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Microsoft CA Settlement Claim Forms Hit Mailboxes
mattOzan writes "So I got my Standard Claim Form in the mail today from the California State Superior Court, as I assume many other California residents did as well. This is the mechanism to get a chunk of the US$1.1 billion settlement Microsoft reached with the state of California for their anti-trust lawsuit. All the legal details (PDF) can be obtained online.
Some of the fine print: the money will be doled out as vouchers based on what qualifying MS software you or your company obtained between 1995 and 2001 (nothing for 'server computers' or Macs). Two-thirds of all unclaimed money will be given to low-income California schools for computer purchases, and vouchers may also be donated to charity."
When the big MS antitrust case was running, at the very beginning, I believe MS was trying to make a very specific point about the relationship of IE to Windows. MS was saying that their HTML rendering engine was a component of Windows (much like Gecko was the rendering component of Netscape) and that IE was a thin application shell that wrapped around that engine to create the behavior of a browser like Netscape. Other Windows applications can use that rendering engine, such as their help. So they could construct help files like web pages, but the app that you see them in is a help tool, not a browser.
That architecture is different than Netscape who carried their own rendering engine along with many other components as a bundle in their app. That difference in architecture is where the rathole regarding "taking IE out of Windows" comes from - removing the shell (as the CMU prof demonstrated) is relatively trivial, but if you object to the presence of the rendering engine, then the removal of that is not only painful but breaks other parts of Windows such as help.
Of course, it doesn't help that MS was also being an ass about this all.
Netscape (actually, I think it's other plantiffs such as Sun's Java) would complain that their ability to interact with the interfaces of these internal components was disadvantageous vs. Microsoft's own access and ability to enact change in the interfaces.
The remedy to this solution would have been hard to implement I think - you have to force Microsoft to publish and commit to a set of public interfaces and functionality, make them available to all comers, and create some mechanism through which MS can't have back-door entry. In practice, quite difficult to do, especially in areas like this, subject to significant evolution.
Once again, it doesn't help that MS was being an ass about this too.
OK, now flash forward to Eolas. For competitive reasons, MS got pulled into having plug-in interfaces. Later, they took the ball and moved it beyond where Netscape had already set it. Today, those public plug-in interfaces are the way that Real audio can be a pluggable replacement to Windows Media, or that Macromedia in some future Flash will become yet another option. Again, to a lesser extent, these kinds of plug in interfaces are what allows Sun to build a pluggable JVM (although I believe this is a pretty different mechanism).
So, if MS decides to lose the EOLAS case, that pretty much gives them carte blanche to slam the doors through the existing public interfaces shut and switch back to proprietary interfaces of their own, and their own control. In Soviet Russia, you don't plug into the brower, it plugs in to you (sorry, couldn't help it)! In a post-EOLAS world, poor Microsoft can't publish an API that allows Quicktime or Flash or RealMedia to appear in a window because they can't afford the license. But that won't stop them from doing a non-infringing implementation of Windows Media will it?
I think this is definitely NOT a case where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.