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.

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
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

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.

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.