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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)."
"I believe the Novell-Microsoft case, regardless of outcome, could have a major beneficial impact for FOSS, providing we watch it closely. Groklaw is uniquely positioned to collect and disseminate information about the case. In a nutshell, the Novell complaint promises a bonanza of evidence that Microsoft engages in unfair competition to maintain its monopoly in the PC software operating system market and to extend that monopoly to the application markets."
This is a good idea. As MS could sue over StarOffice/OpenOffice, evidnece may come up that is relevant..
Wow. I never thought I'd see the day when this argument was logically followed through to its conclusion *and shown to be false by the person making it*.
This "everyone has to be objective" thing is nonsense. No one is truly objective. Everyone has a personal stake in whatever it is that interests them, just by them being interested.
You said it yourself. Each side believes they are right. That's likely true. And whether or not in the grand scheme of things one is more morally justified than the other, it is a natural thing for people to choose sides and then fight for them. (And it's not entirely people, either - wolves choose a side againts rabbits, and the rabbits against the wolves.)
It's this "everyone must be objective" and "one must always reason" argument that leads to more problems. If you don't believe me, there's a gentleman named Neville Chamberlain who was proof enough otherwise. Saddam was evil; there can be no doubt about that. That he is no longer in power can only be a good thing.
The same goes for Microsoft and Novell. No one company is pure good; however, some are worse than others. Microsoft has been in hot water with not only the DOJ, but the Eurpoean Union. Countless examples of their anti-competitive practices exist - ask Netscape or Be. So to say that Microsoft is the "bad guy" in this situation is not only smart, but also accurate. Painting Novell as the "good guy" is accurate as well - they're one of the few companies that have survived against Microsoft's continued sabotage.
While it may work on planet Vulcan, here on earth, people take sides. Sides are good and bad. Very few instances have those sides so equal as to not be able to tell the good from the bad; this is certainly not one of those instances.
Well, of course they would be good guys if that were true. It's pretty much been established (by Groklaw and the court system) that in SCO's case it is not.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
But they did not. They started a PR campaign against open source. Why they did this we may never know. Perhaps it was just a publicity ploy. Perhaps it was a way to way to raise funds for an expensive fight against IBM. In any case, that is what most found interesting.
IBM may very well have taken code and used it in an unlicensed manner. Who knows. IBM is very big, and can probably get away with stuff like that. MS probably did tweak the API so as to disable Wordperfect. The defense will be that both were on the decline already and were unlikely to survive in any case. Even if IBM or MS loses, the payments are unlikely to significantly hurt the companies. And both will go on following the SOP of doing whatever it takes to make a dollar.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Its a question for those of us who were around at the time.
s p
The much anticipated Word Perfect for Windows (6.0) was crap when released. The mass migration to Word was immediate afterwards (especially when Word would import your Word Perfect documents for you).
Word Perfect Corporation (not Novell) at the time claimed it was due to Microsoft's Win32 SDK. They also claimed that the Beta version of the SDK they developed for was different than the production release.
According to Joel Spolsky in this story: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1726059,00.a
It was due to WordPerfect being written in assembler vs 'C' and the office team could write code faster. I disagree as the owner of DOS, MacIntosh and AppleGS versions of WordPerfect. Two of which are GUI/Event driven prior to the release of the Windows 3.x version. All three versions didn't suck. I don't think they used 100% assembler and I have no proof to back up this comment.
Enter into the true slashdot conversation on this article.
1) Did Microsoft withhold SDK information from competitors in the first release of Windows 3.0?
2) Why did Ashton Tate (dBase), Lotus (1-2-3), and others also have problems with their first Windows 3.0 versions? (Keep in mind, all had GUI/Event driven products for MacIntosh/Amiga etc. at the time).
3) Was Word Perfect and others written in Assembler?
BTW, Novell should let this thing go. Proof will be hard to find. Evidence will be circumstantial at best. Spend the lawyer fees on improving SuSE. The hell with Microsoft. It's a new era and a new playing field.
Lets discuss,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
"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."
In an ideal world you might be right. In practice, patents can be so broad that they cover any means of doing something, and a company with an aggressive patent strategy can very effectively block anyone else from competing in their arena. Look for example at GemStar -- even though they failed completely with their products, they patented everything even remotely related to on screen TV listings, to the point where TV Guide (!) was forced to merge with them because the Gemstar patents prevented them from competing in the electronic program guide market, because there's no way to work around basic patents such as on displaying TV listings in a grid on the screen, or clicking a button to record a TV program. Not a specific means of implementing the grid, but actually ANY display of tv programs in a grid on screen, is exclusively Gemstar's. But they're not the only company using fundamental patents -- Motorola got the patent on the heat sink on the transistor, and made many, many $millions on it. And don't get me started on how Philo T. Farnsworth was treated by RCA, who used their broad radio patent portfolio to take over his invention, and crush all competition.
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