Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Flouting DOJ Settlement?
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Washington Post, Microsoft is not adhering to the terms of its deal with the DOJ. Specifically, there are allegations that it is "trying to license key pieces of its technology at inflated rates" and "thwarting its antitrust settlement with the federal government". They're charging $100,000 just to see technical info about their communication protocols, and you only get $50,000 back if you decide you don't want to license them. Whoda thunk?"
They even had to set up a committee internally to make sure they didn't break the rules. Surely the DoJ wouldn't have given them such a limp-wristed settlement if it didn't believe they were honest people.
Oh hang on its only George Bush who lives in a 1950s "Wonderful Life" style world.
Is ANYONE suprised by this move ? M$ have also just bought some AV software, umm will they bundle theirs into the OS to drive other people away, its a shot in the dark, and against the DoJ settlement but it might just be true.
M$ know that with the massively pro-business pro-monopoly president there is right now that they have AT LEAST 5 more years before a President who might go after them. Add 5-10 years of DoJ cases and they might get the next numbskull to let them off.
The only hope for the US Software industry is if the EU crackdown.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
No, this is not a big surprise to the very large crowd of people who think MS got off lightly for what they have done.
The significance, though, is that there are still a couple of states (WV, MA, I think) holding out on the DOJ settlement.
Their case could be made stronger if they can show the settlement is not working properly.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
What they're doing might be immoral, but illegal? Hardly. If they ask 100k from everyone wanting to use the protocol they're not discriminating against anyone.
there are allegations that it is "trying to license key pieces of its technology at inflated rates" Doesn't the fact that they are trying to dump other pieces of technology balance this out, though? mmmmmm... $50 windows licenses.....
Anyone have a list of the protocols under discussion? The article refers to there being 133 protocols in the package, and there are claims (refuted by MS) that some of them are in the public domain (by which I suspect they mistakenly include open source solutions like Samba).
So, what protocols are they? I'm certain that a large number haven't been externally engineered, but I'd be willing to bet that quite a few have, or that they originate from public protocols that MS has since modified.
love that sig...
p ?s t=1&c=223
but i laught at it
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.as
128k, you were priveliged, now wait until this ends up as a "my computer was crapper than yours" thread
whats the lowest oldest 'puter any programmed BASIC on...
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
How does this effect reverse engineering projects such as Samba (smb) and Gaim (MSN)? Is it free if you can figure it out using a packet sniffer?
----
"M$ know that with the massively pro-business pro-monopoly president "
We don't have one. Perhaps you are thinking of the very misleading hype about "media concentration"?
Did you know that if Clear Channel doubled the number of stations it now holds, it would have less than 20% of radio stations.
"Oh hang on its only George Bush who lives in a 1950s "Wonderful Life" style world."
Erm, he's moving us away from eras like the 50s when taxes were extremely high.
It is mentioned in the article, and in some comments before mine, that the DOJ seems to be scared of Microsoft. Indeed, the behaviour even seems to suggest it - they are behaving very trepidatiously, despite their obvious power within the US.
My question is, why are they scared? What have they to be scared of?
Oh, they manage. They financial statements show that they spend just over $1.1bn per quarter on R&D.
Because people will buy it regardless? The effort is not primarily to make their "stuff" better, but to develop new stuff - think X-box, DRM, etc.
Hi!
open all the information on their protocols to the general public.
Are you sure about that statement? 'General Public'?
I thought it was more like they could offer it to different people for different rates. Can you backup the 'general public' claim?
From the article.
...One unusual provision, however, allows Microsoft to license some of the code -- known as communication protocols -- to outside companies on "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory" terms.
So no, they're not breaking the DOJ settlement unless you consider 100k fee unreasonable and discriminatory.
Unreasonable? Hardly, in a business world that money is peanuts.
Discriminatory? Nope. As far as we know, they're asking the same price from everyone. And before someone claims that price that high is discriminatory I have few things to ask from you.
Is Ferrari discriminating against me because I'm too poor?
If Discriminatory clause refers to price everyone should be able to get it, why would the reasonable price clause exist?
Is that while MS is flagrantly ignoring the DOJ settlement with our Gov't our tax dollars are also being used to promote MS in global markets. Why wasn't the removal of that support a part of the DOJ settlement?
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
http://www.lindows.com/lindows_michaelsminutes_arc hives.php?id=66
"Microsoft routinely offers financial inducements to computer companies to not carry LindowsOS computers. With $40 billion in the bank, it's an easy decision for them to use a few million dollars to block Lindows.com from major retailers."
We all know that MS is good at copying, but poor at actually 'innovating'.
Ironically, the reverse is usually true for OSS.
Yes, I know that better tech doesn't always win (Beta vs VHS), but if an OSS solution is found to this problem, MS can follow or get out of the way.
The key is to put the shoe on the other foot - force MS's compatabillity with OSS protocols, rather than the other way around. A tough road indeed, but one that we'd better get used to.
Look at Flash (not too long;), there was tech that was released by one company and went on to become a web standard. Everyone has the flash plugin, and if they don't, they can get it easily.
This was a tough story to write a comment to - it was like pointing up and saying, "The sky is blue! What can we do?"
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. The whole point of copyright is that the author controls supply. In this case, Microsoft doesn't want to supply the market at all. The only reason they do, is because their DOJ settlement requires it.
Like oil and water, Republicans and antitrust don't mix.
I worked in the state AG's office in the antitrust division during 3 AG's tenures. When we went from a Democrat to a Republican, we were told there were certain types of cases we were just not going to bring. Ever.
Now I am all for the American Way and for business making a buck. It ain't Romper Room out there. The Fed is supposed to level the playing field for fair competition. I guess "fair" can be defined several diferent ways, depending on who contributes to your campaign.
Write to those Congressmen, people. They are working on your dime.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
I don't know what it worse, being such a bald-faced liar to say those things, or to be the complete intellectual moron to believe those statements.
" Typical conservative view point"
Yes, in defense of rights for people, not governments.
"Making arguments that have no founding."
They all are founded in fact.
"How is the International Criminal court a Kangaroo COurt"
Because it has sloppy standards, and is easily used for show trials. There are a bunch of Vichy's in France who want to use it in an antisemitic fashion agaisnt Ariel Sharon.
"(And as an Aussie I take offense that Kangaroo is used in the negative)"
Why don't you go put another prawn on the Barbie.
"I love how anything anti-Israel is anti-semetic"
Why do you love it? It is a fact, and it is disappointing. The common denominator of hatred of Israelis is hatred of Jewish people.
"The UN resolutions were that Zionism (which is the official idealogy of israel) is rascist."
If anything is racist, it is this resolution. It was put in place when the UN was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi. It was pushed by a number of nations that had laws to punish people for being Jewish (Arab states, USSR, etc). Zionism was a necessary reaction to prevalent policies.
"How can you say Kyoto has nothing to do with the environment. Reducing emissions is all about the environment."
There is no evidence that these emissions affect climate one way or another. The Kyoto accords are all political: notice how they let China get away with increased "greenhouse emissions". If it had anything to do with the environment (making that assumption), it would reduce the emissions for everyone.
"No doubt you will pick up on my typos/grammar errors to slap me down and prove u are right."
No, I deal in meaningful facts. I almost corrected the typos in the "quotations", but was typing too fast to bother.
The closest I got to punch cards was fortran. I can only imagine. Remembering to put characters on the 7th column was annoying enough.
I think the earliest recollection I have is some form of BASIC on an Atari800 which predated my programming (out of order) experience on a PET.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
http://www.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.as px?JobID=b0e72d5b-89f2-41ed-bb86-36928c903514
MS hires bigtime for its legal department. It has a budget bigger than the DOJ and more experienced lawyers. Look at http://www.idg.net/english/crd_gates_888634.html
Bill "Nuke 'Em" Neukom built a 600 lawyer in-house team for MS. There are 9,000 lawyers in the DOJ. According to the 2003 Budget at http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/2003summary/html/atr.htm
The DOJ spent 100,000,000 on ALL cartel activity, not just MS.
The DOJ is outgunned.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Their reasoning was they didn't want corporations to become more powerful than the government, and hence, have influence over it.
BTW, if you think corruption is bad today, read all about Teddy, he started his political career fighting corruption that was taking place basically out in the open.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
This is way offtopic, but the history of this movie fascinates me. "It's a Wonderful Life" was released in '46, received mixed reviews, nominated for some awards, but sank into obscurity. It fell out of copyright and into the public domain in 1974. And because of THAT, TV stations, starting mainly with PBS, picked it up for FREE and started broadcasting it at Christmas. It became one of the most loved, most aired Christmas movies ever. All because it went into the public domain.
r eviews.colossus.net/movies/i/its_won derful.htmlo vies/wonderfu l_life.html
U TF -8&q=%22It%27s+a+wonderful+life%22+public+domain&b tnG=Google+Search
Well, until 1993, when some copyright sleight-of-hand pulled it out of PD.
RIAA? MPAA? DMCA? hello? is this thing on?
references:
http://slate.msn.com/id/1004242/
http://movie-
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/greatm
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=
Generally, in war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. To capture the enemy's entire army is better than to destroy it; to take intact a regiment, a company, or a squad is better than to destroy them. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.
Microsoft's tactics of decimation and delay benefit no one. They are needlessly beligerent, and have managed to make an enemy of almost everyone. In the process they have also earned, EARNED, a reputation for shoddy product at expensive prices.
This is no "brilliant" plan. It is the work of a thug who thinks that he can bully the entire world. News flash: the world at some point gets tired of this shit.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I had a number of computers with 1mhz processors and 4k ram. I love looking at my old Kilobyte magazines and seeing advertisements for 4k memory boards for $600 and more :)
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
If you are an American, a USian, you are (it appearts anyway) woefully uneducated about our own history. A prime example, probably everyone has heard of it, the boston tea party. That was a significant active protest in the middle of a boycott against the monopoly corporation called the british east indies company, that used the "government" at the time as it's muscle. Of course nowadays the regimists and the apologists would call that "terrorism", even though they claim to be proud of it, if the exact same tactics are used today they somehow become magically wrong, no matter the issue, or the importance of an issue, or the ramifictions of ignoring an issue. Well, yes, yes it was, that's why the entire deal was called the "revolutionary + war", when it finally became necessary to remove ourselves from from being FIRST warred upon "legally" by that feudal/corporate/governmental melded structure known as great britain, an imperial power known for it's blackmail and extortion rackets, simply because they thought they were big enough to always do it by force. And the reason why that happened was because the corporations back then subverted that government, and (re)created what we know call corportism, or fascism. Enough people who were being abused and extorted against finally saw it, and in nation after nation,using various techniques of protest, from extreme pacifism to extreme violence the british got kicked out, and rightly so. Took awhile but it happened, and it took all those techniques to accomplish.
Flash forward a few centuries, it's the same deal all over again, just this time the global corporate extortioners and their mercenary muscle are more sophisticated, have a lot more technology, and use more psychological manipulative efforts to keep people literally brainwashed into being perpetual victims. It's a forced "stockholme syndrome" propaganda effort that is amazingly successful, that I will give them, they suceeded.
But $100,000 to get access to 133 communications protocols doesn't sound all that expensive. What does an intel P4 bus license cost? How much would you expect to pay to get access to someone else's engineering work.
Any company that's going to try to make a MS compatible network product of some sort is going to spend many multiples of this number on the engineering effort for even a trivial product. M$ has some pretty aweful marketing practices and gross business practices, but this is far from the worst. This doesn't seem out of line with the costs to license other proprietary technology in the marketplace.
This created a whole independent industry, where before, only Western Electric made most of that stuff. Today you can buy everything from a phone from a central office switch from multiple vendors, and they all interoperate properly.
The same thing happened over a decade previously with IBM. At one time, you could only buy IBM peripherals from IBM. IBM lost an antitrust case, had to disclose their interfaces six months before they shipped a product that used them. The third-party disk drive industry was born. This forced price competition in disk drives, and started the fiercely competitive disk industry that we know today.
That's what was supposed to happen with Microsoft. That's what antitrust law is supposed to do.
One option at this point is for the Justice Department to go back to the court and say "well, disclosure didn't work, we're going to have to go back to breaking up Microsoft". That's an option, probably for the next post-Bush administration.
OK. 16K RAM Trash 80 model I using cassette as main (disk) storage. Wrote a business App in basic back in '79 that was used by a multi-site business to calculate profitability by site and provide input to manager bonuses.
...
Commerical Library circulation app written in basic in '80 on a CBM 8032 (32K RAM). We did cheat and use a DTL basic compiler to get it to fit.
Lowest memory, original Sinclair, 1K RAM programmed in basic. Used it to play around and write stuff for the kids. Also used it for Z80 asm learning but that is out of scope of this thread.
Also several cash NCR registers were programmed in basic (2950, 215x, and one I forget). I forget the memory size. I used them for programming '80 for accepting credit cards at the gas pump for fleet management software. Kind of an interesting Basic, had async I/O.
Then there was the DEC 10 and DEC 20, oh, yeah and PDPs and
A few years ago, a Scientology critic joked about hitting one of their compounds with a Tom Cruise Missle.
I believe he's still trying to get political asylum in Canada. No joke. Haven't heard much lately about the poor bugger.
Bush is evil because he chose the most expensive and damaging possible solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein. He justified taking this step rather than looking for a better solution because he claimed Iraq was a clear and immediate danger, about the only legal justification for an unprovoked attack. It turns out, as most critics claimed, that Iraq was not an immediate danger; and the latest news is that it is likely that Bush knew it at the time. Bush didn't qualify his statements then, didnâ(TM)t allow anyone independent to see his evidence and make an independent judgment (supposedly for national security reasons), and even now he is claiming the WMD are sure to be found. He asked us to believe his unsupported accusations, and months later, the evidence that was so clear then is not good enough to help find the WMD now.
Clinton supposedly got impeached for lying, not for what he did. Why shouldn't Bush pay the same price for lying, even if you approve of the outcome? I'd certainly say the stakes were higher in Bush's case.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
The Clinton situation was not as cut-and-dried as you make it out here. Clinton gave a clever answer to a question that may have been technically true, but gave a mistaken impression.
Bush made all sorts of claims about a link between bin Laden and Iraq, about Iraqi development of nuclear weapons, and about how Iraq was an immediate danger to the United States. None of these claims has been proven, despite 2 months of unfettered access to Iraq, and all indications are that Bush knew his claims were doubtful at the time he was making them.
I think both of these men have played fast and loose with the truth, whether or not they technically lied. Whether you approve or disapprove of the actions justified by the lies shouldn't matter; if you can't trust the word of the president, the country is in big trouble. Maybe the next action Bush justifies with lies will be something you disapprove of.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Even though they are in an industry leading position, they refuse to lead; they would rather be an annoyance and a barrier to everyone who isn't in bed with them. Quite sad.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
It hasn't. Corporations are still overtaxed and over-regulated.
...since those who are anti-Bush are typically so because they hate the country and its people.
By what standard?
In 2000, the United States payed US corporations over $250 billion in corporate subsidies (or "welfare," as it is known if provided to individuals). Meanwhile, neither GE nor Microsoft payed *any* taxes in 1999, and very little in subsequent years.
Yes, I know that 10% of the US population payed 30% of the taxes collected; but that 10% accounted for over 40% of the income! Now, with Bush's new tax breaks, the rich pay even *less* in taxes. By casting the deciding vote, Cheney earned $80k in reduced taxes this year. That's more than 90% of the population makes in regular income!
Huh? What kind of rhetorical idiocy is this? I am definitely anti-Bush, as his imperialistic agenda has made the United States look like a lieing bully to the rest of the world. He has lied to the world, he has lied to the citizens of his own country, and he is quite likely leading the US into the worst recession since the great depression. His only redeeming quality is that he seems hell-bent on destroying the rest of the world, too.
The harm he is causing the country and the world will take years to repair. The lies he has propogated for his agenda have already destroyed US credibility. (Which lies, you ask? Most of the documents presented as "proof" of Iraq's guilt have been shown to be crude forgeries, or misrepresentation of the facts.)
Dude, face it: GW Bush is raping his own country with a large-bore artillery cleaning brush, and almost half the country is saying, "Give me more! It's not big enough!"
I love the US. We are truly a great country, with all our flaws. And I consider it my patriotic duty to question every action of the president (and the other representatives); otherwise, how can we be sure he is not squandering that greatness on evil?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.