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

Microsoft settlement lacked any Monopoly Money

[bethane]

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.

Re:Thank goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ licenses WinXP to Dell for $17 a copy and they sell it at stores for $300. What a bunch of assholes.

Re:Thank goodness

[Aadain2001]

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?

Mass powered by ASP.NET

[GillBates0]

The state also complained that its investigation of Microsoft has been hampered by the Justice Department and some other states enforcing agreements that preclude any of the states from cooperating with Massachusetts."The exclusion of Massachusetts has been effective and complete," the state said.

And needless to say, the Massachusetts Attorney General's website is running Microsoft-IIS/6.0

200 OK
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Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 13:20:00 GMT
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Re:Thank goodness

[Darth]

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.

Re:Wow

[KiahZero]

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.

Re:Anti-MS FUD

[tarquin_fim_bim]

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.

Factual error by Massachusetts AG

[Moooo Cow]

Quoting the Massacusetts AG: "In November 2002, following an appeal and several court hearings, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a judgment in the Massachusetts case prohibiting Microsoft from continuing certain unlawful conduct." [emphasis mine]

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.

protocol problems, eh? you don;'t say!

[Eminor]

"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.