Microsoft Settles Be Antitrust Suit for $23.25M

ewhac writes "Without admitting wrongdoing, Microsoft today agreed to pay $23,250,000 to Be, Inc., to settle anti-trust claims against the software giant. The payout is anticipated to be used to complete the orderly dissolution of the company. Shortly after announcing sale of key assets to Palm, Be, Inc., filed suit against Microsoft in February 2002, alleging destruction of its business via illegal exclusionary and anti-competitive business practices."

Comments

It is suggested

[mao che minh]

How does one willingly pay $25,250,000, without trial, and not admit to wrong doing? An admittance of guilt is suggested under such circumstances.

Re:It is suggested

[nairb107]

Very Carefully.

Re:It is suggested

[sixdotoh]

i remember reading in a section in ... i think it was Pride Before Fall. It went something like, If McDonalds or (some other company i don't remember) were in this (the anti-trust) situation they would've been at the DoJ's door begging please, whatever we can do to make the problem go away.

sorry the quote is so bad, but i think it perfectly illustrates MS's attitude towards all this legal stuff. that they are just so arrogant and think themseleves above it all.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's proportional. Microsoft has billions so $25mil is like going to the corner store for a coke.

Re:It is suggested

[GigsVT]

Yeah, but it's pretty standard boilerplate in a settlement that the settling party admits no wrongdoing.

It's mostly to keep it from being used against them later in court, when other people sue them for the same type of thing.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably easiest for all concerned, really.

Be won't have the money to fight a really extended suit, Microsoft doesn't want to expend the manhours to defend itself, and $25m is in comparison a tiny molecule of water in the bucket.

Re:It is suggested

[smittyoneeach]

When 8 figures amounts to decimal dust, who cares?
Probably a fraction of what the lawyers were paid, anyway.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as someone who pays $3500 to DirecTV or $699 to SCO because it's easier than fighting a suit is probably guilty of something? When you're as (undeservedly) rich as Microsoft is, one of the key benefits is being able to buy off nearly any litigant.

"Guilt" in this context is a legal term, and can only be settled by a trial in a court of law. Do I think they should be found guilty? Sure. Is it likely they would be, just because it's just, right and true? Probably not, but maybe. They have the ability to buy certainty, rather than trusting a jury of their peers (a laughable term if there ever was one - who's a peer to Microsoft?). The legal system allows them to, and unfortunately it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise in civil trials. Other than not permitting obscene amounts of money to accumulate where they can do so much harm, I mean.

Re:It is suggested

[tricknology]

Not at all. With all the cash MS has in the bank, it is cheaper and easier to just pay up and move on. Simple business.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in court. There is no such thing as common sense in court. Only laws as they are written, and the interpretation of such presented most convincingly.
Don't confuse yourself for one moment that morality and logic have anything to do with law.

Re:It is suggested

[penguin7of9]

How does one willingly pay $25,250,000, without trial, and not admit to wrong doing?

That's lost in the noise for Microsoft. A single court appearance would probably cost them more. This is simply a cheap settlement of a nuisance lawsuit for Microsoft.

Re:It is suggested

[boneshintai]

It's mostly to keep it from being used against them later in court, when other people sue them for the same type of thing.

I believe that was the grandparent's point. A settlement this large is a de facto admission of wrongdoing, regardless of the wording of the settlement. This should be usable against them in court in the future, whether they want it to be or not. It's no longer up to them, ideally.

They are paying off a complaint because they do not feel that the legal system, which is ultimately designed to protect the innocent[0] will protect them. Ergo they must feel, on some level, that what they did is seen by the masses as wrong.

Legal boilerplate should never overrule common sense, but it does. Frequently.

[0] implementation consequences notwithstanding, that is the intent.

Re:It is suggested

[msobkow]

When your bank balance is in the billions, would you worry about spending less than 1% of the total to avoid the risk of being found guilty in court?

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

It really has nothing to do with what they "admit" or "feel" -- A federal court found them to be an illegally maintained monopoly, and that means cash in the bank for anyone who was competing against them.

Settling these cases gets them out of the quarterly reports and gets Wall Street to stop thinking about MS's legal problems.

Also, this settlement is jackshit. Even DR-DOS got more money.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you'll have to talk to Be. Remember, here is what happened:

Be: You are a monopoly and screwed us.
MS: I we give you $25 million will you drop that?
Be: Okay

So there is no more complaint. They worked it out. It doesn't matter if they feel they were wrong, because there is no problem anymore.

If Be had wanted, they could have told MS to shove it. They didn't.

Re:It is suggested

[1029]

Gee, thats such an astute observation...

Of course it is totally wrong. It is called a settlement for a reason. You settle the dispute without any more court hearings and without admitting to anything. You simply pay an amount of money you find acceptable to not have to deal with the situation anymore.

Why is it that because MS can afford $23million without blinking that they must be admiting guilt? Would it be the same if the settled for $1 million, $1000, $1? Because all of those amounts are too much for MS to simply toss out there to get things done with and over.

That said, past behavior dictates erring on the side of MS using illegal tactics to squash competition. But it still doesn't mean paying $23mil means admission of anything, other than admission that MS has at least $23 mil in the bank.

Re:It is suggested

[cubicledrone]

A single court appearance would probably cost them more.

Oh, stop it.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you don't believe it? The bad PR, the distraction of management, etc. would be extremely costly.

Re:It is suggested

[Penguinshit]

Actually what this is, is an admission by Be that they'd rather save something to pay off the investors and/or creditors rather than be economically litigated into the ground by Microsoft.

Remember folks, Microsoft's war chest is so great that it actually economically litigated the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE into the ground, forcing the Feds and multiple individual States to "settle" for a bag of peanut shells and a waggling finger.

If you can keep a court case going by filing motion after motion, continuance after continuance, and then appeal after appeal, eventually the other party will run out of money or lose interest and go away.

Basically, during a conference call between Be's lawyers and Microsoft's lawyers, the group representing Microsoft told the group representing Be that they were prepared to spend at least 2x the remaining assets of Be to "defend themselves" and wouldn't it be in the best interests of Be to obtain *something* to return to the poor shareholders rather than see it all turn to dust with nothing in return.

You run out of money, you run out of lawyers... that's a simple and sad fact.

I've been party to such conference calls (on both sides). It's a dirty, pathetic business.

Re:It is suggested

[odin53]

How does one willingly pay $25,250,000, without trial, and not admit to wrong doing? An admittance of guilt is suggested under such circumstances.

You misunderstand the meaning of a settlement. Remember that BOTH parties must agree to the terms of their settlement. Parties will generally settle only if it's worth it to them -- that is, the plaintiff will settle at X dollars if it's comfortable that X dollars compensates them for whatever they're suing for, after weighing the probability that they (the plaintiff) will win. A defendant will settle at X dollars if it's comfortable that X dollars is less than what the plaintiff is suing for, after weighing the probability that they (the defendant) will lose.

If you still think that one may infer "guilt" from the fact of settlement, think about it this way: in a sense, you could say that a settlement is an admission by the plaintiff that it is probably wrong -- that's why it settled for less than it was suing for.

Re:It is suggested

[marx]

Remember folks, Microsoft's war chest is so great that it actually economically litigated the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE into the ground, forcing the Feds and multiple individual States to "settle" for a bag of peanut shells and a waggling finger.

That's not what happened though. The DOJ won the case, but then the government changed, and with that the DOJ, into a Republican government. So then the DOJ essentially dropped the case.

Re:It is suggested

[Penguinshit]

Actually, the DOJ "won" the *initial* case. Then Microsoft appealed (would have appealed regardless, except in the extremely-unlikely event of a total vindication). During the appeal process the administration changed and the DOJ backed down.

However, prior to administration change, the DOJ was winding down on stamina. Remember, this had gone on for some 5 years. Once the Feds dropped off, so did the individual states (regardless of political affiliations).

Re:It is suggested

[BrokenHalo]

They are paying off a complaint because they do not feel that the legal system, which is ultimately designed to protect the innocent[0] will protect them.

Fair enough; but there's also the consideration that $23E6 is probably not a whole lot of money to Microsoft, and it is probably worth it to avoid a noisy lawsuit for unconscionable practices at a time when they are taking a lot of heat for selling a faulty product.

Re:It is suggested

[jskline]

Actually that is right. Microsoft DOES think themselves better than anyone else. And worse yet; that 25 mil... is just a drop from the bucket. It will hurt them NOT!

Microsoft will continue its tredge of killing any and all competing systems via underhanded means. They have so much power and clout now that they are pretty much unstoppable.

You CANNNOT buy a laptop from anywhere (except used) without a manditory copy of Windows XP installed on it... Pretty sad... paying all that Micro$oft tax and all.

Cheers;
Jeff

Re:It is suggested

[richy freeway]

I believe Asus in Europe will sell you a laptop with no OS installed.

Re:It is suggested

[CordMeyer]

My PowerBook didn't come with Windows. ;)

Re:It is suggested

[Politas]

Also, this settlement is jackshit. Even DR-DOS got more money.

DR-DOS was a product that was actually selling for a long time, and was even being pre-loaded before MS killed them with shonky license deals.

Be just never got off the ground, because MS already had the licence deals in place. It's harder to place value on a potential.

Re:It is suggested

[Pros_n_Cons]

How does one willingly pay $25,250,000, without trial, and not admit to wrong doing? An admittance of guilt is suggested under such circumstances.

Well, not exactly. To most companys 23 million is worth fighting for, but for M$ 20 million is lunch money. If I owned the company I'd rather fork over $100 million then allow other OS's to come pre-installed, everyone knows its already becomming thier only shot at survival. (lockins)

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if MS had a history of settling cases you would be right. But they didn't even settle in the anti-trust suit by the DOJ, even when it looked like they were going to lose (and in fact, they did lose, but that's beside the point).

If they settled in this case they must have felt there was no way they otherwise were going to win this thing. Not legal, and not illegal.

Ofcourse, when you look at the actual claims you can see that MS was one of the major reasons behind Be's failure as a business. Be had companies lined up to sell their OS as a dual-boot option, and MS decreed "no", so Be was screwed. The BeOS really was wildly ahead of its time, and its competitors (if you never ran it, you missed out). If given an honest chance, it would likely have grabbed a sustainable niche, like the MacOS.

Re:It is suggested

[md65536]

I agree. But Microsoft's concern with cash isn't like normal people's concern with cash, that if we use it unwisely or extravagantly, we'll run out. For MS, it's not always a matter of getting as much money for themselves as it is a matter of keeping it away from others, especially serious competitors (ie. those they want to "extinguish"). It's probably ok to hand over cash only after the extinguishing is done.

To maintain its monopoly, MS really must extinguish its competitors. If BeOS were easily dual-booted, more people would consider BeOS applications (the "OS barrier" would erode), and eventually more would be written (the "applications barrier" would erode). MS currently maintains both barriers, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to maintain the monopoly against all the competing and/or superior products out there. If MS doesn't completely destroy even small competitors, there will always be a foot in the door leading to further threats of competition.

What we really need is a competing OS that has a full suite of applications, both of which are freely developed by anyone who wishes to, rather than being controlled by a single corporation, and it will probably need to be possible to buy a computer with these pre-installed, for it to truly break both of the barriers mentioned above. Then, the only barrier will be in the mind -- the fact that people don't yet know about the potential of the OS and its applications, or that they're not yet ready to accept it over what it replaces. When that happens (it seems to be beginning), there will begin to be true competition for MS.

Now... MS products aren't all completely crap. But they must be seriously scared of anyone who can get their foot in the door, because a lot of their dominant products are dominant only because of monopoly. They're like someone viciously squashing mosquitos because they're terrified of West Nile virus.

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

who's a peer to Microsoft?

IBM. We could ask them for a verdict ;)

Re:It is suggested

[Alan Partridge]

But it DID have IE preinstalled.

That should change RSN.

Re:It is suggested

[usotsuki]

Remember it was SCOrdure that sued M$ over DR DOS.

-uso.

Re:It is suggested

[darien]

If given an honest chance, it would likely have grabbed a sustainable niche, like the MacOS.

In fact, given that it came out several years before Mac OS X and ran on cheap commodity hardware that could also boot into Windows for games etc., it could have supplanted the Mac entirely. *sigh*

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

And if your bank account is billions you are allowed to commit crimes and not be actually punished

Re:It is suggested

[spectecjr]

Actually, the DOJ "won" the *initial* case. Then Microsoft appealed (would have appealed regardless, except in the extremely-unlikely event of a total vindication). During the appeal process the administration changed and the DOJ backed down.

However, prior to administration change, the DOJ was winding down on stamina. Remember, this had gone on for some 5 years. Once the Feds dropped off, so did the individual states (regardless of political affiliations).

Nice theory. However, the US Government happily had the stamina to sue IBM for a decade. Perhaps, just perhaps, they didn't have as strong a case as they'd hoped.

Re:It is suggested

[eddie can read]

They are paying off a complaint because they do not feel that the legal system, which is ultimately designed to protect the innocent[0] will protect them. Ergo they must feel, on some level, that what they did is seen by the masses as wrong.

You're confusing a lot of things.

1) What a judge will rule is not equal to what the masses think, so your comment about the masses doesn't follow from their action.

2) Just because the justice system is "designed" to protect the innocent doesn't mean it actually protects the innocent, so your comment about feeling or not feeling innocent doesn't follow from their action.

There is the chance of an unjust ruling which has to be taken into consideration when deciding whether to settle.

There are the costs of defending themselves in court which may or may not be recovered by the innocent party.

3) Your logic applies also to Be, since the fact that they settled could be taken to suggest that they don't think they have much of a case.

Re:It is suggested

[Jon Abbott]

DR-DOS was a product that was actually selling for a long time, and was even being pre-loaded before MS killed them with shonky license deals.

Not only were they killed by bad licensing deals, they were killed when Microsoft added code to Windows 3.x which made installing it on DR-DOS impossible. The code was along the lines of:

1. run "ver"
2. check for "MS" in output string
3. if "MS" is not found, give a vaguely worded error, and don't install Windows

And people wonder why I don't like Microsoft...

Re:It is suggested

[Locutus]

it seems to have been missed but the $23 million to BE Inc was AFTER LEGAL FEES. Who knows how much they(lawyers) negotiated for. I'm with you though, Microsoft seems to have a standard of around $150 million which they'll pay for hijacked technology or will pay for the right to make sure Windows REMAINS DOMINANT( in this case ).

LoB

Re:It is suggested

[Locutus]

the awareness is already starting. I met someone at a party who works for Time-Warner/Roadrunner and they are well aware of GNU/Linux. A friend and her 2 daughters now run GNU/Linux because they got sick of Windows getting virii and breaking( I set the system up for them ). And recently, my younger brother tried a Knoppix CD I gave him and is now replacing MS Windows with GNU/Linux.

The awareness is starting to take hold and every win32 email virus, every win32 worm, and every MS Windows system crash opens their eyes to this thing called GNU/Linux that they keep hearing about. IMHO.

LoB

Re:It is suggested

[Daniel Phillips]

Gee, thats such an astute observation...
Of course it is totally wrong. It is called a settlement for a reason. You settle the dispute without any more court hearings and without admitting to anything. You simply pay an amount of money you find acceptable to not have to deal with the situation anymore.

You need to be pretty gullible to think that Microsoft would settle any case they thought they could win.

Re:It is suggested

[Xerithane]

You need to be pretty gullible to think that Microsoft would settle any case they thought they could win.

A lengthy trial brings in negative press, lawyer fees, and other expenses that can easily go into the several millions. My guess is they figured that the $23M was a cheaper route than taking it to trial.

Re:It is suggested

[sootman]

But to most people, $23M is a lot of money. Are you saying that anyone should be able to do anything without question as long as they're able to settle for less than 0.1% of their net worth? I know the point of settling without admitting is the same as "it's cheaper for us to settle than to fight" but c'mon, $23fuckingMillion? Like James Garner said in "Barbarians at the Gates (no pun intended)", "That's like trying to sweep a ton of elephant shit under the rug."

You're right, it's an imperfect system; scarily similar to cops who say "If you weren't guilty, why did you run (from four big men in dark suits with guns)?" But there are limits.

Re:It is suggested

[Daniel Phillips]

"You need to be pretty gullible to think that Microsoft would settle any case they thought they could win."

A lengthy trial brings in negative press, lawyer fees, and other expenses that can easily go into the several millions. My guess is they figured that the $23M was a cheaper route than taking it to trial.

Look in the mirror, is the person you see there gullible or not?

Or perhaps you see an ammnesiac there: Microsoft has never settled any suit where it wasn't obviously going against them.

Re:It is suggested

[PriceyLaw]

The settlement agreement would state that the company denies liability. That protects the company from being forever precluded from denying liability (res judicata). But the fact that the company settled the case, and its terms (who paid who and how much) are not rendered inadmissible. The fact of settlement, if relevant, could be admitted in any future litigation and a jury could reasonably conclude, as posters suggest, that a company wouldn't pay that sort of money if it had a defensible case.

Re:It is suggested

[LittleVito]

Actually, a settlement is not a de facto admission of wrongdoing. Quite frequently people settle because the costs of pursuing the case (attorney fees, lost income, inability to proceed with plans because of injunctions) are significantly greater than an out of court settlement.

Re:It is suggested

[Keeper]

There was a *warning* message stating that you were running something other than MS-DOS, and that MS-DOS was the only thing MS would support. The warning message did not prevent Windows from running or installing.

Windows 3.0 ran just fine on DR-DOS. Windows 3.1 didn't, until Novell changed some internal bits/structures in DR-DOS to match MS-DOS (they released a fixed version 6 weeks after 3.1 came out).

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that because MS can afford $23million without blinking that they must be admiting guilt?

Nobody gives away $23million for no reason. There's no free lunch. If MS was innocent, Be would have had to pay for court costs, and MS would have saved their $23million.

Re:It is suggested

[PierceLabs]

Nah - while Safari will be the default browser on OSX, there are no plans to remove IE from the system entirely - at least not at this time. 10.3 by all reports will continue to ship IE.

Re:It is suggested

[JDizzy]

As a former employee of BE Inc. I have to chime in here on one glaring pharse of utter bull-shit that you wrote in your post so everyone can see that your obviously not having any idea of what your talking about.

If BeOS were easily dual-booted, more people would consider BeOS applications (the "OS barrier" would erode), and eventually more would be written (the "applications barrier" would erode).

I assume you haven't tried BeOS as it was highly dual-bootable with a very good graphical boot manager, and easily configured. BeOS could even live within a file inside the fat32/ntfs filesystems. The ability to dual boot is a non-issue for BeOS systems as this was one of the primary design goals, to co-exist with other Operating Systems in world dominated by one OS.

MS currently maintains both barriers, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to maintain the monopoly against all the competing and/or superior products out there.

Microsoft did this (in BeOS's case) with lucrative rebate deals and other incentives what involved OEM's (like DELL) who would preload computers with an opperating system like windows98, or BeOS. Dell computer, for example, signed a typical OEM agreement with Microsoft that basicly meant every computer dell sold was attached with a license for a Microsoft OS, even if the computer didn't ship with the Microsoft OS. In this way Microsoft ensured that Dell didn't save any money by using an alternative OS, and thus was anti-competitive. This is not to mention the other parts of the Microsoft OEM agreement that stipulated that any computer covered by the OEM agreement (which was all computers produced) could not contain a bootloader that was non-MS, or the agreement regarding the discounts/rebaits would be nill in addition to the penalty the OEM would have to pay. In other words, Dell wouldn't get the discount on the Microsoft OS (money in their pockets), and would even be fined for contract violation.

What we really need is a competing OS that has a full suite of applications, both of which are freely developed by anyone who wishes to, rather than being controlled by a single corporation, and it will probably need to be possible to buy a computer with these pre-installed, for it to truly break both of the barriers mentioned above.

You mean like FreeBSD, or Finux? I belive those qualify as competing OS's, yet at the time of BeOS, they were still not hardly on Microsofts radar as they were not viable desktop replacments, and Microsoft was making most of its money of the desktop systems area, not servers. In regards to full suite of application, and not being controlled by any single entity. Hrm.. have you Looked at Red Hat recently? In regards to a single corporation controlling things, pulling strings; Have you considered that Linus is the single point of control for the Linux kernel? You can alter Finux all you want, but there is still one single pooint of control over it. As I have pointed out above, one of your foundation points (BeOS dual boot) is stupid, and not valid. So reinforcing any point on them is also not helping. Not to throw sand in your eyes, but I should point out that Finux is easily dual bootable too, as is Freebsd.

Then, the only barrier will be in the mind -- the fact that people don't yet know about the potential of the OS and its applications, or that they're not yet ready to accept it over what it replaces.

Why would anybody take the effort to replace something that currently works? YOu could give them a huge incentive such as security, or price. But when you have an investment in time with the currently installed (and industry dominant) OS, there would need to be an overwhelmings reason to justify changing that.

Now... MS products aren't all completely crap.
This is a true stament

But they must be seriously scared of anyone who can get their foot in the door, because a lot of their dominant products are dominant

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

But M$ have never been sued before. Nor is it likely, with their stellar track record, that they will ever be sued again.

So why can't Bill admit he made a simple mistake? He knows we love him; he should understand we'd forgive him as well.

If for no other reason, he should do it for his children. Come clean, Bill! Serve your time in a federal penitentiary and pay your debt to society!

Make us proud of you again! (Right now we think you're a little bad-mannered unhygienic shit - you've gotta change that!)

Re:It is suggested

[The OPTiCIAN]

Why - oh - why does the United States have this stupid system whereby the judge can't award costs at the end of a trial? We have it in Australia, and I'm sure plenty of other countries do.

Re:It is suggested

[Penguinshit]

We do. The victorious party needs to request them in their version of the judgement which is submitted to the Judge.

How it works is each party will submit a draft judgment document in their favor to the Judge prior to release of ruling. The Judge will consider each draft and, if necessary, make changes. The prevailing judgement document then becomes the ruling after the Judge signs it. The document typically will include costs associated with bringing or defending the action (depending on which party prevailed).

However, in order to get to that point (final ruling), each party must have sufficient funds to pay the attorneys doing the research, creating the various pleadings and motions, and appearing in court to actually argue the case. There are also court fees associated with filing each particular document which concerns the case.

This costs money up front. If a party can no longer pay these costs, then either a settlement, release, or default judgment occurs (depending on which side drops, and the circumstances under which that party dropped).

If the case reaches final judgement, then the prevailing party is very often entitled to recoup these costs (sometimes in total, sometimes in part - this can often drag a case out for months with the parties haggling over what are justifiable fees).

In bankruptcy proceedings, the attorneys for the debtors must actually have a mini-trial to justify their fees to the overseeing court... those pleadings are sometimes hilarious as attorneys are sometimes force to justify their fees down to the nickel...

Re:It is suggested

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like MS was being charitable. I find that hard to believe. They offered $23M, while I would expect them, if there had been "no wrongdoing", to offer Be $20 and a suggestion not to leave assprints on the door. Or pounding a shoe on the table while shouting "We will bury you!"

That they didn't suggests to me, either:

Their accountants and lawyers got together and used some magic formula to come up with $23M for what they'd rather spend now than let it go through the courts, with the possibility of being proven at fault. Which is more or less what you said, without making MS look like a white knight. And is entirely possible.

Or, an (unofficial) admission that they already ran Be into the ground, illegally, and came up with a number that Be('s representatives) found acceptable. Blah blah etc...

Since I'm talking out my ass anyway, I'm going to conclude with this. Either way, everyone but MS loses. Be's still dead. Their creditors get a pittance. Microsoft only loses as much as Bill Gates could find under his couch cushions. And everybody else, society as a whole loses big. (Blah monopoly blah choice blah innovate blah.)

Re:It is suggested

[md65536]

Well I admit I don't know what I'm talking about.

>> If BeOS were easily dual-booted, more people would consider BeOS applications (the "OS barrier" would erode), and eventually more would be written (the "applications barrier" would erode).
>
> I assume you haven't tried BeOS as it was highly dual-bootable with a very good graphical boot manager, and easily configured. BeOS could even live within a file inside the fat32/ntfs filesystems. The ability to dual boot is a non-issue for BeOS systems as this was one of the primary design goals, to co-exist with other Operating Systems in world dominated by one OS.

Oops, I said that wrong. I didn't mean that BeOS isn't easily dual-booted because it doesn't work so well or is hard to do, I mean that it isn't easily dual-booted because MS threw around monopolistic power to prevent it. I should have said, "If average people had a simple option of dual-booting into BeOS..." I think Hitachi was working on making that possible, and MS came in and crushed it.

I never tried BeOS, because the perceived effort required to get it up and running was greater for me, than the perceived benefit. In that, I think I'm fairly average as far as users go. I didn't know much about BeOS. I'd have to be shown how useful and easy it is, to be interested. Most of us use computers for what we already know they do, or what fun things we're shown (which is why companies can sell computers by advertising how fun e-mail is or that your grandchildren can send you pictures). If I had to work with digital media, I'd probably have researched BeOS. If it was pre-installed I would have played around with it.

>Have you considered that Linus is the single point of control for the Linux kernel?

Well... it does bother me that Linux is a registered trademark in his name, however he hasn't done anything "evil" that I've heard about. But I suppose we'll soon see what happens when one group (eg. SCO) tries to control or limit Linux for personal gain to the detriment of others. I think people would turn their backs on Linus if he ever became like Bill Gates, and I think the GPL would let people continue development under a different name?

> Why would anybody take the effort to replace something that currently works?

Not many would (I'm lazy myself, plus most games are for Windows). But if something's already there, and is useful and easy to get into, then people will use it and it becomes easier to invest time in it and use it for more things. That's why pre-installation and dual-boot would be so good. But MS doesn't even let others stand on the same ground as them, and compete fairly.

Re:It is suggested

[Knacklappen]

Windows 3.0 ran just fine on DR-DOS. Windows 3.1 didn't, until Novell changed some internal bits/structures in DR-DOS to match MS-DOS (they released a fixed version 6 weeks after 3.1 came out).

AFAICR, there was no warning message when running Win3.0 under DR-DOS6. Win3.1 refused so start but this could be circumvented, as you wrote, by a patch that was released very soon after the Win3.1 launch. However, at that time Novell was not yet the owner of DR-DOS, it was still with Digital Research. Check it out here

Interesting

[GigsVT]

While $23 million is peanuts to MS, it makes you wonder why they would even bother settling this, it's not like Be had the resources to fight them in court.

Re:Interesting

[mgeneral]

$23 mil is cheap when you have several billion in the bank.
This is chump change. They wiped out a competitor, and it's more like adding insult to injury.
Think of it like handing a bum, a panhandler, a nickel and telling him to shut up and go away.
A very small price to get a nuisance off your back.

Re:Interesting

[mod_parent_down]

Probably afraid of what might have been revealed publicly by the lawsuit.

And now we can only suspect, speculate, and wave goodbye.

Re:Interesting

[Daniel_Staal]

Actually, it sounds like Be had nothing but the resources to fight them in court. A pretty good position to be in against MS: then they can't fight you any other way but legally, and given the specifics of the case, it probably wouldn't have gone nice for MS. After all, they have already got a judge saying they did something like this...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple - Microsoft didn't have the resources, either.

Their orcs, err, lawyers, have been sent to Isengard, err, SCO, to help with the capture of the One Line of Code.

Damned Linux Hobbits.

Re:Interesting

[lowe0]

Look at Intertrust. Buying a company for peanuts with a suit against MS is like a corporate lottery ticket. Better to just pay up now and get rid of them.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Risk management.
Be could very well have had the resources to fight long enough to win, given that they have precedent and past rulings on Microsoft to bolster their case. It's far easier and less risky to just pay them off with what for Microsoft is chump change.

Re:Interesting

[penguin7of9]

...and have a bunch of embarrassing court appearances? This is simpler, quicker, and, in the end, cheaper.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Any lawyer worth his paycheck would realize that this was a case so strong in Be's favor and fight the case with no up front payment. They do get 1/3rd of that, at least in my experience--if they win.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Line of Code/Kernel/

If it was one line, they wouldn't bother... besides, of course, the fact that you can't copyright one line. Besides, they want the whole kernel...

Re:Interesting

[LeoDV]

If you ask me the lawyers are more like the Ringwraiths.

No, the orcs are all the sales people, the marketing people, the executives, the sloppy programmers (or rather the good programmers whose bosses tell them it's okay to release an alpha as a stable release)...

Re:Interesting

[IamTheRealMike]

Like what? We already know many (most?) of the tactics they use, the illegal agreements they have with suppliers and so on. I doubt they could have anything secret more damaging than what came out during the trial.

Re:Interesting

[Unregistered]

Yea, but if ms went to trial, it would probobly cost more than $23 mil. That's why all companies settle.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Their orcs, err, lawyers, have been sent to Isengard, err, SCO, to help with the capture of the One Line of Code.

These aren't just any orcs, there are Uru-kai. Their armor is thick, and their greed deep. They will never rest until they have taken the One Line of Code.

Re:Interesting

[jonadab]

> the lawyers are more like the Ringwraiths

I think Microsoft has more than nine lawyers. If they're more
formidable than ordinary orcs, perhaps they're Uruk Hai or trolls
or something. The Nazgul metaphor must be reserved for something
there are only a handful of, like totally satisfied Microsoft
customers or rock-solid secure Windows servers. Say, where's Eowyn?

Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[MyDixieWrecked]

The ending paragraph of that article is disturbing to say the least. Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device. pshhhh... right. ;)

Re:Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[xonker]

The ending paragraph of that article

It would be disturbing if it were an article, but it's a press release, not an article. Press releases frequently carry such garbage.

Re:Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[Illbay]

any time, any place and on any device.

Got Palm?

Re:Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[leviramsey]

Indeed, press releases are supposed to include a paragraph at the end identifying the issuer of the release.

Re:Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read at the top : It is a PRESS RELEASE.

(Moderators... did you bother checking what this guy was saying, or did you just read it and assume he was telling the whole truth?)

Re:Microsoft Owns yahoo?

[MyDixieWrecked]

well, at least I RTFPR, then. ;)

btw, yeah, garbage, yup. ;)

wha?

[Moose-Alini]

"Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device." .....no comment

Re:wha?

[leviramsey]

You see the words "Press Release" at the top of the article?

Re:wha?

[Izanagi]

Expanding upon the word 'empower', this includes script kiddies and virus writers. Note secure software is never mentioned, HMMM...don't now why!!

thats

[minus_273]

23 million well spent. probably cost less than an Ad campaitgn on the major networks.

Re:thats

[nacturation]

23 million well spent. probably cost less than an Ad campaitgn on the major networks.

Wow, I didn't know it cost that much to put up an ad campaign for Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 on Slashdot.

Re:thats

[Anonymous Coward]

It cost $23M to put a picture of that trailer hag working at a copy machine? They got ripped.

Anticompetitive?

[SargeZT]

I have to disagree with be's definition of anti-competitive practices.

Be alleges that microsoft created exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled operating systems.

As much as I hate saying it, that's just smart business. It's no different from getting an exclusive military contract for developing warplanes, etc. But, in the end, microsoft won this lawsuit. The original charges were requesting 2 billion dollars!
Oh, and if anyone cares, I use GNU/Linux

Re:Anticompetitive?

[Slack3r78]

It's different in that MS was already established as a virtual monopoly and used these tactics in order to raise the barrier to entry even higher - to near impossible.

This would be like your warplane analogy only if the DoD had a contract with Boeing saying that, in order to receive a decent price on the B-52, they could buy Boeing, and only Boeing warplanes. A bit different in my book.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[fork420]

Making an "exclusive sale" deal isn't anticompetitive, if the deal is reached as a mutually beneficial arrangement.

However, the tactics MSFT (allegedly) used to force such deals are highly suspect. Allegedly, MSFT would tell OEMs that they could ONLY install Windows, and if an OEM didn't agree to such a "deal", MSFT would stop letting them sell Windows *at all*.

Those sorts of strongarm tactics are definitely anticompetitive, and should be investigated. Basically, for $22m, MSFT has paid off Be's shareholders to drop the lawsuit and prevent such an investigation. While I don't fault Be for taking the deal, it would sure be nice to find someone MSFT couldn't buy off.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[geekoid]

If MS used its monopoly power in those dealing, then they where being anticompetitive. Monopolies have different rules, and for good reason.

Keep in mind that it may have been good for MS it was still anti-competitve.

Lets say you are selling an OS, a very popular OS, so popular in fact, it would be almost unthinkable not to build a computer without it. Now, you tell a computer maker "I'll charge you X for the OEM, but if you make a computer with a different OS, I'l charge you X*2". You are being anti-competitive.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Be tried to do is to get computer manufacturers offer a dual-boot system with Windows and Be. If you think about it, that's about the only way you can get ordinary computer users to try alternative operating systems voluntarily and without hassle. They might even think that the pre-installed alternative adds value to the computer, worth the small extra price (say 10 to 20 bucks). But Microsoft would have none of that.

The reason these kinds of practices are probably illegal for Microsoft is that they are in a monopoly position, and the law tries to keep down monopoly power in order to increase competition. I hope I don't need to explain why competition is the basic feature of capitalism that makes it good for society.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[rossz]

As long as you are not a monopoly, you can demand pretty much any kind of contractual deal with your "business partners", even exclusive deals like this.

When you are a monopoly, the rules change. You can no longer force the business partners into exclusive deals (amongst other things).

So everything hinges on whether or not MS is a monopoly, and the courts have said they are. That's why MS paid of Be. They new if it went to trial they'd lose. Be probably took the deal because they didn't have the financial clout to go the distance. That's too bad. I would have loved to see MS ordered to pay (little finger to corner of mouth) one billion dollars.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[Slack3r78]

The difference is, Linux started as a totally hobby thing with no real intention of really being used by anyone other than Linus. Be, on the other hand, was trying to create a commercial operating system, and as such, had put hard time and money into developing their product before even having a chance at gaining a foothold. The Linux companies essentially had a ready-made product that simply needed packaging and support. Be didn't have that luxury. Remember, Linux has been in development since 1991-1992, and has only really gained commercial acceptance in the past 3-4 years. A startup commercial software companies simply can't afford 7 or 8 years of funding major development before they kind of, sort of start to gain acceptance.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[fermion]

The thing is that competition is good, and MS just does not have enough to be forced to create a truly great product. They could if they had to. They just don't have to.

Let me tell you a story. I once worked for a company that was able to charge a lot of money for an adequate product. There was no competition, so we could pretty much name our price. We had to keep quality at a tolerable level, but not the level the customer really wanted. We tended to use processes and equipment that was quite old.

These factors caused many economic problems. The company had money, but was not developing or consuming new technology at a rate comparable to the amount of cash on hand. This probably resulted in few overall jobs, but richer principles in the company. Also, the companies customers had to spend time working on our quality issues rather than creating better products for the end user. Also, the companies customers had to pay our 'inflated' prices rather that using that money to upgrade their facilities.

Eventually competition came in the form of Asian manufacturers with modern equipment and processes. The company spent money trying to quickly upgrade equipment and procedures. The competition produced products of equivalent quality at about half the price. Things were no longer great for the company, but times were much better for the companies vendors and customers. Quality increased and jobs were created in the US as the company was forced to modernize the facility.

Which is to say that the free market and capitalism depends on active competitions. While there may be nothing wrong with MS maintaining a monopoly on x86 systems, it does not help the American economy. Manufacturing jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, programming jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, and MS sits there with billions of dollars in the bank and an OS that desperately needs improvement in quality. They could do it.

But there is no competition. There is no other OS that threatens their market share. The vendors are in trouble because MS had no need to upgrade their facilities. The customers are in trouble because MS does not have to charge true market value. There has been no significant feature changes in Windows or Office for at least 5 years. Yet there has also been no retail price change. Admittedly Office now contains VPC, but still we are paying $200 for VPC and $250 for a five year old office suite.

I would suggest that if competition did exist the customer would pay a lower true market price. I suggest that MS would have to hire programmer and buy equipment. I suggest that the previously unemployed programmer would have money to buy durable goods. The manufactures of the durable goods would then hire workers to create the goods. And so on.

This is certainly a simplistic economic view, but the point is that we allow companies to create monopolies and these monopolies cause nothing but problems in the free market . Money collects in unproductive spaces. Technology and process stagnate. And China and India create better cheaper products while American CEO claim ignorance and disbelief at the unfairness of it all and demand that congress enact dangerous protectionist measure to help keep American jobs. They could have just spent some of thier cash reserves on implemeting the new technology, but that never occurs to the CEO.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[jejones]

That's disingenuous at best. Without the free availability of Linux, those distributions wouldn't be able to get a foot in the door.

People generally wouldn't buy a new computer with an OS they know nothing about.

I'm not sure about that--how many people actually know anything about Windows?

Re:Anticompetitive?

[Bert64]

It also shows they realise the poor quality of their own products. If they thought their product could compete on a level playing field with other OS`s, they would let it do so.. And then use this as a marketting tool, in an ideal world, products would have to sell themselves based on quality and overall value for money. Unfortunately, in today`s world, marketting campaigns and strongarm tactics keep people with the established players and raise the barrier of entry too high for a competitor to achieve any great success, remember.. if people dont know about your product, or dont know why its better than someone else`s, then they wont buy it.. and you`l make no money on it, and without money you cant afford the same kind of marketting campaigns as the established players. And end users generally won`t pay for a product they`ve never heard of, if there`s something more familiar available.. "better the devil you know"
The only reason linux is gaining a foothold is because it can be downloaded for free, and thus theres nothing to lose by trying it... and secondly, theres no company behind it that needs to make profit in order for linux itself to succeed.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[hamster foo]

"I'm not sure about that--how many people actually know anything about Windows?" Most people at least have SEEN Windows. That's more than you can say about most people and any other PC based OS. Toss in the fact that if they work in an office, they probably either use some custom designed application running over a dumb terminal or Windows. That breeds familiarity, and that's what people are comfortable buying.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[gnuLNX]

Wow a truely insightful reply! I think you make a lot of very good points.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are a monopoly within a very defined market scope - nothing more. Servers are not monopoly, PDA's are not, office software is not, productivity software is not, keyboards, mice, etc... are not under the rules of monopoly findings. Y'all need to read up on the law and understand it. Their monopoly is defined as the operating software for x86 chips. When Itanium becomes mainstream, it will not apply anymore.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[A_Non_Moose]

I once worked for a company that was able to charge a lot of money for an adequate product. There was no competition, so we could pretty much name our price.

Hummm... until you mentioned competition from the Asian market, I was thinking of three letters:

G
I
S

Funny that even the slightest competition has been assimilated, heck, even the two "powerhouses" have been in such an incestuous relationship for the sake of compatibility, is interesting.

What's even stranger is that support for Sun is dwindiling down to nothing, but interest in other unicies is increasing (Linux and OS X) to an heightening pitch.

And this is from the "decision makers", as it were, who want *alternatives*, free or not.

One GIS shop's boss said if there was improvements to GRASS (Low level, free?, GIS software) on the OSX side, he'd move in a *heartbeat*)

My boss actually uttered the words "I wish we could sue Microsoft" after the blaster worm...DESPITE our lab being unaffected. It was the *other* places we do business with that were paralyzed because, well, Windows dominates the market.

What's this got to do with Be?

A lot, if you consider what a great product it is/was, but they weren't ready, IMO.

First, lack of drivers and software beyond a specific set. 4.5 was limited to a specific set of hardware on the Intel side. 5 was better in general, but audio/video/cd burning and such needed at least *base functionality* (think OSX/XP...ain't pretty, but it works 'ok')

Second, was a damned if you do, damned if you don't conundrum because you have to get the word out, but you don't wan't to show up on Microsoft's radar. hummm, how do you do that?

Linux did. By starting small, building momentum, stability, drivers, support, etc...by the time it was "seen" it can't be stopped (per se) but it can have its course altered (SCO, anyone?).

Yellowtab seems to be on the right track, as I've been watching with interest, and the project is progressing, gathering support(ers), and being open source (IIRC) doesn't hurt either.

That said, I'll miss BeOS and the way it made an old P200 sing.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[bobjohnson]

Wow, what an insightful point you've just made, that's the most useful post I've ever read on slashdot. I wish I had some mod points right now! Kudos.

Re:Anticompetitive?

[rossz]

WTF does that have to do with anything? They prevented BeOS from being installed on desktop computers - the specific monopoly they have the monopoly in.

In addition, it is illegal to leverage a monopoly to increase market share in another area. So if BeOS was targeted towards the server market, MS was breaking the law because they used their desktop monopoly to prevent the software from being installed.

Y'all need to read up on the law and understand it.

You show your ignorance. I have read up on the law. I do understand it. Did you read the BeOS court papers (the PDF was linked). I did. I'm sure you didn't.

Not good for Linux

[chill]

The suit was about MS pressuring OEMs to not install other OSes on hard drives of machines they shipped. They did NOT want to see a dual-boot situation.

One of the big issues is getting end-users to install another OS. Since most people never have to install an OS, it is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is.

The whole effort in making Linux so easy to install derived from this.

Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court. They don't admit guilt and can keep on pressuring OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows on new machines.

$23+ million is chump change if it avoids getting dragged into court and having this practice under scrutiny.

Re:Not good for Linux

[geekoid]

".. it is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is"

I love that phrase. I am going to use it on monday.

"This project is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is."

Re:Not good for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court."

Why is that? This case settles the case between Be and Microsoft, nothing more. Red Hat et al are free to sue now as they were before. Its not like they recieved some remedy and waived their right to sue you know.

"Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court. They don't admit guilt and can keep on pressuring OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows on new machines.

$23+ million is chump change if it avoids getting dragged into court and having this practice under scrutiny."

Did you miss that whole anti-trust thing? MS WAS dragged into court and all the lured details came out. MS won and came out stronger then they were before.

Re:Not good for Linux

[Darth]

Did you miss that whole anti-trust thing? MS WAS dragged into court and all the lured details came out. MS won and came out stronger then they were before

technical correction:

Microsoft lost and came out stronger than they were before.

Now that's justice...

[fork420]

To put this in perspective, consider the following math:

$8,072,000,000 net income for MSFT during the 9 months ended 3/31/03
divided by the (roughly) 270 days during the 9 months ended 3/31/03
...yields $29,000,000 net income per day for MSFT

so basically they destroyed Be, Inc., and it cost them roughly 18 *hours* of income.

just lovely :-/

Re:Now that's justice...

[stratjakt]

they destroyed Be?

Not Be's business model or practices. Not the fact that noone knew what the hell the target market for BeOS was supposed to be (business? artsy fartsy Mac types? education?). Not the fact that this unknown OS with very little software was sitting next to Windows in Best Buy, and costing twice as much?

So MS says dont bundle our product with this other one, we dont want to be taking support calls for them, we dont want their shit shipping with us. It's like Pantera saying they dont want a Britney Spears track on their next CD. Big deal.

If they were trying to prevent OEMs from shipping another OS altogether, then maybe I'd take up a pitchfork too. Be had a chance to be competitive and chose the whine and sue road to success.

Noone takes responsibility for their own favors anymore. Be failed because Be sucked.

Re:Now that's justice...

[rmarll]

...yields $29,000,000 net income per day for MSFT

That's pretty gross...

But it get's Be's creditors paid and perhaps even a little cash for what/who's left for all their trouble.

Re:Now that's justice...

[fork420]

Fair enough, Be had its own troubles, but (especially on /.) you have to admit, MSFT got its money's worth on this deal.

Re:Now that's justice...

[enkidu]

If they were trying to prevent OEMs from shipping another OS altogether, then maybe I'd take up a pitchfork too. Be had a chance to be competitive and chose the whine and sue road to success.

Uhmmm, if you don't know shit about what happened, shut the fuck up. Sorry for the strong language, but that is precisely what Microsoft did. Not only were vendors prohibited from shipping dual boot machines, but if they tried to ship machines with only BeOS on them, Microsoft would have

• Still charged them for the Windows license
• Changed their "partner status" so they wouldn't get anymore kickbacks discounts etc., raising the costs of ALL of their copies of Windows.

Be offered their BeOS for FREE to any OEM who would install it on their machines. The end result was not a single top-20 pc manufacturer shipped any machines loaded with BeOS or dual booted with BeOS. A few manufacturers shipped with BeOS on hidden partitions requiring an arcane complex series to steps to activate.

$23.5 million? Chump change. They should have gotten at least $235 million if not $2.35 billion. There is no justice.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Be offered their BeOS for FREE to any OEM who would install it on their machines

Nothing's for free.

Putting BeOS on a system would increase support costs -- Everytime someone calls because they chose the wrong item on the boot menu, there goes pretty much the entire profit on the machine.

Not to mention that it had about zero appeal to the end user because of the lack of any compelling applications.

>$23.5 million? Chump change

IIRC, that's more than Be's "IP" was worth. It's not like you can accuse JL Gassee of a lack of anti-Microsoft zeal. He's probably shitting his pants that he got anything.

Re:Now that's justice...

[enkidu]

Putting BeOS on a system would increase support costs -- Everytime someone calls because they chose the wrong item on the boot menu, there goes pretty much the entire profit on the machine.

Nothing stopped the OEM's from offering BeOS as an unsupported option. And profit from the machine should have much higher for not having to pay for the OS license. Unfortunately, as we all can see, Microsoft managed to strangle that baby before it even had a chance to crawl.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing stopped the OEM's from offering BeOS as an unsupported option

Another SKU to stock, hardware to test, employee time spent, marketing costs, etc. It would not have been "free".

Not to mention that anyone who wanted BeOS for free could just download it, so OEMs had nothing to gain from the deal.

I'm not disagreeing that Microsoft acted in a monopolistic manner by forcing OEMs to sign contracts that prohibited boot menus. Just stating that there was very little OEM interest in BeOS because it was mostly worthless to the end user.

Re:Now that's justice...

[boneshintai]

Not to mention that anyone who wanted BeOS for free could just download it...

Actually, anyone who already knew they wanted BeOS could just download it. The OEM installs OSes so that the end user doesn't have to worry about it. How many Windows users do you think specifically sat down and thought "I want Windows?" By the same token, the Walmart Lindows boxes have actually sold -- when I was working for Road Runner I took support calls for a couple of them (sadly I couldn't help them due to corporate policy) and the people I've talked to (not just the support cases) seem pretty happy with it.

Not to say that Microsoft is solely responsible for the current situation, and on a level you are correct. There is not much business in alternate operating systems for OEMs right now.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

'How many Windows users do you think specifically sat down and thought "I want Windows?" '

To be fair, quite a lot did.

For those that understand choices exist, most would want Windows for compatibility with the rest of the world.

For the rest, it doesn't matter. They DEFINITELY want Windows so they can get tech support, etc. that they need.

Walmart Lindows sold because a) it was cheap and b) a lot don't know any better. I certainly wouldn't advocate a non-Windows OS for "the masses[tm]" at this point in time. Well, not unless they were considering a Mac, but that's a whole different box.

It's a shame though. BeOS was a pretty nice OS, even if it was unsuitable for the modern world -- a modern OS needs a real concept of security.

It "felt" really nice tho' ... much snappier than pretty much anything else I've tried on x86.

Re:Now that's justice...

[ATMAvatar]

So MS says dont bundle our product with this other one, we dont want to be taking support calls for them, we dont want their shit shipping with us. It's like Pantera saying they dont want a Britney Spears track on their next CD. Big deal.

I have a closer analogy: the RIAA tells Best Buy not to sell CDs from independent artists, or RIAA member labels will discontinue selling CDs to Best Buy stores.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Penguinshit]

"It's a shame though. BeOS was a pretty nice OS, even if it was unsuitable for the modern world -- a modern OS needs a real concept of security."

You say this while defending Microsoft?

Have you lost your fucking mind?

Have you actually ever really used a computer, or are you just hijacking your buddy's web browser which just happened to be pointed at Slashdot?

Oh, and to answer your other question: 90% of the folks buying PCs at some SuperStore want to use the OS that everyone else uses. Everyone else uses that same OS because everyone else could ONLY buy that OS on a new computer for years and years.

Ergo, Microsoft had a monopoly and used illegal practices to maintain said monopoly.

The average home computer user was immersed in Microsoft, was ignorant of the alternatives, and was too ignorant of technology to even begin to understand HOW to go about investigating an alternative. Microsoft enforced this ignorance.

Microsoft also made it economically difficult for developers to develop for other platforms (both by having the most ubiquitous desktop platform and by manipulating the license of its Developer Kit). Therefore, you see a plethora of applications developed exclusively for the Microsoft platform. Is it because the developers love it, or because it makes them a buck?

In short, you talk good game, but you really don't know shit. You'll notice I haven't opened the topic of Open Source (yet).

Re:Now that's justice...

[timeOday]

Nothing stopped the OEM's from offering BeOS as an unsupported option.

Argh, don't you get it?

Microsoft OEM contracts forbid a visible dual-boot option.

Re:Now that's justice...

[hamster foo]

"Nothing stopped the OEM's from offering BeOS as an unsupported option"

Offering something as an "unsupported option" doesn't mean you aren't going to have support costs associated with it. I worked at an ISP for a few years, and we had people calling in for help with their printers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that your ISP isn't there to support your printer, but people still called. Even if you provide no assistance at all, you are still going to have costs associated with answering the phone and listening to the user before telling them you can't support that.

Re:Now that's justice...

[MisterFancypants]

Everyone else uses that same OS because everyone else could ONLY buy that OS on a new computer for years and years. Ergo, Microsoft had a monopoly and used illegal practices to maintain said monopoly.

Uh yeah and Microsoft originally *GOT* that monopoly how... a gift from God? Saying that Microsoft is only successful because of their monopoly status is a dumb chicken and egg statement -- if they weren't wildly successful to begin with, the monopoly wouldn't ever have become an issue.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Penguinshit]

They were successful through a stroke of luck (well, two actually). First, IBM gave them the contract to supply the OS for their little project called the "PC" (with an expected product lifespan of a few thousand models) and second, Bill Gates duped Tim Paterson into selling him QDOS for nothing (had Paterson known it was going to be integrated into IBM's product he would have undoubtedly asked for an ongoing piece of the action).

The third stroke of luck, which had nothing to do with Microsoft, was that IBM opened up the specs for the PC which allowed multiple vendors to create competing products to enhance the capabilities of the system. This high availability of off-the-shelf items at the competetive prices required led many to choose the PC platform over the Mac platform which was more expensive to upgrade.

Once the market share of the PC grew, Microsoft went along for the ride. No one gave a rats ass about DOS, other than it was the OS which came with the computer.

We could go into the "theft" of the windows idea from Apple, but that would take pages.

Basically, Microsoft got a monopoly by forces outside its control. That's really fine and dandy; good for them. What's a big problem though is how that monopoly was MAINTAINED.

THAT is a big issue, and an ongoing one at that.

Microsoft is the chicken which grew up first and started kicking all the other eggs out of the nest.

Re:Now that's justice...

[technix4beos]

Take a gander at what's coming down the road:

OpenBeOS

and

Zeta

All it takes is continual development, just like with linux, and there -will- be a future for anyone who fell in love with BeOS in the first place.

It's not so much the OS itself, but as to what it represents. The Be Way, the ideals and concepts it has offered up, among it's ease of use and elegant design choices.

I am very saddened to see such a poor outcome for this legal case. However, I see this as another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. Their day is coming, and I will be happy to show people seeking alternatives just how nice a company Microsoft is by adding this outcome to the (already) growing lists of grievances against the company from Redmond.

If you feel up to the challenge of programming for a splendidly thought out API, please visit the OpenBeOS website and offer your assistance. Even if it's just one small application, one line of code, or just a diversion from what you normally do, it will help.

We can make something if we all help each other. Isn't that a nice thought?

Re:Now that's justice...

[technix4beos]

I'll go through your points one by one.

You're right when you consider how the average user thinks about their computing desires and the choices available to them. As long as we're going down this olive branch, I ask you to allow me to go through your points one by one.

• 'spreadsheet'
  
  YellowTab has a screenshot showing they are improving the AbiWord office package here. There is a donation page to help port OpenOffice to BeOS. Last but not least, GoBe at one time announced they would port GP 3.0 to BeOS, providing they had enough sales of the windows side. Sadly, this did not work out as intended. That's another topic for discussion. ;)
• 'instant messaging'
  
  The venerable and solid repository of BeOS applications' BeBits has these entries for instant messaging applications:
  
  • msn
  • icq
  • aol
  
  There are more, but I chose to show three examples of chat protocals.
  
• 'surf the web'
  
  Both Mozilla and FireBird have been ported to BeOS for quite some time now. In fact, just 2 days ago there was a new build directly from the cvs server for BeOS of Mozilla. I believe the current direction is towards FireBird, since it's just the browser, but that's a good thing. ;) I won't mention Opera, as the jury is out until Zeta comes out
• '3D Games'
  
  You've got that one, I will admit. but it's not so hot either on any OS other than Microsoft's, so it's a poor example for debate.

I do hear through the grapevine that CounterStrike has been ported for BeOS, but that is pure speculation at this point. ;) I'll also point out that there were two seperate ports of Quake3 TEST made for BeOS. One by Be Inc., the other by id software.

Also, thinking back to that time period, there was an excellent review article on BeNews.com that illustrated just how great the openGL implementation was heading towards for BeOS. Again, time will reveal more when Zeta comes out, as it supposedly has openGL support for Radeon and NVidia chipsets.

The main basis for development was already underway by the time that BeOS R5 Pro/PE came out, starting with the excellent groundwork in R4.5 of openGL, and the overhaul of the networking stack and media kit. Given a few more years, at the pace that BeOS was being released at (every 8 months on average), there would have been no doubt in anyone's mind who was active in the community as to how great it could have been.

That was then. This is now. The future is with OpenBeOS and YellowTab, and the other development OS projects.

I wanted to address your points, because I felt you were not giving BeOS a fair shake. There were quite a few companies who were making some serious headway, not only in software, but in hardware products such as HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform), BeIA webpads, Audio Recording stations, and more.

Thanks for raising these important user requirements to light. If you have any points you would like to address to me, please feel free to do so.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh yeah and Microsoft originally *GOT* that monopoly how... a gift from God?

Pretty much yeah. IBM decided that MS was going to deliver the OS for the IBM PC (as we know, at the time, IBM was pretty much God in the IT world). And because the IBM PC was the only computer with an open hardware standard, and IBM foolishly decided to license the OS from MS instead of buying it, MS owned the clone market (because all the clones wanted to be compatible with IBM). Since clones were cheap, even in comparison with other platforms like Apple, and they ran all the business software released for the IBM PC, they took off like a rocket. Basically MS were handed their PC monopoly on a silver platter. That's not to diss the business skills of the MS management. It's not easy to not screw up while you're building a monopoly. But anyone who pretends they got that monopoly by offering a better product is woefully underinformed about history.

Ofcourse, how they got their monopoly is irrelevant. Once you have it, you have a responsability under the law to behave correctly. MS has broken anti-trust laws more than it's worth mentioning. The only reason nobody has taken them down is because the legal system is fscked up.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Alsee]

Be had a chance to be competitive and chose the whine and sue road to success.

Riiiight.

Did you even read the linked legal complaint? I did, and I'm am flabberghasted that Microsoft got a settlement for a miniscule $23.5 million. Hell, most of Be's complaints have already been proven by the federal Microsoft anti-trust case. Essentially Microsoft has already been proven guilty here and collateral estopple forbids them for even trying to argue the case in court. It doesn't matter how many lawyers Microsoft has, they can't win if they are legally prohibited from even making an argument.

Be went so far as to offer it's product for FREE, and they still couldn't get a single manufacturer to include it any functional manner. Microsoft abused their monopoly position to acheive this result by imposing illegal contracts on manufacturers and making illegal treats. Microsoft cannot even argue this point. Microsoft had NO legitimate business basis for those contract terms. This has already been proven in cort, Microsoft can't argue that either.

Microsoft specificly threatend Hitachi with finantial penalties and denial of the use of the Windows Compatiblility logo if Hitachi so much as included the BeOS LOGO on the package. Microsoft executives met with Hitachi executive and DEMANDED to review and approve Hitachi promotional materials before they could be used.

The complaint then goes on to explain how Microsoft abused it's monopoly to destroy the "internet appliance" market. Many of the claims in this section have already been proven in the federal anti-trust case. Not only did Microsoft destroy the market in general, they specificly interfered with Be's business dealings with Compaq in this market.

Be then says that Microsoft illegally meddled in Be's financing andf IPO. The allegations are non-specific, but that isn't supprising because this is exactly the sort of area where Be would need to go through the legal discovery process to get the information it needs to make and support specific claims.

It looks like Be's claims against Microsoft exceed a billion dollars. Not only that, but anti-trust laws, the Clayton act, and the California Business and Professional Code violations ALL call for TREBLE DAMAGES! So we are looking at possibly billions of dollars.

Microsoft has been violating the law as a matter of standard operating procedure. In the cases where they finally get called on it they simply pay a few bucks and write it off as money well spent.

-

Re:Now that's justice...

[renoX]

>Microsoft originally *GOT* that monopoly how... a gift from God?

A gift of IBM actually, but I suppose that you could call IBM the "gods of computer" at that time..

Re:Now that's justice...

[drinkypoo]

Personally I think Apple destroyed Be. Microsoft might have helped them nail the lid down but let's face it, Apple not providing specifications on their hardware forced Be to drop their Apple/PPC support and focus on PC/x86. You can say that linux does a fine job but since it's GPL it's not even really safe to use it for ideas, from a legal standpoint. Once you've had your head in the code, you're contaminated. So all that reverse engineering effort would have to be duplicated. Meanwhile, how do you sell yet another PC OS? I'd think it would be a lot easier to talk some mac users into switching.

Re:Now that's justice...

[westlake]

Walmart sells Lindows PCs all but exclusively off it's web site. In back-to-school promotions for it's brick and mortar stores Linux had zero exposure and Windows XP was a given. I have yet to see proof that Walmart's Lindows systems have sold well to anyone but enthusiasts who were looking for an el cheapo, disposable, Linux box. The same crowd who shops Tiger Direct.

Re:Now that's justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a point: There's a big difference between "spreadsheet program" and "someone might port a spreadsheet program in the future".

Also, it's great that Mozilla was finally ported, but that was not the case when these events were going down.

Be could have been successful marketing itself to video producers as a specialized workstation OS. Positioning themselves as a general enduser system was just foolhardy. They didn't have the apps, and they ran smack dab into Microsoft.

Re:Now that's justice...

[snarfer]

You left out how Microsoft killed off OS/2.

Re:Now that's justice...

[snarfer]

Oh yeah, and the story about what happened when Apple was trying to get OEMs interested in an Intel version of MacOS...

Re:Now that's justice...

[enkidu]

Sorry, I meant, purchase option, not boot option. Sigh, posting late at night and such. If you read the grandparent post of my post, it should be clear that I am well aware of how Microsoft "protected their innovation" through illegal OEM contracts. Thanks for clarifying that.

Re:Now that's justice...

[jonadab]

> there -will- be a future for anyone who fell in love with BeOS

I believe the most meaningful future contribution of BeOS is the
set of ideas it has made available to the developer community. The
BeOS was *innovative*, innovative in ways no current major OS is
innovative.

We're already seeing ideas from the BeOS incorporated into other
systems. Filesystem journaling is a good example. The new (yet
to be released) MS filesystem is another, perhaps better, example.
Have you noticed people in the OSS community talking about threading
lately, and about making things thread-safe? Heck, have you seen
processors for sale with hyperthreading technology? Thank Be for
demonstrating the performance advantages of a heavily threaded
system. These are not pie in the sky but real, concrete benefits
that we have because of the BeOS.

There's another thing current OSes need to learn from BeOS; Linux
has started, but there's a long way to go: better on-the-fly
hardware recognition. It's nothing to take a hard drive with the
BeOS on it out of one computer and stick it in another computer,
turn it on, and just start using it. No fooling with driver CDs,
no reconfiguring X, no "New Hardware Found" dialog boxes, just
turn it on and use it. (This is also part of what makes BeOS so
easy to install.) Kudzu and HardDrake are starting to be pretty
impressive, but the BeOS still has them beat on this point, so
there's room to grow.

Okay, so it's missing some things like a working security model,
the ability to set global color preferences, and (since it's not
1998 anymore) support for modern hardware. But we can learn from
the things it's *not* missing.

I still want a versioned filesystem. ITS had it in the days of
yore; VMS has had it for a good while too. C'mon, somebody get
on the stick and put it in a modern OS.

Re:Now that's justice...

[technix4beos]

You're absolutely right.

Which is why the collective programming group and community is learning well from these past mistakes, and working on the things that will overcome these types of problems.

I know painfully well the mistakes that Be Inc. made. This is not the single most important issue at hand however. The thing that strkes me as most compelling and worthy of discussion is the fact that the entire court case gets to be swept under the rug, as if nothing happened.

That, in a nutshell, is wrong. Everyone who has a semblance of a clue knows it, and will not forget. They will add it to the growing list of charges by Microsoft, the numerous wrongdoings and misappropriate behaviours that the Redmond company has taken over their sorted history.

Back to your reply. ;)

I agree there is a big difference between a "spreadsheet program" and someone porting one in the future. The fact remains that history has shown there were many, many developers and companies working with Be Inc. to produce these things. They might not have been the most stellar of products initially, but as we all know, programs do eventually get better in time.

A proven example of program growth would be the browser wars. In the beginning there was Mosaic, then came Netscape, and Internet Explorer joined the fray. Frankly, in comparing the three against today's standards, or even just 2 years into their respective futures, we find the contrast striking.

I also agree with your point about the marketing mistakes and how BeOS could have been far more successful in a very niche market like a specialized media workstation. Agree with 100%. But the choice(s) were made, the decision to do a "focus shift" was announced, and the end result was a leap in the wrong direction.

But the dream lives on. The spirit and ideals that BeOS itself presented will not be forgotten.

I for one am looking past the actions of Microsoft, insomuch as they do not affect my resolve to create a viable future for BeOS. I for one resolve to continually advocate the solutions available with BeOS when and where they are applicable.

Thank you again for your reply. It gives me a chance to further redefine my own perspective and how I can apply myself to helping the dream come alive.

Regards,

It's sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it sad that immoral companies like Microsoft are able to casually dismiss serious legal infractions with more money than any of us will ever see in our lifetimes?

It really puts things in perspective.

Re:It's sad

[DrMrLordX]

The only reason why MS could settle this case is that Be agreed to the terms of the settlement.

It's no more sad that MS could settle this case for a "paltry" $23 mil than it is that Be would actually accept that settlement.

Re:It's sad

[Goalie_Ca]

How long do you think Be could afford to be in court? They would have been quickly outspent then lost it all.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[jhylkema]

True, but you must understand that this is yet another chink in their armor. Once-invulnerable Microsoft has now had to settle a number of actions such as this. What they really didn't want was a full-dress jury trial where all of what Microsoft did to them would have been fleshed out for all to see.

What's more, it's very telling that a company with Microsoft's resources would settle rather than fight and "clear our name."

Here is what this means

[erikharrison]

The essence of the "voluntary" dissolution of Be means that this money will not go to a sudden resurrection of the BeOS, as some have thought (foolishly hoped, perhaps).

Be Inc wisely (I think) dissolved "voluntarily" and did its best to ensure that investors did not get the short end of the stick. Be sold off all their intellectual property to Palm, and passed the cash amongst stock owners, minus costs. Be then had a single purpose - pursue the MS lawsuit. This money will be passed about, minus expences, to stock holders.

Then all Be will be is a trademarked logo.

Re:Here is what this means

[nocomment]

The essence of the "voluntary" dissolution of Be means that this money will not go to a sudden resurrection of the BeOS, as some have thought (foolishly hoped, perhaps).

Those people obviously don't know about the deal Be made with Yellowtab right before they sold to Palm.
YellowTab (yellowtab.com) got exclusive rights to the Beos source code, and is updating it and preparing it for a release. :-)

Re:Here is what this means

[Space Coyote]

The essence of the "voluntary" dissolution of Be means that this money will not go to a sudden resurrection of the BeOS, as some have thought (foolishly hoped, perhaps).

Actually all the BeOS IP was sold to Palm, Inc (now PalmSource). Be, Inc. was kept in existence as a shell company for the sole purpose of persuing legal action. It didn't have the right to sell or develop BeOS if they wanted to.

Now that it's collected a bit of cash from MS it no longer needs to exist.

Incidentally, senior Be executives seemed to have pulled a NeXT on Palm Inc, taking over the key influence positions at PalmSource.

Re:Here is what this means

[SoSueMe]

"Be, Inc. was kept in existence as a shell company for the sole purpose of persuing legal action."

This sounds disturbingly familiar. It is happening more and more these days.

Re:Here is what this means

[Darth]

it shouldnt sound disturbingly familiar.

they existed only to pursue the legal action against the company that crushed them out of business through predatory practises.

They wouldnt have even had to stick around to do that if the Feds would do their damned jobs.

Re:Here is what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

Those people obviously don't know about the deal Be made with Yellowtab right before they sold to Palm. YellowTab (yellowtab.com) got exclusive rights to the Beos source code, and is updating it and preparing it for a release. :-)

Be Inc. should have released the source code under the GPL. They are going to die anyway, at least they could have dealt another blow to Microsoft, like Netscape did (it took a couple of years, but Mozilla is now ready to avenge Netscape).

If every company who is destroyed by Microsoft's immoral and illegal business practices would just release as much of their ip under open licenses, eventually the beast from Redmond would be defeated.

Ok, it will be defeated anyway, but more ammunition sooner means a quicker victory for us and less casualties. Companies, give us the code!

Re:Here is what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

> Be sold off all their intellectual property to > Palm, and passed the cash amongst stock owners, > minus costs. Stock owners? Nope, they got Palm shares. The money goes to the lawyers. All Be Inc. is, post-dissolution, is a bunch of attorneys working to get their fees.

Re:Here is what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

yet they didn't get the latest codebase. bleh, yellowtabs slow development makes this further obsolete.

Re:Here is what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

YellowTab did NOT get exclusive rights to the full BeOS source code. They got a distribution license from Be, but they did not get a license to use the full source code.
So don't expect too much from them.

Re:Here is what this means

[sootman]

They couldn't have, even if they would have wanted to. Remember back in '98/99 when everyone was sprinkling the Open Source fairy dust on every project with a somewhat bleak outlook? Be had a page on their site explaining why they couldn't do that--that there was a lot of 3rd-party closed code. Kind of like how OpenOffice doesn't have Star Office's Adabas database except it wasn't possible to just break of a chunk of BeOS and say "OK, that's closed, the rest is open." Maybe wayback has the page or someone else has it archived somewhere.

Re:Here is what this means

[sootman]

Thanks for the linek, I'll have to look at that. Nice little secret, like how if you wan the newest OS/2, you have to know to look for eComStation. (from ecomstation.com: eComStation 1.1 provides users with a low cost package which includes the most up to date distribution of IBM OS/2 4.52.)

So there is a pricetag?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much in addition to this settlement amount
did MS spend in ensuring the demise of BeOS?
Any guesses? I guess its much more than 23.25M.

Freedom...

[Nybble's Byte]

Microsoft calls it 'Freedom to Innovate', everybody else calls it 'Freedom to Violate'.

The saddest part:

[burgburgburg]

Now that Microsoft has settled with Be for $23 million dollars, they'll have to cut back to 12 towels a day to wipe down dancing monkeyboy Ballmer. He'll be significantly moister with everything that that entails. I feel truly sorry for the Microsoft employees working in his immediate proximity.

Re:The saddest part:

[Obiwan Kenobi]

For those who don't get the "dancing monkeyboy" part (all 12 of you), here's a mirror of the video of him making an ass of himself via my site.

How lame is that?.....

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

....I mean, SCO is looking for BILLIONS....and their business hasn't been destroyed....Seems like the Be people need to get more than a few 23 million!

The Be people need Uncle McBride on their side....oh wait a second...SCO's attack is being funded by MS....sorry, my bad...

Re:How lame is that?.....

[stratjakt]

Be was looking for billions as well. Be had about as much of a case as SCO. They both share the whine-and-sue-your-way-to-riches philosophy.

BeOS was a half-decent OS at best, and the company was run by morons. They expected people to pay more for BeOS than Windows 9x? WTF? More for less.

So MSFT pays them a pittance (which is more than they deserve) and tells them to STFU.

The SCO suit will end in the same way. Except slashbots will cheer, because they think the corporate world is like pro wrestling, where you cheer the faces and boo the heels.

Re:How lame is that?.....

[Anonymous Coward]

....I mean, SCO is looking for BILLIONS....and their business hasn't been destroyed

SCO has less then 10M in cash and about 8M in accounts receivable. Their cash flow for the last 2 years were -14M and -16M respectively. SCO has 16 months to live (if they are lucky).

I think I'm getting all teary. Must be the onion.

Does little to improve OS diversity

[Shinzaburo]

It's great that Be's shareholders get a few dollars back for their pains, but they still certainly didn't come out ahead. But the real tragedy isn't the way about the investors -- it's about the millions of people who could have benefited from Be's amazing and innovative software, had Be been allowed to compete on anything remotely resembling a level playing field.

Hopefully more and more of Be's innovations will end up in Mac OS X and Linux. Then Be's achievements won't have been for naught.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[GigsVT]

Who said anything about shareholders?

Shareholders are the absolute last people to get money when a company goes under. All debt is paid first, all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid, etc. Then if there are any leftovers, the shareholders get their scraps. In other words, they rarely get anything at all.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[horos2c]

"Who said anything about shareholders?

Shareholders are the absolute last people to get money when a company goes under. All debt is paid first, all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid, etc. Then if there are any leftovers, the shareholders get their scraps. In other words, they rarely get anything at all."

well, true, but in this case, Be will get approximately 70 cents per share. It has one employee, approximately 26 million dollars and 38.4 million shares.

So, its not 'nothing' but it still is a sellout IMO.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[Shinzaburo]

Who said anything about shareholders?

The article did. I know it runs contrary to the Slashdot custom, but I actually followed the link and read the article.

all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid

The payout is _after_ lawyers' fees, which is also mentioned in the article.

I used to work at an investment bank, so I realize full well how little shareholders normally receive in situations such as this one. It's not clear how much debt Be still has, but it's probably not much since they never really had enough assets to borrow against. Most of their capital came from equity investors, so they are likely to get at least a fraction of a cent per share. Whoopee! ;)

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[boneshintai]

Are there any projects afoot to do what BeOS was attempting to do? To create an OS sans cruft? I'm aware that the canon here dictates that Linux is the solution to end all solutions, but UNIX in general has proven ill-designed for home desktop use (single-user or few-user, multimedia-oriented or document-oriented systems).

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIX in general, yes.

Linux, yes.

MacOS X, no.

Oh, and http://www.openbeos.org.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[ATMAvatar]

Perhaps OpenBeOS?

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[boneshintai]

I specifically didn't mention OpenBeOS because I do not think of it as an OS without cruft. Their project right now is to rebuild BeOS, but what happens when they reach that point? I rather suspect they'll do the obvious thing: extend it.

Tell me, does Linux have any cruft left over from extending UNIX? Does Windows have any cruft left over from extending Windows?

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

The only _positive_ Be innovation left is their indexed "live query" filesystem.

Everything else has already been done or re-done, usually better. The best of the "innovations" Be fans talk about were already found elsewhere before BeOS reached its public debut. These days you can find the same features in OS X or Linux.

In fact that's no bad thing, the bits Be shared (in design, or literally as code) with Unix systems and other places mostly worked pretty well compared to some of their "innovations".

Be's daemon-based userspace netstack turned out to be a very bad plan (Be scrapped it almost immediately after their last public release)

The from scratch GUI _requires_ heavy use of threading and an unreliable message delivery system, making complex applications a nightmare. Be's programmers even admitted this as early as BeOS R4.5

The same GUI also doesn't support sane layout primitives, so serious app developers have to roll their own. Is it still 1985? I didn't think so.

On the other hand some of the features hyped more by outsiders than real fans never really existed. Was BeOS R5 a great multimedia system? Only if your taste in multimedia was rather parochial.

Although 3 separate audio APIs were developed BeOS never actually shipped with a working and completed implementation of any of them. 2D stereo worked great, just like in er... DOS

Hardware 3D was supposed to be part of a forthcoming update to R5. It never shipped.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[advocate_one]

The only _positive_ Be innovation left is their indexed "live query" filesystem.

Isn't something just like this that's going to be the basis of Longhorn's file system. Yet another Microsoft "innovation"???, and yet another headache for OSS developers to provide file system support for for OSes like Linux... What's the bets MS will have got this heavily patented and DRMed to shut Linux out from ever being able to duel boot on Longhorn PCs.

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[GigsVT]

Heh, that's what I get for only quickly glancing over the press release (it's not really an article).

Re:Does little to improve OS diversity

[westlake]

"duel boot"

a slip of the tongue or gospel truth?

The Loss of BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

This speaks volumes for the case against software patents. Had BeOS been free of patent licenses from third party vendors, it could have been given to the masses when the doors closed. I still count BeOS as my personal favorite and likely will for some time to come. So clean, so fast, so elegant, and so gone. What a shame.

MS employee karma

[EreIamJH]

I wonder what the morale must be like among the programmers/technicians employed by MS? Every day they must be reading about MS security holes, crashing MS apps, or the latest MS abuse of market power. Their karma must but so low when they shuffle off to pick up their pay cheque.

Re:MS employee karma

[ainsoph]

To be honest, living in the belly of the beast itself, Seattle, I see these weirdo's on an almost daily basis. I actually have spent many a drunken night courting these folks at bars in town and lemme tell ya, they are all cultishly 1000500% behind the company and everything they stand for.

In fact, last week, I was telling some finance woman the reason why the worms and virus are so dominant, how it was base level crap that allowed the vulnerabilities, and all she could say to me, with a golden hued gleam in her eyes was:

"Thats why we put security features in both IE and Outlook."

I said to her:

"Well, so thats great, but did it stop these worms and virus attacks?"

She got uncomfortable, and began to talk about what a great company Microsoft was...

Re:MS employee karma

[geekoid]

its very low. some of them are almost seen shedding a tear as they drive to there mansions in a Lexus thats almost 3 years old.

Truley a sad day.

Personally, I hope it drives out of the company.
You can't be in the devils band, and not be part of the music.

Re:MS employee karma

[jejones]

People are able to rationalize a lot. I know I'm tripping over Godwin's Law, but it's going to take the equivalent of the "good Germans" being taken on concentration camp tours to drive home to MS employees the evil that they have participated in.

Re:MS employee karma

[Alien Being]

"She got uncomfortable, and began to talk about what a great company Microsoft was..."

Typical Borg reaction.

Re:MS employee karma

[Wumpus]

I actually have spent many a drunken night courting these folks at bars in town

Dude,

You're never gonna get laid this way.

Re:MS employee karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm.... I bet you didn't get laid that night, at least by her. :)

You could have asked her... "Hey, let's have sex. We can use some condoms I have. They're as reliable as Microsoft's products. You in a gambling mood tonight?" :)

Re:MS employee karma

[boneshintai]

I know from here it's hard to believe, but even within the tech world there are a lot of people who actually believe, for one reason or another, that what Microsoft is doing and has created is the best thing since sliced bread.

Creepy, isn't it?

Re:MS employee karma

[pitr256]

This is so true of most emplyees who work at Microsoft. I myself worked there for about three months in a sysadmin support type function and even with the Code Red outbreak crashing the internal Microsoft network to the point where even the call center couldn't route calls to support agents, they kept saying, "Microsoft is the greatest! Damn hackers did this."

I got the fscking out of there before being assimilated.

Re:MS employee karma

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to bone up on some standard methods of courting. They mostly eschew triumphant victory in geeky debate in favour of things like casual flattery and buying people drinks.

I mean, a zealot can be a great lay. When someone's looking at you with a golden-hued gleam in their eye, do you really care how it got there? And if you do, why the heck are you torturing yourself by going to these bars???

Re:MS employee karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Look you MSofties! Look at what you have wrought ! You have made Microcomputer a standard household and business appliance, and gotten rich in the process!

THE HORROR! WHAT HAVE WE DONE! GOD HELP US!

Re:MS employee karma

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for all employees at Microsoft, but I can say my "morale" is pretty high. I get paid very well, I have awesome benefits, I get to work with some incredibly smart people, I get to work on awesome projects, I work in a great environment, and (the most important one of all) I love doing what I do. It is by far the best job I've ever had, and I've had a few pretty good ones.

I find it amusing to read Slashdot, and the utter paranoid delusions people have about what Microsoft does. Everything is always a conspiracy to crush the little guy, or to do evil nasty things to your computer. I mean, the government conspiracy theory guys are funny, but reading about Microsoft on Slashdot just takes it to another level entirely. Anytime I need a good laugh I just search Slashdot for a MS story.

I read about security holes whenever a patch is released. Which ineveitably evolves into a discussion about how Microsoft is evil because Outlook lets you open attachments without having to do 30 different things (ease of use is not a security flaw, and Linux is not more secure because it is hard to use). At anyrate, patches don't bother me; nobody is perfect, MS's record is about as good as anyone else in that regard (though you'll find amusing double standards in discussions on Slashdot related to the topic). I'd probably feel pretty lousy if any of them had ever been my fault (directly or indirectly), but they haven't.

The holes do piss people off on occasion though ... especially the guys who have to fix it once they're found (I'm told they generally don't go home until they've got a fix ready for QA). There was recently a meeting to review a few of the recent security issues and how to recognize/fix coding patterns that lead to the holes (they do this on occasion); of course such a discussion invariably involve showing code and how it was exploited. Well, one of the holes was an incredibly stupid buffer overflow that didn't fit a pattern picked up by any of the scanning tools -- when the slide went up on the screen you wouldn't believe the jeering that followed. The presenter (for obvious reasons) declined to tell anyone who wrote it. I guarantee you the guy got one hell of an ass chewing... It was kind of neat to see how they got around some of the protections that were added in Win2k3 to guard against buffer overflows.

I never hear about crashing apps unless I read an article on slashdot ... I mean seriously, it hasn't been a problem since the Win9x days. Even when we're dogfooding apps, crashes and freezes are rarely a problem (the one exception would seem to be Outlook, because those nimrods keep putting network io tasks on the UI thread).

The "abuse of market power" stories almost always fit under the Microsoft conspiracy theory category. It's never anything with real proof, it's always some innocuous action spun as the reason why widget xyz failed. Makes me think of "A miracle occurs here" steps in proofs where the proofwriter couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point C. A perfect example is the "meeting" between MS and Netscape. Nobody ever bothers to try and figure out what the meeting was about or what happened, but because there was a meeting everyone is like "ooh, Microsoft demanded such and such, and Netscape didn't like it, and then Microsoft did something evil and squished Netscape". In reality, the meeting was between Netscape and Office, and the Office guys were wanting to talk about a componetized web browser for use inside of Office and whatnot. Of course the IE guys heard about this, and that's where all of the "must crush Netscape" emails came from (in the context of getting the Office guys to use IE instead of Netscape). But nobody on Slashdot cares about context.

Oh, and generally if you don't have your paycheck direct deposited, they mail it to you (unless you ask that they hold it for you). No "shuffling off" to pick anything up ...

At anyrate, that's my 2c on the subject.

Re:MS employee karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook lets you open attachments without having to do 30 different things (ease of use is not a security flaw, and Linux is not more secure because it is hard to use)

Maybe, but you know, it wouldn't hurt if you could actually run outlook and word as a regular user, so an exploit couldn't take over your entire OS. And it also wouldn't hurt of office had a concept of security, like java, so apps could run in a sandbox. But I suppose that's just crazy talk. I mean, who needs secure environments, right?

MS's record is about as good as anyone else in that regard

If by good, you mean bad, then yes, i agree.

I run debian. Since the beginning of the year (and I counted), there have been exactly 22 security problems which affected my install. And I'm talking about a desktop install, with full desktop functionality. In that time, how many security problems habve affected your desktop windows install? You can't count security problem on linux the same way because most security problems is in software the user will never install. It's like taking all the third-party software for windows, and adding up all the security problems in them. That would be unfair. It's just as unfair to give linux the same treatment.

The "abuse of market power" stories almost always fit under the Microsoft conspiracy theory category. It's never anything with real proof

No, not anything with real proof like MS provably forbidding dual-boot installations by threatening to raise prices for any OEM that dared do such a thing and so keeping competing OS's out of the preload market. No, nothing like that.

Re:MS employee karma

[IamTheRealMike]

.... that's where all of the "must crush Netscape" emails came from (in the context of getting the Office guys to use IE instead of Netscape). But nobody on Slashdot cares about context.

Believe that if you want. You guys had years at the trial to give the world "context", and instead chose to forge evidence, lie, drag your heels and in the end in the judges still decided that the allegations were true. Now did the judges simply "lack context" too?

I don't know if you really do work for Microsoft, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've seen incredibly talented and smart people say some shockingly naive things about the company they work for. For instance, when taken to task over the poor design of the Windows DLL loader mechanism (which involves callbacks while holding a global lock), Chris Brumme stated that "The phenomenal success of Win32 clearly shows that it provided the most value", or words to that effect.

The vast majority of us don't live in this happy clappy dreamworld where Win32 became dominant because it provided value, we live in the real world where Microsoft forced its products onto the market then kept them there artificially, and the law agrees with us.

People joke about the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field", well from what I've seen the one around Redmond are far stronger. Kool aid indeed.

Re:MS employee karma

[discovercomics]

Dude thats not going to get you laid.
You need to tell that in the morning, if you never want to see here again.

Re:MS employee karma

[PetoskeyGuy]

Here is your mistake...

"Thats why we put security features in both IE and Outlook."

I said to her:

"Well, so thats great, but did it stop these worms and virus attacks?"

You know she's a MS Borg, but damn man some of them are hot. Don't attack head on or she'll raise her sheilds. I realize the Geek Gene in you thinks technical accuracy is more important the reproduction, but you must resist. Remember your objective.

Try something like...

"Thats why we put security features in both IE and Outlook."

"That sounds fascinating! I am awed that you actually work for the company that created such great innovative products. Lets go back to my place and you can check out my security settings."

Maybe slip something in about your big hard drive and hot processor. :-D

And when the smoke cleared...

[RyanFenton]

And when the smoke cleared in the dusty street outside the courthouse, Microsoft was left, a few bullets short, still smirking.

The old judge watched on and winced at the display of street "justice", knowing he had no role in this display. Still, he spoke: "You aught to be careful, Mr. Microsoft. Your...attitude may bring such antagonism that even your ... formidible arsenal might not be enough to protect you someday. Dead men like these do say something about you, you know."

"Bah", Microsoft said, turning. Soon, Mr. Microsoft's gun barrel wavered towards the judge's general direction, "Dead men tell no tales." Mr. Microsoft then promptly holstered his weapon, tipped his hat, and rode away, honor still officially intact.

Ryan Fenton

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[blitzoid]

And years from now, when Microsoft is crumbling because of their business practices in the past, we see MS sitting in a hospital bed... a doctor enters the room. "I'm afraid it's cancer.".

And then Linux walks past the hospital room door, whistling, playing catch with a big chunk of asbestos... the same asbestos that was in MS' air conditioning! Yay!

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's goiong to be years from now.

The handwriting is pretty much on the wall Microsoft is obsolete today. People are just starting to notice.

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it wouldn't actually cause cancer in a big chunk. Unless maybe you had REALLY big lungs. And then you'd probably need more than one chunk.

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[Peyna]

Asbestos doesn't even cause cancer, it gets in your lungs and doesn't leave (and does bad things to them, but doesn't cause cancer.).

Also, asbestos has gotten a much worse rap than it should have; certain kinds of it aren't harmful at all, but much like nuclear power, people are afraid of it based on a whole lot of FUD.

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that asbestosis is the most common effect of asbestos inhalation, and isn't cancer. Though it probably still will kill you eventually.
However, mesothelioma is cancer, will also kill you, and is strongly linked to asbestos exposure. It used to be "rare' and is now uncommon, entirely because of asbestos.
Beyond that, asbestos is also strongly implicated in other generic forms of lung cancer, so I'm not sure where you're getting your information. It does cause cancer. The fact that it doesn't do it in everybody exposed is irrelevant.
It's a bit like saying smoking doesn't cause lung cancer because majority of smokers will die of heart disease or stroke before lung cancer kills them. Sorry, doesn't wash.

Re:And when the smoke cleared...

[CrosseyedPainless]

Considering the well-established links between malignant mesothelioma and asbestos exposure, I'd say you're either a tin-foil helmeted nutjob, or your family owns asbestos mines.

Or both.

Regret

[mm0mm]

"Damnit! We should have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft instead of Big Blue!" -- Darl

Re:Regret

[OverRated]

"Yeah, let's sue Microsoft for not using SCO IP!" -- Darl

Re:Regret

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, but you forget, they have already been paid by Microsoft...

Re:Regret

[walterbyrd]

They already filed a lawsuit against msft - and won a big fat settlement - around $250 million.

After caldera-scox won the settlement, they threw dr-dos on the scrap heap. dr-dos, which only cost a couple of million, turned out to be a sweet investment.

UNIX didn't cost scox much either, not compared to unix's value in suing everybody, and thereby pumping scox share price from $1 to $16.

Scox's parent company, canopy, also got a big fat settelment from CA.

Scox's CEO, Darl, got a big fat settlement from his previous employer.

This is the way canopy-scox opperates.

YellowTAB

[PAPPP]

Last I checked YellowTAB (http://www.yellowtab.com) is working on a new release of BeOS (which really is a nice OS), called zeta, and has collected most of the IP rights to the old BeOS. I wonder if/hope they see some of this.

Re:YellowTAB

[Anonymous Coward]

YellowTab owns NO ip rights to BeOS. In fact, many in the BeOS question how legal is yellowtab really is.

Re:YellowTAB

[smcavoy]

someone mod the parent up, Palm bought all rights to Be Inc. IP.

Re:YellowTAB

[Xiphas]

Yes, but Zeta was supposed to be released at the beginning of the summer. As much as I love the idea of an updated BeOS, Zeta is starting to look more and more like vaporware. The magazine Beyond just had a preview article about Zeta, but alas, it is in Italian.

It will be a long and arduous road, but I think the open-sourced OpenBeOS, not Zeta, will be worth the wait.

Re:YellowTAB

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does anyone care?

BeOS was an interesting solution when we had 100Mhz computers -- mainly because it tossed all the legacy crap in Win95 and MacOS and had a very lightweight design.

But on modern systems the legacy is mostly gone, and BeOS would do nothing unique or interesting.

Re:YellowTAB

[Jungle guy]

In the long run an open source BeOS clone makes sense, but in between Zeta OS might keep the BeOS flame alive. I have talked to people that are leading the OpenBeOS, and they support Zeta and hope they succeed. If you think OpenBeOS is great, have you ever tough of giving them a help?

Re:YellowTAB

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS is still way faster (especially the GUI) than Windows, Mac OS or Linux (Gnome, KDE or whatever).
Also the Interface and the Be API is very clean.
BeOS might not have much "unique" things from Anonymous Coward's point of view, but it has the best features of about every other operating system combined. This is, what makes it unique.

Re:Hey remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah use M$ in your title. The dollar sign makes it super duper clever and not like idiot drivel at all!

michael must not have had on the "daddy pants" that night.

Boo fucking hoo

someone get this baby a bottle

not so fast...

[horos2c]

Be has to get the deal approved by Judge Frederick Motz.. so things are not as dire as they seem. He has no real love for Microsoft.

As for 'not being able to afford going to court', well Be hired Susman/Godfrey on a contingency basis. So it looks like they went for the easy paycheck.

Re:not so fast...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a MEDIATED settlement. So the deal ain't going to be vetoed by Motz.

Re:Great news!!

[Anonymous Coward]

True, true - also, imagine the problems that could arise if an underfunded company like Be were allowed to widely produce an OS, and some security problem in it brought the rest of the Internet to its knees? It's bad enough having all those Macs and homebrew SCO-based systems out there threatening peaceful Windows customers. One day, the Internet will be safe.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[tambo]

Once-invulnerable Microsoft has now had to settle a number of actions such as this.
Yeah, but here's the problem: a one-time fee penalty can't really remedy never really compensate for the permanent elimination of a market competitor. By eliminating Netscape, Microsoft secured a permanent (and quite effective) internet browser monopoly.

Look at it a different way: Microsoft can continue to own that market and cannot get sued over this incident again. So instead of thinking about the fee as a legal penalty, you can think of it as Microsoft buying a (very expensive) license to monopolize the market. It works out the same way.

Eventually, the legal system will have to come to grips with the fact that its current M.O. of penalizing corporations isn't deterring anyone. They smile, pay it, and move on to bigger and better market exploits.

What they really didn't want was a full-dress jury trial where all of what Microsoft did to them would have been fleshed out for all to see.

Eh? Why would they care? They've had several incidents of antitrust very publicly resolved against them. (Netscape; Lotus 1-2-3; that DoubleSpace case... and a hundred small cases of patent theft or breaches of contracts with small companies that were decimated in the struggle.) The public knows they're monopolists - it's been a consistent business method for much of their existence. What's one more suit?

Nah, the real reason is that it's just the cheapest way of resolving this claim. They have no hope of winning or swaying public opinion; they don't even care any more. Just cut bait at bottom dollar and move on.

- David Stein

checks and balances missing?

[Chromal]

Settlement is all fine and well, but US$23.50M isn't exactly going to motivate fair competative practice from Microsoft. Where are the crippling government fines MS deserves? A US$10 billion crime would probably give MS pause, and it'd help the US Budget crunch, too! :)

Re:Hey remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should sue Slashdot for anti-troll tactics. That's a civil right, you know.

I have to wonder...

[Botchka]

Whose Passport ID gets used to transfer that amount of money?

Re:I have to wonder...

[geekoid]

HELLO!
I am the minister of finance at...

you've seen the rest.

Money IS everything

[PingXao]

It's too bad that companies don't stand for principals. They can't. Their raison d'etre is to enhance shareholder value, and that means cutting a favorable deal when it's practical to do so. The reason I lament this is that MS once again gets away scott free while admitting no wrongdoing . A person - an individual - might stay the course and see a case like this through to its end provided they had the resources to pay their legal bills (which of course, almost no one has). That end would ideally involve their adversary admitting to wrongdoing, and then paying. Such an admission could be useful to others who find themselves in the same boat. Unfortunately, it IS all about the money.

Re:Money IS everything

[geekoid]

in that case, the settlement will short change there shareholders. If I were a shareholder, I would be complaining.

Re:Money IS everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the GrammarFairy when you need it?

Re:Money IS everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the parent poster messed up "their", failed to hyphenate "short-change" and didn't capitalise the first sentence, 'tis true. But the Grammar Fairy was suitably awed by the proper invocation of the subjunctive mood in the second sentence, and was thus moved to forgive and forget.

Toodles,

the Nazi Grammar Fairy

Re:Money IS everything

[Anonymous Coward]

But when will businesses raison d'etre to create personcons?

its a cult, really

[geekoid]

Think about it:
1 people work too many hours, they live and breath 10,12, 16+ hour a day inside MS. Most employees are sleep deprived.
There diet is generally poor.
They listen to the MS propaganda all the time.
when they go out they almost exclusivly go out with MS employees.
The company expects that Wives and children are second to the company.
then within the company, you have 'cells' of people. If you interact 'inapproprietly' towards another cell, your leader can make your life hell, so you always smile.

OTOH, somedays I wish I was so completly blind, I could ignore the worlds problems.

Re:its a cult, really

[Anonymous Coward]

They send their children to Microsoft sponsored schools.

Re:its a cult, really

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, somedays I wish I was so completly blind

Keep using that other hand and you will go blind!

Re:its a cult, really

[idamaybrown]

And the open source/Linux movement isn't? The only difference is M$ employees are paid.

Re:its a cult, really

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for MS; most employees work 9 to 5 hours (or 10 to 6 hours if they commute in from Seattle, because of horrible traffic)
As for our diet being poor, the cafeteria food at Microsoft is no worse than anywhere else :)

Reminds of a Satire

[wwhsgrad2002]

This reminds me of a satire I once read about the United States. One of the points that the satire makes is that if a country needs money all it has to do is to get the US to bomb them. Then the US will provide them with billions of dollars in relief money. Same can be said of companies competing with Microsoft. Do something that Microsoft doesn't like...Microsft will pay you to keep your mouth shut.

Re:Reminds of a Satire

[Anonymous Coward]

See also: Republic, Conch.

http://www.conchrepublic.com/history.htm

Re:Reminds of a Satire

[unixdad]

Are you thinking of the book "The Mouse that Roared"?

Re:Reminds of a Satire

[wwhsgrad2002]

Yep, I believe that was the title of the sstire.

Re:Hey remember when...

[Disevidence]

Perhaps the dollar sign was a bit too much?

LOL

[Namaseit]

Did BillyG open his wallet and fork over the "chump change"

It's not news that someone sues microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's news when they shake loose a quarter or two.

Not the windfall it looks like

[Mr. Darl McBride]

"Be" rhymes with the adjective "UNIXy," and I'm sure you can all see where this is going.

$23,250,000 isn't that much after I take my $3 billion cut. And don't think I haven't got my eyes on Be. From the geekport (the idea of an exposed bus is stolen from UnixWare, wherein the bus can easily be stolen by any wayward application) on through the final Be releases (which stole our concept of severely limited hardware support), Be has been stealing our valuable IP and releasing it to the world.

Gasse and his cohorts will be facing my mighty Level 17 Staff of PR Blustering faster than you can say "BeBox."

Re:Not the windfall it looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

' "Be" rhymes with the adjective "UNIXy," '

No, it doesn't.

Re:Not the windfall it looks like

[Mr. Darl McBride]

I will pay you handsomely not to bring that up in court.

Just thought this was funny...

[CaptainTux]

From the Be Website: Susman Godfrey L.L.P. is a law firm that limits its practice to litigation, on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants

Ummm....doesn't that kind of cover all litigation? Not to limited there!

Re:Just thought this was funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Doofus - they limit their practice to litigation - no other legal activities. This means you can't see them about drawing up your will, but I can call them if I want to sue you for wasting my time with this drivel.

Re:Just thought this was funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm....doesn't that kind of cover all litigation? Not to limited there!

I assume that line is meant to indicate that Susman Godfrey L.L.P. does not do things like wills and contract creation.

Litigation is not something a lawyer spends *every* moment doing.

Re:Just thought this was funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, unless they work at Susman Godfrey LLP.

Re:Just thought this was funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your English parsing skills are poor.

The sentence indicates that Susman Godfrey L.L.P. limits its practice to litigation.

It then adds that they work on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants.

That comma is very important. If it were not there, then it would say what you THOUGHT it said.

Perspective

[Trailer Trash]

Imagine you have $10 and someone wins a lawsuit against you, and the award is a penny. That's how badly this is going to hurt Microsoft.

Re:Perspective

[rootofevil]

but i dont have 10$ you insensitive clod, after paying SCO, im runied!

Re:Perspective

[reiggin]

...im runied!

You mean like a bad omelet? Yeah, 'cause I feel ya there.

For BeOS fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Your quota of 1 BeOS stories every three months has expired. Here's what you get on clicking the BeOS icon:

First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta
On June 2nd, 2003 with 344 comments
Gentu writes "Great news for the BeOS fans. After Be sold its IP to Palm, many said that the BeOS was no more, but a new startup company from Germany,...
Section: Main > Be , Software , Businesses , Operating Systems

Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1
On February 4th, 2003 with 222 comments
TweetZilla writes "Good review if you are a fan of BeOS. Not ready for regular users but tinkerers will probably love it to death. OSNews is carrying the...
Section: Developers > Be , Programming

Then all Be will be is a trademarked logo

[Anonymous Coward]

Then all Be will be is a trademarked logo

Kinda reminds you of sco, don't it?

Re:Hey remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't get beat by anyone, jobber. The story never even touched Slashdot. I think a Buffy post made it on that day though. Also, not the best title, but direct and to the point. And I think I've only seen about 19387324 other stories that use M$ instead of MS. Hell, I'm sure M$ is more common. So, was it worth the karma burn?

Microsoft Owns yahoo?-BSV

[Anonymous Coward]

>"...any time, any place and on any device."

"Got Palm? "

Got vibrator?

Not surprised, but how about Apple?

[unsung]

I have no arguments that MS was involved with anti-competitive practise with Be, but I don't think that Be would've won. MS has (essentially) unlimited resources to delay the legal proceedings until either the other side calls mercy, or they find a sympathetic judge. Hell, they even did it to the US government, they certainly would've done it here. Admitting wrong-doing would be detrimental to MS and would open floodgates to tons of lawsuits.

I don't know if this needs mentioning, and I'm sure that I'm missing the point, but from an outsider's viewpoint, wasn't Be's demise mostly because of Apple? For a while, it seemed that BeOS was the front runner to Mac's new OS. They ran a huge PR campaign that deflated when Apple chose another OS from which to base.

Re:Not surprised, but how about Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Be were holding out for more money - trying to be a little bit gready. Apple ended up using NeXT. I'm sure Steve Job's involvment in the NeXT project had nothing to do with it!

Though that said, there are some guys from Be working at Apple now - last rumored to be putting some of the magic that was Be's filesystem into a future OSX.

How soon we forget ...

[mec]

Caldera did file an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for $1.6 billion, and settled for $150 million (estimated).

Re:How soon we forget ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course, Caldera bought SCO and now is biting Linux on the ass.

Re:How soon we forget ...

[mec]

And Canopy+Center7 (another Canopy subsidiary) just settled a suit against Computer Associates for $40 million.

I am not a PR guy, but heck, this is Slashdot, none of us are very good at persuading people whose values are different from ours. So here goes: I think this would make a good PR meme: if you do business with a Canopy company, you have a high risk of getting sued. I would love to see that meme get some traction in the mainstream business press.

it looks bad to the shareholders

[Artifex]

Carrying a possible liability, an "oh yah, we're being sued by someone, and they might win" clause in the quarterly report, looks bad when it recurs for years.

Re:it looks bad to the shareholders

[Anonymous Coward]

not really. If you read the quarterly/annual reports for any medium-cap/large-cap company, chances are that there are at least 2 lawsuits in progress at any time.

You know what this means though

[Anonymous Coward]

This year, Bill Gates won't get live reindeer for the Microsoft Christmas Party. :(

MSFT didn't really harm Be

[Anonymous Coward]

legally, MSFT's prohibitive and punatively anti-Be licensing schemes probably were illegal. however, that probably didn't have much of an effect, if any at all, on BeOS's ability to spread.

face it, BeOS was still mostly a hacker's and hobbyist's OS. it didn't have the mainstream "killer application" to get most people or corporations to change. everybody who would have used BeOS would probably have wiped their BeOS partition and reinstalled the way they liked it anyways. even if they wouldn't have instictively scrubbed their system, the BeOS audience would have easily installed it themselves without much trouble.

sure, MSFT probably should have faced punative fines, but I don't see how anybody could place BeOS's failure at the feet of MSFT.

Re:MSFT didn't really harm Be

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a tard.

That's it??

[eschelj]

My Inudstrial Oraganization Econ. is a little rusty, by why so little money? If I recall, the Clayton and Sherman acts stipulate that if found guilty the party is responsible for 3 TIMES the damages caused. Be, Inc. is accepting that Microsoft only caused it about $7mil in damages? Others have already pointed out how little money $23mil is to Microsoft. Why wouldn't MS be extactic to settle for so little? We would Be give up so easily? In understand that proving the monopoly would be extremely complex and take years. All the same, it just seems that they could have gotten much more in court.

Re:That's it??

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because MS can tie this up in court for years and years. I doubt Be has the resources to continue this for long.

Of course, it could be that the law firm pushed the settlement for the same reason.

Law firms often push settlements that aren't terribly good for their clients because they - the law firm - do well from said settlement.

I've seen several cases. One I recall was a class-action where employees should have been paid overtime but weren't. The settlement worked out about $500/year/employee. The average employee should have gotten around $6,000/year for the overtime worked. The law firm that negotiated that "wonderful" settlement recieved $1.5million.

So, it might have been worthwhile for Be's shareholders, etc. to pursue it. But it probably wasn't for Be's lawyers.

Re:That's it??

[madmarcel]

Ehm...from the little court-experience that I have,
(and not having read the article ;^)

there might be a problem establishing the EXACT amount of damage. Be Inc never sold any/much products right?
They offered their OS for free to OEM Manufacturers? Yes, ok, so how much income did they lose? How much (potential/real) loss of revenue did they suffer?
I'm guessing that they'd find it quite hard to put a value on that, and even if you do the judge will probably say: "How did you come by this amount? Proove it!"

But I'm not a laywer, so there's probably more to it :o)

Whether you agree or not

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the law, and it's unfair when Microsoft doesn't play by the same rules as others. Back when IBM was making OS/2, they considered giving it away for FREE to compete with Microsoft. They decided not to, though, because they were afraid they'd be found guilty of anti-competitive practices. Meanwhile, Microsoft was off violating the law...

MoneyISeverything-Scratch my back, I'll claw yours

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's too bad that companies don't stand for principals. They can't. Their raison d'etre is to enhance shareholder value, and that means cutting a favorable deal when it's practical to do so."

If that was all it was? Then the managment and CEO would live in abject poverty, and the majority of their paychecks would go to the shareholders. Funny how that hasn't happened.

Re:Hey remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you should smoke a cock already.

Pets.com

[batura]

This reminds me of when pets.com sued Conan O'Brien and NBC for Triumph the comic insult dog. I wish I could run around sueing to cover up my failures.

Re:Pets.com

[Anonymous Coward]

thats the stupidest fucking post i have read today.

huh?

[nyseal]

23 million? 2 people in car accident get more than that in cival litigation; how many people has MS hurt? This whole thing is just fucked up, and I give up on the legal structure of things because the one with the most money at the end of the day wins. MONEY='Get to do what you want". Wow, what an alogarithm....we should have thought about that during the writing of the Constitution

The saddest part

[pitr256]

The saddest part for me is the fact that a great company with so much potential is basically reduced to a pittance (23 Mil for a company that Apple almost purchased for big bucks) and all the magic of the BeOS is gone...

Hey Microsoft! No matter how much money you have or how many companies you copy, mimic, or destroy... you will never, and I repeat NEVER, develop anything remotely as cool a as BeBox with BeOS running on it!

Re:The saddest part

[The Spie]

23 Mil for a company that Apple almost purchased for big bucks

The smartest thing Amelio ever did at Apple was not purchase Gassbag's piece of shit alleged operating system. $240 million for that, my ass. Good for you, Gil. Just shows that anything Gassbag has is a pale imitation of his lord and master Jobs, from his NeXT-wannabe operating system to his Reality Distortion Field.

I'll never forgive that little French bitch peddling his POS to desperate Amiga users and whipping up false hope in the name of "word of mouth" so his company could con more VCs into sinking cash into his black hole. "Look at all the people talking about us! Give us more money!" I never felt so ashamed of being an Amiga user as when all those influential people in the Amiga world got sold on BeOS as "the only possible future".

And by the way, the $23 million settlement amount was about the same amount Apple figured out Be was really worth. So MS paid market value.

'Was'

[mod_parent_down]

They could always change their name...

MS you'll never be Be

[pitr256]

The saddest part for me is the fact that a great company with so much potential is basically reduced to a pittance (23 Mil for a company that Apple almost purchased for big bucks)

Hey Microsoft! No matter how much money you have or how many companies you copy, mimic, or destroy... you will never, and I repeat NEVER, develop anything remotely as cool as a BeBox with BeOS running on it!

Re:MS you'll never be Be

[Anonymous Coward]

you said that.

Re:MS you'll never be Be

[Anonymous Coward]

You said that 13 minutes ago.

that's lame

[Anonymous Coward]

just die already Be. flame/troll me if you want, but BeOS, though technically a superior OS, was stillborn from day one. MS didn't cause that.

Bill Gates secretly converted to Islam.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates is now secretly funding Osama Ben Laden, SCO and the JI. His plan is to dominate the world once he kills all the citizens of the United States and all the other jews who stand in his way. This is will of God and the prophet.

Rant on the subject

[StickMang]

This is another example of Microsoft buying its way out of trouble. I've just posted a rant on this subject, heres an excerpt:

A tiny bump for Microsoft, well worth keeping their "Hoe"EMs in the harem. I can hear the conversation now, "Where's my money Compaq? I know you sold more boxes than that, bitch! I want my money!"

Cheap price to rid themselves of competition

[maddmike]

This is a pretty cheap price for Micro$oft to rid them selves of a competitor. I think they are getting off real cheap.

Be should not have accepted.

[Jerk City Troll]

Whenever someone brings suit against Microsoft, they always try to settle. There is no court proceedings in which facts will become public record. There is no innocent or guilty verdict. It's all very quiet, subtle, and quickly brushed aside from peoples' view and memory.

Reading the Complaint, Be appears to have had a very strong case. I cannot believe they would actually lose in court again Microsoft. (Then again, Microsoft do have an army of lawyers and unlimited monetary resources at their disposal.) By accepting this settlement, they do not demonstrate Microsoft had engaged in any wrong-doing. By all accounts, a mere 23 million is nothing to Microsoft and they come out as the winners.

Shame on you, Be. Why doesn't anyone actually take a stand these days? Microsoft says: "here's a lollipop, now shut the fuck up." People, unfortunately, take it without any consideration for the public good in the long-term.

Re:Be should not have accepted.

[jeti]

Be is totally broken. They do not have any money to pay lawyers. The bureau that fought the case for Be Inc did it for a percentage of what MS might have to pay.

So it's not actually Be Incs decision how to get most out of the case.

Re:Be should not have accepted.

[the grace of R'hllor]

If Be were to win, they'd get recognition and restitution, but given the 'war chests' of the two companies, this is unlikely.

Not accepting the 23 million would have been irresponsible of then in wrt their shareholders, who then might have had grounds to sue BeOS, I believe.

Publically traded companies are in the hands of people who are generally in the game for the money. That's how business works, and why I would rather companies didn't go public (Google, this means you. Don't even fucking think about it).

Feeding the trees

[dsandler]

But the real tragedy ... [is] about the millions of people who could have benefited from Be's amazing and innovative software ...

Those benefits may still be realized, albeit a bit indirectly. The innovations in BeOS weren't sent to Earth by aliens; the ideas came from brilliant people, and those people are still around -- thinking up even better ideas, and putting them into practice all over the place. Consider also the many developers and users who have been inspired over the years by their Be experiences. I'd be willing to bet that conceptual descendants of the designs and decisions that shaped BeOS and BeIA will probably have a non-trivial impact on computing for some time to come.

Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[teamhasnoi]

Well after a long night of drinking, I come home to see this. I have had some form of BeOS in my sig, and have used BeOS since 99.

23 Mil? Fuck you, Bill Gates.

You bitch. You know exactly what you deprived the world with your 'smart business'. You'll go on being the richest man in the world, then sell off your stock to your sweatiest idiot. You'll go and live your carefree life.

Fuck you, Bill Gates.

23 million. Nothing. Not even a fucking bug bite to Microsoft. And then to admit to no wrongdoing. Are you fucking kidding? I don't know when you sold your soul to the devil, but you've been engaged in 'wrongdoing' since I can remember.

Fuck you Bill Gates.

BeOS was magic. BeOS could do shit that you can't even get your shit OS to attempt without blue screening. Sure, it was rough around the edges, didn't support a ton of hardware, but neither could any other commercial OS with you locking them out. Pulling your licensing shit on OEMs, you closed them out of the market. You did this because Be could have ate your lunch.

Fuck you Bill Gates.

23 million. There are 23 million reasons why you should be slowly roasted over discarded Windows 95 manuals.

You fucking coward. You little fucking prick. 23 million. Another day at the races. Fuck you Bill Gates. Fuck you.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to go kill Bill Gates.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it was rough around the edges, didn't support a ton of hardware

It was a piece of shit, it didn't really work on 90% of all computers in the face of the planet and the shell sucked. But "fuck you" and "it's all your fault" nonetheless.

Be killed itself with alarming efficiency. They killed themselves the moment they decided they wanted to be bought out by someone, anyone.

But don't let that stop you from playing frustrated-zealot-in-heat.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[IamTheRealMike]

You really think if Be had eaten Microsofts lunch, they would have used the power owning a platform gives to make the world a better place?

You're trading apples for oranges there. There's only one real way forward, that would guarantee this situation will never happen again. I'm sure you know what I mean.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[remember_beos]

in a word: thanks

reading that let me rant vicariously through you.

i wanted to share this: i first learned of BeOS at an MCSE course in Braintree, MA. i was taking the courses because, having no formal education, i doubted my ability to fix Windows.

stupid. thats all i can say about the MCSE track. anyone who EVER wants to impress me these days with an "I'm Microsoft certified" does irrepairable harm to their 'worth' in my eyes. it's ok to BE certified, just don't be proud of it - after taking the clases you chould know better than to ever admit that you wasted such time on such a bogus 'education' in which buttons to click on. the whole course track had me so pissed off (and broke, it cost $8000) that i stood up ranting one day, much like your post above. a fellow by the name of Andrew, sitting at the desk in front of me, turned and offered a BeOS R3 Demo CD. my life changed. i bacame a religious zealot and in 7 days i had removed everything 'Microsoft' from my computers (i ran a computer shop then - took windows off the demo machines in favor of BeOS too!) and i have NEVER run microsoft-anythin since that day.

i lost all of my extra money in the stock market by purchasing BeOS and AMD stocks. *sigh*

so - i'm with you. FUCK YOU BILL GATES! i've said it before and i'll say it again - give me one chance, just ONE and i'll kick his skinny ass. wouldn't prove anything - but dam would it be healing for me to watch him stutter and spit and cry out, "Please! PLease stop"!

fucker.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[remember_beos]

you idiot.

BeOS DID WORK with 90% of the hardware. it was the 10% remainder (like Lucent Modems) that fouled things up. if you had anything within 3 years of the release date of the OS you had a 90% chance of it working respectably and a good 75% of it working perfectly.

and you cant tell me i'm wrong - i SOLD BEOS FOR 3 YEARS! all of my machines ran BeOS without me worrying about what hardware to buy simply because i bought good and new hardware.

what, did you buy an emachine last month and try to run BeOS R3 on it?!?!?

FUD is only to be used on the living - don't sling bullshit-covered-mud at a dead OS. thats like calling out, "Amiga ahd horrible multi-tasking code"!!!

and did Be kill themselves "with remarkable efficiency"? hardly. they were in business for 10 years. 1990 - 2000. thats a slow crawl towards killing oneself. and when you're fighting an overwhelming battle you have to send all of your troops to the current task. better to win one one part than lose at them all. so the focus shift? yeah - well if they'd split their dev and support teams into groups for each BeOS and BeIA we would be blaming them for that mistake rather than blaming microsoft. two weak teams can't win. one strong team just might.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[remember_beos]

i have had to answer this question in person a thousand times now and i think you'll agree with my answer after a moment of unbiased-towards-OSS-thought.

IF Be had 'eaten microsofts lunch' that would not have killed the beast of redmond. microsoft could operate for many, many years with Zero gross income (especially if their accountants realized the zero days were coming before they happened). with that, the developers of the world are split between:

1. I only know MFC; and
2. Only diversity will save us.

the MFC (microsoft's fucking clones) would still develop for windows since thats all they know. they aren't programming for the joy of perfection but rather to complete a task and they know a method already. they won't switch.

the 'diversity' people on the other hand are much more astute and will do whatever they feel miht possibly prevent another platform monopoly - unless they ARE the monopoly.

therefore, would it be POSSIBLE for Be have been in microsoft's posistion at all? the question, "would they use their power to make the world a better place"? supposes that they have monopoly power. it is irrelevant. they would not have been given monopoly power. their morals would never have been tested.

and with that said, yes - i do believe that they would have wanted to make the world a better place. i also think that microsoft wants to make the world a better place. the question is, what is this better place. how might microsoft's description of it differ from Be's? we all know the linear progress of microsoft's 'take over everything' plan. but what of Be, Inc? a group of creative highly respected geeks who constantly re-write core OS features because they claim, "we did not do it The Right Way the first time", can only have a brighter, more beautiful image of "the world [being] a better place".

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[Anonymous Coward]

You just cant make this stuff up - this is great - a bunch of retards with absolutely no sense or balls crying over some code. You have all got to be the biggest bunch of pussies I have ever heard. Here's one for you - Fuck You, you senseless, pathetic geek. Get a life.

Re:Drunk BeOS user - Mod down before your mom sees

[Anonymous Coward]

you idiot.

Hahahaha!

Re:Great news!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say, this is an excellent troll. One that I will savor for many days.

unfortunate

[utexaspunk]

it's a shame- maybe Be didn't have enough resources to fight MS successfully, but perhaps they could've gotten a bigger judgment had they followed through with the lawsuit?

If ever there were a case that could be proven of a directly competing (and superior) product that failed due to MS's anti-competitive practices in the OS market, it would be Be. A fair chance for Be would've been worth a lot more than a measly $23.25 mil.

Terms remain hidden

[Alain Williams]

All other terms of the settlement will remain confidential.

In cases involving publically quoted companies, the terms of the settlement must be published, we cannot have things like this hidden from view. The public interest is in holding these guys accountable.

You damn right.

[teamhasnoi]

I can't believe it. Be had the best case I have seen; that complaint is right on. I'm pissed. I'm piss drunk, I'm pissed that people can't defend themselves against corporations that have infinite money, and I'm pissed that people don't/can't take a stand.

It makes sense that Ashcroft covered the statue of Justice. Justice is dead. And the DOJ just sucks the biggest dick.

If corporations are 'just like' people, where do I sign up to kill them?

If I understand correctly

[appleLaserWriter]

The PC vendors asked Microsoft out on a date. Microsoft agrees, and the relationship begins to grow and develop. After dating for a while, a new girl shows up (Be), and some PC vendors ask her to dinner. Microsoft complains that Be is getting all of the attention now, and threatens to be less available for dinner and drinks on Friday. Most of the PC vendors decide they prefer Microsoft, so they leave Be to go patch things up with MSFT. Be dies of heartbreak and her parents (children?) sue Microsoft for wrongful death.

Re:If I understand correctly

[Alsee]

The PC vendors asked Microsoft out on a date... After dating for a while, a new girl shows up (Be), and some PC vendors ask her to dinner... decide they prefer Microsoft, so they leave Be to go patch things up with MSFT.

You have it about right, except for the fact that Microsoft violated at least a half dozen laws in the process. Microsoft is that psychotic girlfriend who makes making illegal threats to anyone Be works with, illegally sabotages the strip-mall where Be gets a job, and who illegally interferes with Be's bank affairs.

Try reading the legal complaint. Hell, Microsoft has already been convicted on most of these charges. It's more like the movie Fatal attraction with the added bonus that Glenn Close is a prison babe on parole and Michael Duglass decides to marry the psycho bitch to avoid getting killed by her.

-

What an allmighty bunch of cowards

[BeCre8iv]

Be inc was dead - they had nohting to lose and the antitrust trial ad done all the work. The money means nothing, but the precedent set in court would have real benefit to the community. I smell corrupt execs.

www.yellowtab.com

[Anonymous Coward]

yellowtab.com.

Less than 1%?

[rcs1000]

Really, really a lot less than 1%.

$22.5 x 10 = $225m
x 10 = $2.25bn
x 10 = $22.5bn
x 2 = $45bn

i.e. 1/2000 (or 0.05%)

(ehich is *still* less than MSFT cash at hand...)

But I digress. This looks like a pretty fair settlement to me. If you look at who Be's was really compeating with, it was probably Apple, and to a lesser extent SGI. I really don't think there were many BeBox buyers that thought... hmmm.. I really want a Pentium 66 running Windows 95.

This is like Dugati extracting a settlement from Ford, as it's predatory pricing on cars was affecting Ducati's motorbike sales. There are many, many people who can claim to have been harshly affected by Miscrosoft's unfair competitive practices: Be is probably pushing it. Which is why it picked up just 0.05% of MSFT's cash balances...

Just my 2c.

Re:Less than 1%?

[squiggleslash]

There were actually specific actions taken by Microsoft against Be, whereas the Ford example you give is where someone might get hurt because of Ford's general marketing issues.

As an example, one manufacturer initially agreed to bundle BeOS with their computers in addition to Windows, making them dual-boot. (I think it was Sanyo, my memory's foggy.) Microsoft immediately jumped on them, and the "dual booting" machines ended up leaving the factory with BeOS installed but no way to access the BeOS partition. Buyers had no clue the operating system was even there.

And this was at a time when Microsoft had vanquished OS/2 by telling IBM they had a choice: Either they could have enough support to credibly offer Windows 95, or they could continue marketing OS/2. Linux was still considered a geek's toy, serious computer manufacturer's weren't taking any notice. So it really was an act against BeOS specifically, this wasn't part of some general attack on some major rival that wasn't Be.

Sounds like the solution...

[MickLinux]

... is the 2-click-insert-good-floppy-and-go-to-lunch Default Debian Install.

Essentially, first click downloads the install program. Second click confirms "Do you want to run this, and install Debian as an alternate OS?" Most of the program then downloads off the internet.

Then, the program (1) Loads all system information that it can, into a file
(2) Loads the basic program onto the hard drive, plus all required debs, and checks the hashes.
(3) Installs startup program in Windows that gives the user an option "Would you like to change your default bootup setting to Linux? (Y/N/Don't ask again)"
(4) runs ScanDisk to clean the disk
(5) runs Defrag to defrag it.
(6) rewrites the floppy with a boot disk, and boots into Linux
(7) Partitions a standard user configuration onto the HDD (or onto the alternate HDD, if you so select, thus removing the need for repartitioning)
(8) Installs the Debs
(9) Installs LILO, with 20-second timeout, and default option being Windows bootup (the polite option).
(10) Sets a waiting screen "Your Debian Linux System is Installed. Please hit any key to reboot to Windows, or 'L' to continue with Linux for now, and explore your new OS!."

Such a system should also have a kind of "new hardware" wizard which reports back any new hardware that Debian developers have never seen.

It should also have an "Error Reporting" wizard, such that if the installation process fails, then when you return to Windows you have the option, "Report Error?"

but it looks guilty

[pyrrho]

to me

MS and too much money: this is where it goes...

[dysprosia]

I remember reading a while back that Microsoft had literally too much money for its own good.


So this is where some of it goes, presumably. Probably will be a win for MS, anyway.

Chump or Chimp?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's you that should STFU. Nobody wanted BeOS, that's why they crumbled. You said it yourself, they couldn't even give it away for free. If you make a product that you can't even give away for free, it friggin' sucks bad.

IF BeOS were indeed a viable competent alternative to Windows, and OEM's could install it on their machines for free, then SOMEBODY would have jumped on it and rode it like a French whore.

Let's see, Company X is selling their PC with Windows for $1000. Company X is a lot bigger than my company and I'm finding it hard to compete. If someone comes along and offers me a a viable alternative OS that I can install for free... there's the edge I've been looking for.

I use Windows because I actually WANT to use Windows. I've been using computers for over 20 years, I'm well aware of all the OS choices out there, yet I still choose to use Windows. Does the fact that there's a catch 22 in that most people use Windows so most stuff is made for Windows so most people use Windows play into my decision? Hell yes it does.

If you offered to give me a new engine for my car free of charge, an engine that gets 500 miles to the gallon, but I have to drive across the country to fill it up then I'm not going to yank my current engine out and install your engine. However, if I could install your engine in addition to mine, I might use it until it runs out of gas, then more likely than not I'll just switch back to my old engine and never give yours a second thought.

If someone really wants to compete with Windows, then they need to do everything Windows does, which is one hell of a lot. You need hardware support, you need software support, you need to be as easy to operate as Windows, and you need to offer something to make it worth the switch, like free.

Linux is only just now starting to make strides in the first 2, but I feel still has quite some way to go on the ease of use. Look how far behind Linux BeOS was. If Linux has a hard time gaining ground, of course BeOS never had a chance.

The very reason so many people have computers today is because so many people had computers before them. It's all about volume. Think about how much it costs to make any computer component, hardware or software. The price of the materials is like beach sand compared to the price of development. If you are only going to make 10,000 units you can only distribute that cost over 10,000 people. However, if you make 10,000,000 units... you should get the idea by now, this is /. afterall.

Until companies can expect to sell millions of units for an alternate OS, they are either going to price their product out of reach of most or most likely not even make it for that OS at all. Without those products, an OS is worthless to most people. People don't use computers to use an OS, they use computers to use products and the OS is simply a means to that end. Right now, Windows is a means to a lot more ends than anyone else. When that changes so will their market share.

So this whole BeOS suit is total crap. I'm pissed MS had to pay 25 mil just to get BeOS off their back. That will be passed on to me, thanks for making me pay for your failures BeOS. Build a better mouse trap is absolutely true, however, if it only catches pure white mice then it isn't better. Sometimes losers lose simply because they are losers.

What was BeOS's ultimate goal anyway? Were they an Open Source company that worked primarily for the betterment of the computer industry? Their intentions were no more pure than Microsoft's. They were a company in business to make money. Give them 90% market share and they will act just like Microsoft, or worse. Why would anyone want to trade one dictator for another? At least Linux is FREE.

Re:Chump or Chimp?

[JonathanBoyd]

Maybe it's you that should STFU. Nobody wanted BeOS, that's why they crumbled. You said it yourself, they couldn't even give it away for free. If you make a product that you can't even give away for free, it friggin' sucks bad.

Yeah, the situation did suck, but not because of Be. Read the various articles above yours. Be couldn't give it away for free because Microsoft wouldn't let them. PC manufacturers were forbidden to have another OS visibly installed, on pain of major financial hurt re: Windows licensing.

Re:Chump or Chimp?

[Alsee]

Maybe it's you that should STFU. Nobody wanted BeOS

Wrong. Be's legal complaint lists companies that wanted BeOS. Anmely Hitachi and Compaq, probably others as well.

IF BeOS were indeed a viable competent alternative to Windows... If someone really wants to compete with Windows, then they need to do everything Windows does

WRONG. Be was not trying to position BeOS as an alternative to Windows (at least not immediately). They were trying to position it as a COMPLEMENT to Windows. No OS can stand on it's own without a large application base. So Be positioned BeOS to be better than Windows for certain tasks so people could dual boot, get the benefit of Windows applications for some tasks, get the benefit of BeOS for other tasks, and more applications would be written for BeOS when there was an installed base of BeOS. Co-existing with Windows is a completely viable business plan.

Hell, it is a plan that could conceivably have lead to BeOS eventually replacing Windows, but that is irrelevant to the suit. Even without replacing Windows Be had a viable plan, and Microsoft illegally abused thier Monopoly to exterminate competition.

If you offered to give me a new engine for my car free of charge, an engine that gets 500 miles to the gallon, but I have to drive across the country to fill it up then I'm not going to yank my current engine out and install your engine. However, if I could install your engine in addition to mine, I might use it until it runs out of gas, then more likely than not I'll just switch back to my old engine and never give yours a second thought.

Exactly! And that is what Microsoft ILLEGALLY PREVENTED.

BeOS wanted people to be able to dual-boot Windows and BeOS. They wanted you to install that second engine for free. Once a number of people have that second engine installed then gas stations (applications) could start popping up locally.

-

Re:Chump or Chimp?

[axxackall]

So Be positioned BeOS to be better than Windows for certain tasks so people could dual boot, get the benefit of Windows applications for some tasks, get the benefit of BeOS for other tasks, and more applications would be written for BeOS when there was an installed base of BeOS.

And can you reveal the secret here, what are those tasks specifically that require BeOS rather than Windows? I've tried BeOS and have not found anything that I would like more than in Windows. Have I missed anything?

It's not that I love Windows. In fact, after years of working with and trying various OSes for desktop (and server too) applications, from MacOS to OSX to Linux to BSD to SCO to BeOS, I think I am capable to compare such OSes. So, it would be surprise for me to find out that I've missed something in BeOS.

Personally, I think that the only two viable alternatives to Windows are Linux and OSX. Well, OSX has own niche of PPCs where in a long term it has its own trouble from Linux/PPC, thanks to IBM. Apple cannot feed anti-Windows geeks too long with alternative themes, especially after GNOME and KDE distros will have better default themes. Eventually Apple business will collapse back to hardware with application services available for both then-dying OSX AND then-growing Linux/PPC clients.

In a long term Linux is the only viable solution. And there are serious reasons for that:

• I trust to open source software: with all other equal features I would prefer Open Source software as I can trust the source more than to any binary code. I cannot trust the same way to BeOS.
• I can fix the source code in case of bugs, while I have to wait months until the close-sourse vendor Like Be will send me the fix.
• I can contribute the patch back to community being sure that my competitors cannot hijack my modifocation: it's protected by GPL. Well, nothing to worry with BeOS as I cannot fix it anyway.
• Who wants to pay any license fee when there are good freely downloadable distros? IMHO Windows is the last viable license-fee based OS on the market.
• With Linux community around the world I have more chances to find helpers, who will code in Linux for me with cheap price and a good quality. The only same big community is of Windows developers. BeOS doesn't have a community of such size and never had any chances to have it.
• When the installation base is big the chances to find bugs are bigger too. Well, with such a bad OS design as Windows has it's not help. That's why another OS of a big community, Linux, has it's chances in a long term. BeOS does not have chances by this reason too.

IMHO, BeOS did not have any chances. It was too late: Linux is already uprising, being free, open-source and broadly-distributed. The final OS war will be between Windows and Linux. Of course untill new OS will come, which will have to be also free and open-source from one habd, and significuntly better than Linux from the other hand. But I don't think it's possible. It's more likely that Linux will fork and the competition will be between Linux branches.

Re:Chump or Chimp?

[Alsee]

And can you reveal the secret here, what are those tasks specifically that require BeOS rather than Windows?

To be honest, I know next to nothing about BeOS. But this case is about Microsoft's illegal actions. According to Be's legal complaint it looks like Microsoft specificly moved against them. Perhaps Microsoft saw some sort of competitive threat in BeOS on the desktop. Perhaps Microsoft saw some sort of threat in BeOS in embedded systems. Perhaps Microsoft saw no threat in BeOS at all, but still moved against them out of habit of eliminating anyone who dares try to enter the market.

Illegal businesses tactics should not still be profitable even after getting nailed for it and paying damages/settlements. Microsoft routinely breaks the law because they have found that they make more money by doing so even if they get caught and lose. Imagine if there was a one million dollar fine for killing someone. It would then make "good business sense" to simply pay the fine and kill anyone who is going to cost you more than a million dollars.

Even if Be only had a 1% chance of becoming even a minor nuciance to Microsoft it's still worth paying $24 million to kill them.

-

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Photo_Nut]

David Stein wrote:
Eventually, the legal system will have to come to grips with the fact that its current M.O. of penalizing corporations isn't deterring anyone. They smile, pay it, and move on to bigger and better market exploits.

If by move on to bigger and better maket exploits, you mean that they create products, and sell stuff, then I agree with you. You are free to compete, but they have more money and more lawyers and more patents. The only way that you can "win" is to give away your products or provide some different feature sets/offer something of a different value.

Does Linux do this? Sure. That's what makes MS compete with it. Microsoft for once has a competitor that is worthy of the name competitor. Will Linux win? Not in the sense that it is any better or cheaper to use than MS products. Linux will win in the case that it will change people's minds. Sure, they violate a few patents that MS wouldn't sue for because they already have enough legal battles and aren't stupid enough to pull a SCO. MS can't sue Linux to win. MS wins by selling product and establishing market dominance in the corporate world. Just because MS has a home division doesn't mean that they don't make their money from Office and Windows sold to enterprises and governments.

And in case those of you staunch Linux supporters out there think that Linux isn't in any way, shape, or form produced by the industry, but rather by cool geeks like you, then let me dispel the myth. Linux is the OS produced by IBM and RedHat, not you. Yes, you may be submitting your lines of code to the Kernel or some utility, but when you submit lines of your code to Linux, you are giving your time to IBM. IBM is not compensating you for it. IBM is selling your developments to others, and you cannot prevent it from happening. The GPL already absorbed your patent rights.

Is Microsoft evil? Hardly. They make products that appeal to the market, and people buy those products because of the way that Microsoft positions them. From time to time, Microsoft buys technologies and competition, and from time to time, Microsoft actually produces something you can call innovative (for example, amouse you might actually want to use with multiple buttons, a scroll wheel, and a stylish finish).

In the business world, there are many failed ventures for every one which succeeds. For example, can anyone tell me what you might be able to do with a product known as Microsoft Liquid Motion? Microsoft purchased the company which produced it according to this press release.

Here's a quick list of some of these corporations that are out to "make money" in the hardware/software industry, maybe MS has Billions of dollars, so do all of these companies. Why? Well, you can't live without the products and services they have provided, continue to provide, and might provide in the future: IBM (the marketers of Linux, and the founder of the Computer Industry, whose people produced such famous inventions as ASCII and the Personal Computer), AT&T (they brought you several things including the Transistor and UNIX), Oracle (if you ever use a credit card, your transactions were made using their software), Apple (Jobs and Woz were the first to make an affordable hobbyist PC), Microsoft (MS was the first Software company, and established the software licensing business model), Sun (makers of expensive hardware which run all that Oracle DB software, and Java), Xerox (They didn't patent the GUI, the Mouse, or WYSIWG, but they invented them), HP (printers, calculators, computers).

So I don't see Microsoft or the computer industry as all that bad, they produced all the technology that enables you and I to have this discussion. They made Billions of dollars and will spend Billions of dollars this year to make it even better.

Jeez

[Bruha]

What did they ask for? Bill gates pocket lint and this was the spare change that shook out while he gave it to them?

Everyone should be asking this same question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so little money? The answer is simple, they had no case. Microsoft did nothing wrong, they simply made a more popular OS. How is that a crime?

Should I be able to sue McDonalds if my mom 'n pop burger stand goes belly up? Hey wait a minute! Why not? How is it different!? McD's gets a better price on meat than I can get, that's not fair. McD's advertises on TV, I can only advertise on their bathroom walls. Can't you see it's all their fault? Surely that's worth a couple mil.

23 million pretty much proves BeOS has no case. Face it, they have far more explicit details about the case that everyone here combined. If they felt 23 million was all they could get, then that's because they knew 23 mil was more than they would likely get if they took it to court.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

By eliminating Netscape, Microsoft secured a permanent (and quite effective) internet browser monopoly.

By eliminating netscape, they gave birth to the very thing they were afraid of. Mozilla, a cross-platform development framework that commoditizes the OS.

Sure, mozilla holds a ridiculously small percentage of the market now, but gecko is the fastest growing browser engine out there, marketshare-wise. So there's still hope.

Cool free money

[t_allardyce]

Can we start some sort of class action suite against MS for something stupid like "Windows crashes hurt my productivity" or "Poor windows security practices caused virus propogation" - i mean someone managed to sue McDonalds over hot coffee right?! Hm, im not sure if i have any Microsoft Windows licenses that i can send in to collect the money tho :(

The Lawsuit ...

[polyp2000]

The complaint filed by Be basically centres around the fact that they had a number of manufacturers willing to distribute Beos as a dual boot System. In particular it describes how they had an agreement with Hitatchi to distribute Beos Pre-installed alongside windows. Apparently Microsofts big wigs turned up at Hitachi and gave them a good ticking off, apparently the OEM license prohibits Windows being installed in a dual boot configuration with any other operating system.Hitachi got a right royal bollocking from the big boys ... and eventaully offered be the option of allowing the customer to boot and install manually via a floppy disk (which as you can imagine is a waste of time idea !)

As If you needed to be reminded about just how much Microsoft are evil bastards one more time the pdf, makes a good case.

That press release BTW is a microsoft one, Its only natural that they would'nt admit any wrong doing.

More like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine you have $10 and you kill someone. Your punishment is paying the victim's family a penny.

Technically superior operating system?

[PrImED73]

BeOS was good, but i dont see how it was "technically superior" they were pushing it a bit there.

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[f00zbll]

Having used BeOS for a little while. I would say definitely better. Superior might be too grand of a statement. The file system was rock solid and is exactly what MS has been trying to build for the last three years with longhorn. The graphics looked much better and had fewer color calibration issues. for example, the colors you see on the screen are much closer to what prints out. windows still has these problems, unless you go buy expensive calibration software/hardware. The SMP support was pervasive, meaning all application benefit from multiple CPU's without having a programmer go in and change the code. The pre-emptive multi-threading/tasking is much better than the current pre-emptive threading in windows 2K and XP. Give you an example, I could copy a huge 300Mb movie to the disk from a CD and still play a 200Mb movie from the hard drive. Try that with windows 2K or XP and tell me how well it handles that. Better than windows definitely.

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[borgheron]

This was mainly because, despite Be's protestations to the contrary, BEOS borrowed many concepts from UNIX.

GJC

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[remember_beos]

indeed BeOS was and still is superior. everything was thought out to provide users with a feeling of confidence - a deserved feeling. try this on for size:

download a 600MB Divx rip of some DVD you've been waiting to see. while it's downloading, change the filename in the filesystem. the app you use to download the file never knows or cares - data just dumps to the right place and the proper i-nodes are extended and updated. move the file - go ahead, don't be afraid. click and drag - drop it on another drive. a completely seperate physical disk. what do ya know? the download app still hasn't any reason to worry, the OS seamlessly links the downloaded data to the file, wherever you've put it. throw it out. yup, put it in the trash can and hit 'empty trash'. still, the data streams properly. never a glitch. how about this: on a pentium 2 400Mhz box i can play a Divx while burning a CD and still watch as Seti@Home gets plenty of left over CPU cycles. why? because with fine-grained multithreading i really do have more spare CPU cycles. fewer cycles are tossed out the window by being allocated to processes that are not ready to use them.

what about simple Focus settings? ever try to type a URL in Internet Explorer as the crappy site you're viewing uses pop-unders? why can't you type? because windows pulls focus away and sends it to the other window. when focus returns to the window you wanted, you aren't in the adress bar anymore. theis NEVER happens in BeOS. i don't mean ideally speaking, i mean never. use a script to launch 1000 apps, and start typing into the first app as it is launched, my typing continues to affect that app which had the focus when i started typeing. it is just "The Right Way" and how it was done in BeOS.

just better? ok - that works for telling your friend to try it. don't want to create huge expectations. leave something of a wow effect instead of "well, i already knew it could cure cancer - no big deal"

but BeOS is dead - no more wow effect to be had out there. might as well give away the punchline now: if a person runs BeOS for 7 days they will feel pain and hatred when they next try to use Windows, MacOS and even *gasp* linux.

this turned into a rant aimed at non-beos users. sorry, i suppose i should copy/paste and move it to a reply to someone else's post somewhere but i'm too lazy. your observations are good and true :)

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[1s44c]

This was mainly because, despite Be's protestations to the contrary, BEOS borrowed many concepts from UNIX.

Maybe they did, but it wasn't all UNIX. The GUI was way better than X could ever be.

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to explain some of these differences to people who have master in CS and they still didn't get how different and powerful BeOS was. then again, most users could care less about how the OS performs the tasks.

Microsoft could have easily bought BeOS and called it Windows2K3. But instead they stuck with a crappy hack they call windows.

Re:Technically superior operating system?

[borgheron]

This would be a valid point, if X were an official part of the UNIX OS, which it's not. Case in point: Mac OS X.

GJC

lose court case, but killed competitor

[wadiwood]

link with why BE sued

I reckon Be should have applied for an ongoing pay out, eg $23 million per year, since Microsoft's actions effectively forced Be out of the market even though the Yahoo/Microsoft statement says that Be went belly up had nothing to do with Microsoft. Crap. That's why Be sued in the first place.

These things shouldn't be solved by civil law cases, they should be solved by criminal law cases. How often does a criminal case get settled "out of court". I guess plea bargaining counts but it usually doesn't allow you to buy your way out of jail if you were bad/provable-guilty enough.

Er...

[usotsuki]

...Linux?

-uso.

You know how M$ is going to pay?

[madpuppy]

with 25 million in vouchers for M$ software
(restrictions apply, voucher should not exceed 50% of purchase price, not valid for Office, Windows family products, or development software.)

You don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has no desire to develop anything as cool as a BeBox running BeOS. They've NEVER had that desire at any time.

Microsoft's only desire is to DOMINATE EVERYTHING THAT RUNS ON SILICON, regardless of the cost. And in the case of Be, it only cost them $24 million to completely and utterly destroy them--piffling pocket change for the defacto monopoly.

And on top of it all, they STILL get to walk away as though they did NOTHING to harm Be.

@subject

[Anonymous Coward]

LINuuuuuuuuu..uuuuuuuUUUUuuuuuuu..uuuuuuuX

So how much will the shareholders get?

[jbwolfe]

I miss Be, but now the important question is how much can we expect to receive in the end? I figure from the last 10Q we should get $28M/38M shares outstanding the small sum of about 74 cents per share. Oh well, it still beats the trading price.

In a follow-up

[dbretton]

Bill Gates was later asked to comment on the outcome of the lawsuit.

When prompted, Mr. Gates stated, "This is truly an unfortunate turn of events. We are saddened by the verdict, and it will take quite some time before we can recouperate our losses."

Mr. Gates then ripped a juicy fart, and followed up by stating, "Ahh. I just earned another $25 million."

great description of the situation

[Anonymous Coward]

The mythology of MS as some great innovator and "market leader" (in the sense that the company benefits the market) because they are #1 is typical. Peguinshit puts the reality of MS's history into the proper frame.

If anything, Bill Gates was/is an excellent negotiator and deal-maker. He understands how to push the envelopes of ethics and legality to win. MS, during the last twenty years, has proven that it is not technologically innovative or particularly good at the "development" game. There have always been numerous examples of the 'right' way to implement a technology; MS has consistently adopted those technologies that solidify its controlling position in the market-place. MS has used and continues to use its monopoly position to force out competition and force in technologies that have harmed the evolution of technology. It is incredible to hear MS or others claim that MS and Windows has facilitated the technology revolution. In the long- and short-term, active competition is ALWAYS good. A Monopoly has never proved to be helpful to its industry and market: technology and innovation inevitably screech to a halt when monopolies take hold.

What's really sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is that when people think a toyota is a luxury car.

Son, luxury cars are made in Bavaria certain parts of England. Toyotas, Datsuns and Hondas are made in Japan.

You probably think an SUV is "cool". Loser.

OJ

[Anonymous Coward]

OJ Simpson paid a lot of money for killing Nicole without admitting wrong doing.

OT: MCSE

[swordgeek]

Used to work with a guy who had his MCSE. He was utterly pissed off, because he worked bloody hard for his (one of the first five in Canada), when the exam failure rate was more than 50%. However, to increase the number of MCSEs and make everyone happier, they went through the process of dumbing down the MCSE path until everyone had one, and they were worth nothing.

My friend felt betrayed by Microsoft by making his training worthless and an object of derision--just to make some market statements. That's one of the things that drove him into Unix, where he's been ever since.

You "cannnot"?

[Dictator For Life]

Perhaps you ought to visit this page and see whether that's true or not. Run any of those systems through their configurator, and you'll come to the page where you get to select the Linux distro (even dual-bootable with FreeBSD) that you like.

It's not that you can't do it; it's that most people won't do it that is the problem.

Re:You "cannnot"?

[King_TJ]

Huh? I don't see your point at all. Obviously, your link points to a firm that's trying to survive as a "niche" business, largely because they're one of the few that offer a line of systems pre-loaded with a variety of OS choices.

I've never heard of their computers until now, and I'm not sure I'd trust buying one of their notebooks either. I've had plenty of experience with "off brand" notebooks, and it wasn't good.

There's too much potential for something to break and then you're out of luck getting replacement parts. The build quality is (sometimes) 2nd. rate, and you may or may not be getting all the performance you should be getting for your dollar. (Hard to say, since these things are rarely reviewed in head-to-head tests in the magazines and reputable web sites that benchmark competing systems.)

Until the top 10 "name brand" systems (like Toshiba, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) all offer *any* of their computers with or without an OS pre-loaded on them, and offer choices like Linux or BSD as well as Windows - I'd say it still holds generally true you're stuck buying Windows bundled with your new system.

Re:You "cannnot"?

[rwise2112]

Actually there's a very good chance that these notebooks (or any other "off brand" model for that matter) are going to be made by the same firms that make the "name brand" systems.

Very few companies you list make their own notebooks, with Toshiba being the biggest exception.
For instance:

• Tosbiba - made by Toshiba or Compal
• IBM - made by Quanta
• HP - made by Quanta, Arima, Compal, or Iventec
• Dell - made by Quanta

Re:You "cannnot"?

[Dictator For Life]

Huh? I don't see your point at all.

Well, then let's take a look at what the original poster said:

You CANNNOT buy a laptop from anywhere (except used) without a manditory copy of Windows XP installed on it... Pretty sad... paying all that Micro$oft tax and all.

This gentleman pretty categorically denied even the possibility of obtaining a new laptop without a Microsoft OS. I demonstrated that this is not the case. That was my point.

your link points to a firm that's trying to survive as a "niche" business

Which has nothing to do with the OP's point. He said it wasn't possible. It is. The fact that it's a niche market is irrelevant in the present context.

Until the top 10 "name brand" systems (like Toshiba, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) all offer *any* of their computers with or without an OS pre-loaded on them, and offer choices like Linux or BSD as well as Windows - I'd say it still holds generally true you're stuck buying Windows bundled with your new system.

This is a different assertion than that of the OP, and since you say that it's "generally" true, I'd "generally" agree with you ;-) although Wal-Mart perhaps could change that, if they started selling Lindows laptops. Other than that - you *can* get a computer without Windows, but you frequently have to look extra hard. FWIW, you can buy a Dell Precision workstation with Red Hat pre-loaded on it today, and you can do it over the web in the same way that you would do it if it was going to have Windows installed. I suspect that you'd still be paying the Microsoft tax; the price is really no different for these boxes than for a Win-box. (Of course, the OP was talking about laptops, so this doesn't really apply).

Re:You "cannnot"?

[King_TJ]

Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you said. I just felt that the original poster was exaggerating a bit, but trying to make the (valid, IMHO) point that it's extremely difficult to buy a new notebook computer today that doesn't come with Windows pre-loaded on it. (And let's face it, people aren't really selling many new notebooks nowdays with any flavors of Windows other than XP, unless it's "old stock" or something. Microsoft is trying hard to get everybody onto XP and off of Windows '98/ME and even 2000.)

This is especially unfortunate, because folks wanting to run Linux on a new laptop often run into "snags" such as oddball video chipsets that XFree86 doesn't support well, or lack of support for all the power management features in the notebook. It's more of a benefit that some people first realize to get a laptop that's preloaded with Linux and fully functional.

Too little too late

[Orion Blastar]

BeOS is just about done, the Amiga of operating systems. It only lives on because of its fans, much like OS/2 does.

Apple did some damage too, by not releasing the specs needed to run on G3 PowerMacs so Be had to leave the PowerMac market and focus on the WINTEL market.

The BeBox was a glorious invention, the Geekport is a great expansion port.

The main problem is where are the apps? Microsoft donimated the market so much that few developers even considered developing for BeOS. Most games are still developed for Windows, so the GameHeads need their box to run Windows.

Another problem was driver support, much like OS/2 driver support, most hardware makers didn't want to support it. So you had to pick your hardware carefully.

Be.com is for sale, and beincorporated.com no longer sells BeOS. Palm bought it.

OpenBeOS is in the works to make an Open Sourced BeOS.

YellowTab has Zeta, based on BeOS which can still be bought.

BeOS 5 Personal Edition is still available as a download from BeBits

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Locutus]

Well yes. DimensionX was purchased to keep Netscape out of the picture. Actually, it ended up knocking down 3 pins because the DimensionX APIs were being used by company for it's development tool for the Netscape browser. It used Java technology and Sun Microsystems was interested in purchasing them( DimensionX ).

Microsoft came in and purchased the company to:
1) Keep a tool used for Netscape off the market
2) Keep Java technology off the market( ala Coopers & Peters )
3) Keep Sun for getting a good Java technology.

I know this because I know one of the founders of DimensionX. This deal was great for Microsoft, good for DimensionX and bad for Netscape and bad for Sun. It was also bad for the tech community because the market was not allowed to choose the best product for the job. This kind of "business" is the exact reason why I recommend everybody stay away from Microsoft products. The company is anti-innovation, NOT pro-innovation like they say they are. IMHO.

my $0.02

LoB

"Fair and reasonable"

[mjrauhal]

A particularly funny twist in this particular case is that "Both parties are satisfied with the agreement and believe that it is fair and reasonable".

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't think paying 23.25 million dollars is especially fair or reasonable to Microsoft if there had been no wrongdoing whatsoever...

It is suggested-Might makes right.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nice theory. However, the US Government happily had the stamina to sue IBM for a decade. Perhaps, just perhaps, they didn't have as strong a case as they'd hoped."

Two things. One this is the government we're talking about. The one's whom big business wouldn't exist. Period!

Two the DOJ would have had a stronger case if they had pursued the right thing. e.g. bootloader issues.

mmmm, killer psycho bitches...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever had a girlfriend that acts sane and rational when she suspects you are seeing someone else?

what about Yellowtab?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Yellowtab ever releases their update to Be's op system if Microsoft will care? They are so small I dont think they would, but a updated BeOS that runs on modern hardware would be so freakin cool.

They could not have been found "Guilty"

[spacefrog]

to avoid the risk of being found guilty in court

• This was a
• civil case, otherwise known as a lawsuit being tried in a civil court. Microsoft could not have been found guilty of anything, only liable or not liable.
  
  Civil and criminal court are very, very, very different places and the results of a victory or defeat are very different, indeed.

Sure you can

[the grace of R'hllor]

My brand new Jewel notebook (a Dutch brand, though) is supplied without OS (except for an MS-DOS bootdisk, which isn't installed to the harddrive)

It's one way they minimize their prices.

Maybe you're just looking in the wrong places.

Such a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS really was a great OS. I tried it, and I loved it. At one point I ran it on a very low end machine, a celron 300 (shudder), with only 64mb of ram, and a very small, slow, old hd. To my surprise, the machine SCREAMED. I never saw it perform so fricken well. I had 20 avi files open at one time, while playing 4 mp3's and several other apps open, without a hickup or single frame drop. Even after it ran out of memory AND out of swapfile space, it kept going no problem. Something windows would never even come close to doing. It's a shame to see the demise of BeOS, as it truely impressed the hell out of me.

Well, is it a fair punishment, or not?

[DonGar]

I agree with your point, but think it's important to understand that there is another view point here as well. They did end up handing over 25 MILLION dollars. They WERE punished.

There tends to be a difference in perception on the value of money based on who has this. This strongly influences legal results, and taxation. Since both sides really, truly believe in their viewpoints, they both tend to consider many decisions unfair.

An argument can be made that if 25 million is a fair fine (which I don't agree with in this case), then it doesn't matter if the company being fined has $12 or 26 million or 26 billion in the bank. The punishment should be the same. Most people who have a lot of money would take this point of view.

After all, if their money is worth less because they are rich, why did they bother to make it in the first place?

Most of the rest of us tend to say.... ah, they're rich, they can afford it, what are they bitching about? I just wish I HAD 25 million in the first place!

Of course, the point of the lawsuit (from a social point of view) is to discourage behavior that is bad for society. I don't see an occasional 25 million penalty as being much of a deterant for Microsoft.

chump change

[Anonymous Coward]

$23e6 is a drop in the bucket compared to what Be could have accomplished in a FREE ( as in no artificial barriers to entry economic assumption from hell ) marketplace. Competition is one thing, but doing your best to insure you have a lossless season without ever playing a game ain't exactly that ( yeah you Billy boy ). It's no wonder M$ can get away with causing the largest blackout in history when they can buy off anyone that even attempts to play in their league. Lobby your congressmen to keep our government from using MS.

signature

[jonadab]

> Do not meddle in the affairs of LeoDV, for he is subtle and quick
> to anger.

Never leave a live dragon or an angry ent out of your calculations.

Re:Sounds like a false solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but what about ReiserFS?

You aren't suggesting using gnu/linux without a journaling file system, are you?

So which floppy do I use for that? Which download CD? Does that include support for my adaptec hardware raid card, or is that another floppy/cd altogether? Does that include the current kernel? Or an old kernel that doesn't support my hardware? Will my matrox dual head card be picked up, or will I be staring at a dead X screen? Or will I need to figure out how to get X working with my matrox or nvidia dual head card?

Am I getting woody? If so, what do I do to get the most current version of kde? the most current version of mozilla? the most current version of openoffice?

When I do an apt-get upgrade, do I answer yes or no if it wants to remove kde? I would assume yes, since I am doing an upgrade, right? It would remove the old (and incompatible with older compiler/whatever) version of kde, and install the newer version, right? Or am I losing kde altogether, as has been suggested on a post to a list I saw?

So I'm a multi-year debian user, and the floppy install works for me. What about the newer users? Should newbies be kept out of debian just as newbie hams are kept out of better frequencies through morse code requirements?

Can I run the latest version of MySQL or Postgres on woody? How about Apache? Not? But Apache.org says to upgrade immediately to the latest release for security issues...does woody include the latest gcc compiler? If not, how do I run the apps that require it?

Or should I forget about woody, and use unstable so I can use apps that actually are usable (like the latest openoffice/mozilla/kde/whatever). But then, do I need to locate a debian guru to fix my system when unstable breaks? Or is it my responsibility as a newbie to fix a broken unstable? What is the recommendation for newbies? Run woody and old apps? Or get a guru to help you run woody and new apps? Or run unstable and new apps, but when it breaks, you dumb newbie, newbies aren't supposed to run unstable unless they can fix their systems...right?

Got fired?

[melted]

You don't just drop a job like this these days.

It works both ways

[ClosedSource]

How does one willingly accept $25,250,000 without a trial, when one could potentially receive many times more. The lack of a viable case is suggested under such circumstances.