Massachusetts Probing Microsoft Settlement Gripes

tassii writes "In this article from Reuters, Massachusetts' DA's office told the judge in the Microsoft Anti-trust trial that it was looking into Microsoft settlement complaints. Among complaints being examined by Massachusetts was whether Microsoft had violated portions of the settlement prohibiting pacts requiring exclusive support of Microsoft software. Massachusetts was also examining whether the company had properly offered communications protocols allowing non-Microsoft software to work well with Windows." An Associated Press article covers the same story; the non-Microsoft software mentioned in both stories is Linux, but it's not clear which company's promotion of Linux is drawing the attention.

Comments

Re:Wow

[KiahZero]

If I recall correctly, problem was when the first judge talked out of turn to the press, the government felt they had to ease up on the restrictions so people wouldn't feel that they were being too hard on Microsoft.

In retrospect, no one seems to care what happens to corporate criminals (excluding Martha Stewart, but that's just because she, as Lewis Black said "made us feel bad about using parsley as a garnish").

I used to think that breaking MS up would have been a bad idea... now I'm wondering if it was the only feasible situation.

MS evil? That's news to me

[UnknowingFool]

We all knew this would happen. The only question was when and if anybody noticed. Unfortunately, one of MS defences has always been ignorance. They can claim that they are so big that they don't know sometimes what each section of the company is doing. Take for example the iLoo fiasco. Cynics like me think that the negative public reaction forced them to retract their statements. Billy G has always had a firm grasp of his company. Even though publicly he isn't running the company, as the major stockholder, he would be stupid not to be in charge. MS is still doing business as usual, now they are not so blatant about it.