Microsoft Pays $536M to Novell

_mArk writes "This morning Novell announced that it had settled a potential law suit with Microsoft related to its NetWare product line. Microsoft agreed to pay $536 million to Novell, but this is not the end as there is another litigation against them pertaining to WordPerfect."

Comments

So Novell is going to let the EU case die?

[Sikmaz]

"Finally, Novell has agreed to withdraw its intervention in the European Commission's case with Microsoft."

Re:So Novell is going to let the EU case die?

[bfree]

Personally I cannot believe this is legal. EU takes a case V MS and MS can pay off the prosecution witnesses. Is this not in itself evidence that it is an dominent abusive monopoly which will run wild without legal restraints, the exact thing "anti-trust" laws are for. Imagine you were a witness in a blackmail trial and you were called into an appeal, when asked to give evidence you say "sorry, but I made a deal with the defendant for loads of cash to not say anything so I'm withdrawing my statement". End result, you should presumably be tried to perverting the course of justice and/or the defendant tried for witness intimidation. For a business isn't the ultimate intimidation "if you don't do what we want we won't give you buckets of cash"?

Re:Beware the Microsoft settlements

[Ohreally_factor]

Microsoft settles with Novell. Result: We don't know yet, but I'm expecting something ugly. Maybe some bizarre legal cross-licensing to prevent non-commercial software from existing?

And let's not forget the recent resignation of Chris Stone from Novell. Maybe it's just a coincidence.

Strategy on Microsofts part to legitimize lawsuits

[3770]

Is it a strategy on Microsofts part to legitimize software related lawsuits?

They have really deep pockets. They can afford to pay. When the pay they achieve two things:

1) They can stop worrying about the lawsuit and continue with their business.
2) They also legitimize the claim of the other company, in this case Novell, thereby setting a precedent.

When Microsoft sets a precedent it means that the next company that Sun or Novell or SCO sues will almost certainly have to pay. There is a precedent after all. But that company might not be able to pay. And then Microsoft has one competitor less.

Re:WordPerfect

[Reziac]

And "monopoly" would imply *lack* of choice. People used WP by choice back then even more than now -- in WP's heyday, WP had direct competition from Wordstar, MultiMate, and numerous other word processors of varying capability. WP cornered what was then a very competitive market because of several factors:

1) support for every printer known to man
2) features that users wanted (notably, features for lawyers, which no other product bothered to include)
3) excellent free tech support for one and all (legal user or not)
4) Reveal Codes (the ultimate timesaver for complex documents)

WP only lost the market lead by being slow and lame to the Windows bandwagon, and I think more critical, by radically reducing their free tech support.

Until WPWin8, where WP got its Windows act back together, WinWord was prettier to look at, but Word has *never* been superior in any way, and as you say about file formats -- lordy!!

BTW, tho I have (and use, and collect) most WP versions, I still use WP5.1 as my everyday workhorse, and I lurk on the WP OO.o mailing list. :)

More Mac viruses?

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

This is really off-topic, but was there really a time when there were more Macintosh viruses than DOS/Windows ones?

AFAIK, the first viruses were spotted in 85-86 and they were on dos. The first 2-3 years were pretty quiet (well, there was the Robert Morris internet worm).
Then in the beginning of the 90s or so there were Brain, the Jerusalem-family, Michelangelo, and most notably the first kits, Dark Avenger and VCL. All for DOS/Windows. According to my memory, at this time viruses were already 'Microsoft country'.

So was the Mac virus hegemony between these periods, or does one of us have a memory fault?