Slashdot Mirror
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.
Ximian is based in Boston IIRC...
The anti-trust settlement...
-lacked any monetary payment by Microsoft to those that had been wronged by their greed.
-lacked any understanding about how money in Microsoft's hands means less money in other competitor's hands. Microsoft could then throw huge amounts of money into software development and the competition could not. So - this has resulted in MS having the ability to write so many more lines of code, AND the ability to buy other companies out for the code that someone else created... something that no one else could afford to do!
Instead of having a monetary settlement where every person get a few dollars/money from Microsoft (where only the class action lawyers get the money) it would be better if a revisited settlement included a payment, from Microsoft's 46 Billion dollars in cash (that billy G etc has on hand right now) a payment to be made to a trust fund controlled by Open Source Leaders (Linus, for example) where this money could be evenly spread out to projects (free and commercial software projects for Linux, Apple OS, BSD, etc) that are needed to compete with Microsoft.
This type of settlement would be fair. And a settlement like this would improve the competition to where Microsoft would really have to innovate in order to compete.
Bethanie: Whore...
Fan Whore
M$ licenses WinXP to Dell for $17 a copy and they sell it at stores for $300. What a bunch of assholes.
I think that's a verying good point! MS does NOT make their money from the individual consumer. They make it from the corporate sales and the large OEMs like Dell. If they are charging so little to OEMs but so much to consumers, they could probably drop the consumer price down to $50 for XP Pro and find the piracy rate dropping! Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50? And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
Space for rent, inquire within
And needless to say, the Massachusetts Attorney General's website is running Microsoft-IIS/6.0
200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 13:20:00 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50?
I wouldn't. The only reason i have a copy of XP Home is because i couldnt get the laptop i wanted without a microsoft os. (and before people start in on me about wiping it or the refund thing: i know i'm not gonna get a refund unless i can get a few thousand people to ask for one with me. The machine now dual boots xp and gentoo. I use the XP partition to play games like raven shield and star wars galaxies.)
And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
I would mind the bugs a lot. I would mind Microsoft's attitude towards the bugs a lot.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Good point... hadn't thought about that.
If that were too strict, they could always force them to release code the versions after they've "died"... that way people wouldn't be forced to upgrade, at least.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Actually, I have banking software that only works in windows (well it's more secure, what would you expect a bank to use?), it crashes 1 out 5 times I use it at a rough guess. But then that would probably be a hardware problem wouldn't it? Funny I don't have any hardware problems with the other dozen identical machines in the department that run another OS.
How about if they dropped their price 90+% like they did here in Thailand to fight the 100,000 new Linux computers the government is offering??? You and I probably still wouldn't (that probably is about you, not me), but a serious percentage of slashdot would have a copy, not to mention the rest of the world.
Put identity in the browser.
However, the final judgement entered on November 12, 2002 clearly says at the start: "AND WHEREAS, this Final Judgment does not constitute any admission by any party regarding any issue of fact or law". That is, the final judgement does not find Microsoft guilty of any so-called "unlawful conduct".
Clearly the issuer of this press release (presumably authorized by the AG) is attempting to make up their own interpretation of the Final Judgement, without regard to the actual contents of it.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
"whether the company had properly offered communications protocols allowing non-Microsoft software to work well with Windows"
This is a problem. One that made me decide to switch email clients. A while back, my prof. send me my mark back in an attached file. I did not not "get the attachment". I hounded him a couple of times for the mark. He insisted that he sent it to me. He even said that my reply had the file attached. I did some investigation, and found that the attached file was there, but wasn't showing up in the user interface. On further investigation, I found that this is an issue when Outlook XP recieves attachments from Pine. Microsoft was aware of the problem and had no plans to fix it.
I have no idea why Outlook XP would recieve an attachment from Pine and not show it. It would seem like the code would almost have to be made to purposely do that. Who knows, maybe it is a bug.
A few months later, switch over to Linux entirely. I now use evolution. I never looked back.
that way people wouldn't be forced to upgrade, at least
That's not 100% true. MS has a vested interest in getting you to shell out $$$ when they need it. Once a product version is desupported, all they would need to do is break backwards compatibility and you'd be left with soon to be useless code.
Also, the antitrust trial was based on illegal business practices, namely bundling (dumping). The DOJ would never have seeked a penalty to force MS to open up their code since it didn't address the original complaint directly. If the antitrust settlement had teeth, MS would be forced to stop all bundling of non-core software (ie. browser, media player, system utilities, editors, etc) with the OS -and- also bundling in the form of preinstallations with OEMs. To take it one theoretical step further, imagine if OEMs decided to image Linux on all systems and if people wanted windows, they'd have to purchase it separately at $200 a pop. You'd have a market flooded with Linux PCs and a rapidly declining Windows PC base as systems broke or were retired. Of course, since most users have a "good enough" mentality, few would choose to spend the extra $$$ and it would decimate MSs business, so there's no way in hell MS was ever going to let that happen.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I wouldn't. For me the primary issue has always been their license. They could be free, and it wouldn't matter. They could pay me and it wouldn't matter. I don't want to sign a license that gives someone else the right to say whether or not I can see my own files.
And that stupid bit about "alter, copy, or remove any files on your disk"... That just about takes the cake. When I create something on my computer it's mine, and neither MS nor any other company has any rights to it. So they couldn't *PAY* me to use their be-bugged system.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You don't seem to understand. The whole point of charging $189+ for retail is so when they come to OEMs and sell it for $50, they can also include $10-$20 of requirements, like don't include specific competitor products, don't modify the desktop in some way they don't like, etc. They still make a huge bundle (trivial development cost per license plus less packaging). If you could go out and buy Windows for $50, so could every OEM which means Microsoft would lose all control over dual boot setups, using non-MS products, etc. Since the government didn't want to force MS to sell windows at a reduced cost, they just made it so MS couldn't make contracts where you're not allowed to sell other OSs, dual boot setups, or include non-MS products as part of the bundle.