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Should We Follow Novell v. MS in Detail?
e6003 writes "Groklaw has a fascinating article written by a retired attorney. In short, he believes FOSS advocates should be following the recently announced Novell anti-trust case against Microsoft with as much vigour as we do the SCO-IBM case. Whilst the latter is to all intents and purposes settled in favour of the Good Guys, the article points out how Novell v. MS is far harder to call. Evidence produced during this new case, he argues, may be valuable for proving anti-competitive intent on Microsoft's behalf should MS (or a proxy) go on a patent rampage against FOSS. Finally, the article points out that Microsoft either destroys evidence itself (see the Burst.com case) or requires evidence to be destroyed as part of settlements (as in the Caldera DR-DOS case)."
No. Patents protect the "inventor" from other people competing against them with duplicate products/processes/whatever. They do not protect the holder from competition in the marketplace. Anticompetitive behavior is using force to keep products unfairly out of participation in the marketplace. Keep in mind that patents aren't on actual results--if you have two black boxes which both produce, say, anti-gravity but they do it in different ways, the patents will not infringe. But if the owner of one company squelches the other one to death outside of the marketplace, they are being "anitcompetitive."
Read jack phelps dot net
www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2002/02/25/foc us6.html
The above link is a good article on the subject. Basically, if you know that litigation is coming, you can not destroy evidence. That's for civil cases. Destroying evidence in criminal cases really gets you in trouble.
Spoilation became a big issue with the Enron case. In other words, the rules of the game have become much clearer. What Microsoft thought it could get away with, it can't anymore.
Burst is currently in court suing Microsoft for stealing their video on demand technology. Microsoft had examined the technology over a period of many months, decided not to license it but did offer Burst $1M for an exclusive license. Burst declined and soon MS was touting a new version of their media player featuring the same technology.
During trial discovery Burst lawyers found that Microsoft had purged all emails regarding Burst during the negotiating period. So that puts Burst SOL unless they can prove why the emails were destroyed.
Groklaw's doing it. Groklaw does careful, thorough, detailed work. Slashdot doesn't do the kind of in-depth research. (Semi-obsessively reading both sites, I think that I can objectively say that.)
If you feel strongly that this needs to be done, go over to Groklaw and help.
...for the case to even begin, and destroy the evidence first.
Because if evidence is accepted as fact in one case, it becomes a matter of record. This potentially makes discovery easier in related future cases, as well. If the evidence is sealed, an attorney in the hypothetical future case can petition for it to be unsealed.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The RCA/Pharnsworth story is at http://pd.cpim.org/2002/aug25/08252002_snd.htm and it's interesting reading.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Patents are a license to sue. They are designed as licenses to sue. They grant the assignee a temporary monopoly should he/she/it choose to enforce it and they grant a source of revenue should he/she/it choose to license it.
If you have two black boxes and both produce anti-gravity but by different means, one may infringe upon the other. This example would likely fall under a "product by process" claim, and the burden would fall on the inventor of the second product to prove that his antigravity is patentably distinct from the first antigravity, if the first black box is patented with a product by process claim. In distilled form, the rules regarding prior art for product by process claims during prosecution of a patent application state that (in this case) antigravity which is "substantially identical" to antigravity produced by a different process is prior art and the second invention's antigravity is NOT patentably different from the prior art.
Now, if we stay away from patenting the antigravity itself (and therefore away from a product by process claim) you could easily have to patentable devices for producing antigravity.
And, for discussion's sake, I'm pretending that antigravity is patentable. ;)
No offense to the original poster, but the fact that it was modded so highly informative ought to make some people (some with mod points, some without) think about how informed the Slashdot crowd really is about the patent system. Again I reiterate - no offense to the original poster.
"Its a question for those of us who were around at the time."
Ok, i'll bite.
Not only did i wait on deploying MS Word, i was a "decider" for several large entities that were waiting for the consultant community to pick a winner.
WordPerfect for Windows 6 (WPW6) was a train wreck, but as i remember (reasonably well, i believe), it was primarily a question of DESIGN (i.e. usuability), NOT reliability that pushed me and my customers to MS Word.
The outstanding clarity of design focus that was evident in WordPerfect 5/5.5 was (OBVIOUSLY, IMHO), completely lacking in WPW6.
The WPW6 menus, past the obligatory XWin/Win components were illogical, occasionally misleading and often confusing. As were many of the dialogs.
I would hold that most of this confusion came from the complete departure from the long established Wang meta tag block text markup interface that SSI WordPerfect, UMMM, "adopted" for their own, with two pane screen windows, one for text and one for the markup meta tags.
Though this was available in WPW6, it was awkwardly implemented, and in design terms the "context binding" to the Win32 design approach was very poor.
Interestingly, MS Word for Windows 1.0 ALSO had a pretty horrible implementation of the Win32 GUI, however it was somewhat cleaner, and somewhat faster.
Leading to another observation;
WordPerfect for Windows 6 WAS SLOOOOOW, real, real slow. large document saves were "go get a cup of coffee slow".
WinWord 1 was also somewhat porky (i personally stayed with MS WORD DOS for a LONG TIME, much faster, much more stable, from a BSofD perspective - i also had written nearly 300 macros that really couldn't be translated easily/well to WinWord).
so, if WPW6 was all/mostly written in assembler, -- WPW6 was SO SLOW, i'd guess that it was either badly written, or rather badly optimized -- making me wonder if all/parts were written to the Win32S API (what a train wreck THAT was), and also wondering what assembler WP used????
-- in those days the first round of Win32, the first version or two of MASM wasn't all that much more powerful than "Debug", i still occasionally use MASM 5/6 to knock out quick small drivers and some CODEC work, and as i recall from the time (VERY FOGGILY), IFF TASM was around (and many of MS' competitors wouldn't TOUCH MASM), early TASM never really performed for me (or my friends) on LARGE scale projects (it was VERY nicely fixed after the first/second version).
I also seem to recall that it has already been legally established that MS has in/around this time period did indeed have "non-published" API features, particuarly used by the Excel teams in their "life and death" battle with the then spreadsheet market monopoly holder, "Lotus 1-2-3", and Andrew Schulman has written numerous books and articles on this aspect of early Win development.
Lotus, i believe, having bet BIG on OS2/G (BTW, 1-2-3G ROCKED -- way ahead (2 years) of its time), came late to the Win32 party, and had to rush 1-2-3 Win out the door, using lots of source from OS2/G (not quite a port, but close) and the Oz2 -Win32 APIs were VERY different (Oz2 was in many ways much "cleaner" than the earliest W32 APIs).
Ashcan Fate (down the street from my company) was imploding at the time, between the "religious" problems that were besetting the company's highest management, and the Big Bet (Failed) on Framework and that DTP program they were tussling with Ken Ski over, I would say Ashton-Tate died of self-inflicted wounds.
While i certainly don't know the internals of WPW6, most of the senior corporate developer types i spoke to were not ready to put any large amount of developer resources into Win32 until it was market tested, most people at that time thought Oz2 would wipe Win32 out of the market, and many ISVs put their money down accordingly....
And i completely agree, this suit serves NO ONE but, the attorneys, and Novell should leave it alone.
What next? Should AT&T sue MITS and IMSAI for ripping off the OS approach and command verbs of UNIX????
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Fast forward to late 2002 when Corel "mistakenly" launched a somewhat successful EOM drive to get WPO preloaded and in December that year MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture capital firm Vector, operated by former MS (and McKinsey) executives, snapped up the MS-owned 20% of Corel shares at absolute giveaway prices and immediately began bullying Corel's management to sell the whole shop...
Corel's CEO Derek Burney was a spineless lackey and their chairman Jim Baillie was a lawyer who's law firm in fact represented the Microsoft's friends Vector in the takeover bid (!!) and by blatantly manipulating the shareholder informing and voting procedure they narrowly won the "vote" and pulled Corel out of the public view and scrutiny during the 2003 summer holidays.
Groklaw folks with their investigative abilities could well have a field day reopening the Microsoft-orchestrated Corel undertaking manoeuvre, especially as Novell is suing Microsoft over their anticompetitive manipulation of the cash-cow segment Office suites market. As most people here know, it was Corel who bought WordPerfect Office from Novell in 1996, inheriting the MS-enemy #1 status along with it.
FWIW, the above-mentioned Jim Baillie was instrumental in Corel's decision not to sue MS after the US government won the closely-related Netscape antitrust trial, as the owners of the then #1 competitor to MS-Office, over unfair antitrust manipulation.
Godspeed Novell. I only hope Corel's kneecapping will help you prove you case and take MS to the cleaners.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Downward spiral? Last quarter Microsoft made a profit of 2.9 billion dollars. 2.9 BILLION DOLLARS. Microsoft made more than Novell's entire market cap in three lousy months. Revenue is continuing to grow, Microsoft is pushing into new markets (missed that story about Pocket PC becoming the dominant handheld OS did ya?) and idiots like you still assert that Microsoft is in a downward spiral. Jeez.
Repeat after me - saying it doesn't make it true! Propaganda doesn't help anyone if it's demonstrably false by any idiot with a browser.