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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."
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Indeed, press releases are supposed to include a paragraph at the end identifying the issuer of the release.
Caldera did file an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for $1.6 billion, and settled for $150 million (estimated).
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...
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.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Microsoft OEM contracts forbid a visible dual-boot option.
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.
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.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
My PowerBook didn't come with Windows. ;)
Man and Goat
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.
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.
The venerable and solid repository of BeOS applications' BeBits has these entries for instant messaging applications:
There are more, but I chose to show three examples of chat protocals.
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.
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.
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.
user@host$ diff
"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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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).
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