perjury and frauds upon the court; guess which single group was *most* upset with Clinton?) ran off his big mouth and generally acted like the wrong end of a horse.
From the language she used, it looks like they're well on their way to alienating another.
hawk, esq.
They tossed out *everything* that Jackson did following his opening of his over-sized mouth to the press, on the grounds that he'd undermined credibilty of the system. THe court *explicitly* noted that they had not ruled out a breakup or any other remedy.
hawk, esq.
With .NET, the operating system is not as important as it once was.. in the future, a proper .NET program will run on any system that has a .NET compatible VM and the correct class libraries!
.NET Virtual Machines that will ever be 100% compatible with Office and other leading MS applications will be the one that Microsoft writes itself.
Funny, people were saying the same thing about Java five years ago.
The only
Do you honestly think Microsoft is going to maintain OS X or Linux/x86 versions of their VM with the same enthusiasm as their Windows VM's?
They have done crime with computers.
Who have? Gates and Ballmer? The executive VPs? Hundreds of developers? All Microsoft employees, inclusing the potwashers in the cafeteria?
They have created software which is so faulty that it's caused losses to other people counted in the Billions of Dollars. ( The cost of time needed to clean up after all the viruses and worms. )
1. Microsoft never created and released a product called MS Virus, nor MS Worm.
2. The losses that are reported due to virus attacks are 80% bullshit.
They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars.
IIRC the value of the raw chemicals that make up the human body is under $20. Should people be allowed to kill whatever people they want, so long as they pay twenty bucks?
Value of raw materials is not a meaningful indicator of total value.
They are now demanding money from people on a regular basis to provide continued access to their programs. In my country that's called a protection racket.
My landlady demands hundreds of dollars from me every month to provide continued access to my apartment. In my country that's called a lease.
You, Sir, are the idiot.
.NET will be ported to other OS's is an idiot.
.NET on FreeBSD is also nonsense?
Anyone who actually thinks that
So Ximian's Linux port is nonsense. Oh, and Microsoft's own source code for
I am, however, interested in this OCP thing you mention. What is it?
mogorific carpentry experiments
>This last motion was not really that out of line but a bit late and incorrect too.
Microsoft committed a no-no that can often be gotten away with in lower courts in lower profile cases with less competent judges.
Case law is a tricky thing, and any lawyer will try to use it to best advantage or to explain it away. No question.
There is however a line you must be careful to avoid crossing. When you say a holding says samething that it does not, you can be seen by the judge as saying that you don't think the judge knows the law or will bother reading the cases.
Good judges don't like that. Worse, judges will scrutinize your submissions all the more carefully when you have established that you are not trustworthy. In this case its even worse. Microsoft has high-priced lawyers. The judge will presume any attempts to mislead the court are the product of malice, not of incompetence (a presumption that most lower courts cannot safely make).
I think you actually believe that the justice system of the United States has something to do with "Truth" as a serious concept. Anybody outside the country can clearly see it does not.
The american justice and legal system is a wonderfully complex chess game. You find the cleverest way to use the law to avoid having to tell the truth, and you win.
Microsoft understand this very well.
As much as I love another opportunity to demagogue the issues of the trial and Microsoft's behavior, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the law, this isn't a big deal. It is pretty much pro forma to file a motion to dismiss at every opportunity. The denial of such motions is pretty common also when there is ANY appearence of merit to the case. A conclusion of law from a federal judge and the upholding of that conclusion by an appelate court pretty much ensures that motions to dismiss will not fly. That really has nothing to do with what the ultimate sanction will be.
In other words, this is just the normal grinding of the legal wheels. I am a dyed-in-the-wool MS hater (just so you know my prejudices), but when I sit back and really try to be objective about it, I'm not sure that I can think of a remedy that would be effective that would not also represent a fairly egregious exercise of state power. The best one I can think of would be a mammoth fine (and I mean mammoth). Breakup actually worked for me, but it seems clear the appeals court wasn't going for it (and I'd have had a 3-way split: OS, apps, and media holdings). Forced opening of code seems to me to be a seizure of property which, again given my limited knowledge, seems unprecedented in a case like this. Besides, John Locke would come back and haunt us...
No, I'm thinking a mammoth fine. Something that really devalues the company. Something that will make shareholders spank MS management if they behave this way ever again.
Complicated stuff...