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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..
This phrase is so loaded that it's hard to broach anything resembling a middle ground here. If you refer to Microsoft as the "enemy" and everyone else (excluding SCO) the "Good Guys", how can you expect to be partial when delivering judgement.
Take a look at what's going on in Iraq. The American "Good Guys" are wiping out the "Bad Guys". From the other perspective, the Iraqi "Good Guys" are being slaughtered at the hands of the American "Bad Guys". It all depends on your perspective. Until you give up the notion of "good vs. evil" in your considerations, you will never be able to find a common ground and eventually peace.
You have to understand that not only are Microsoft and Novell's hands completely clean, they are not completely dirty either. The Iraqi resistor may be shooting at the American soldier because he believes that the occupation is unjust. The American soldier may be shooting back only because he has been trained to kill instead of think. Each one has their reasons, and to them, their actions are perfectly reasonable.
Until you can find a way to reason with the "enemy" and truly come to an understanding, you will never win. You will only fight.
There's an old saying, "The only way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend."
...is that editors be limited to one story about it per week. I'm sorry, but I'm just fed up after the tabloid-like fetish the editors had with the whole SCO thing that most of us didn't give a crap about, at least not on anything near that level. "Darryl sneezes!" "Assistant wipes his nose for him!" "IBM has no comment!" "Groklaw eloquently pontificates!" "IBM says 'bless you', is settlement around the corner?"
Wait- make that twice a week, if you count the inevitable duplicate because the editors can't be bothered to read their own site.
Metaediting, anyone? Jolly good!
Please help metamoderate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anticompetitive misuse of a given patent attracts more researchers to search for prior art that would invalidate that patent. In addition, 35 USC 271(d)(5) implies a narrow exception to the definition of patent infringement where one with "market power" (that is, a monopolist) ties the purchase of a patented product to another specific product.
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.
If you read the sources carefully especially this you will see that it was Canopy, the successors of Caldera that wanted to destroy their evidence because it was costing them too much to maintain it, and they didnt need it anymore because their case was finished.
The key line is "The Canopy Group, Inc. ("Canopy"), filed a motion to this court seeking permission to dispose of hundreds of boxes in its possession..", "the primary issues relate to Canopy's desire to avoid further burden and expense.."
The sort of fudging of facts in the headline here is how you get people who are nearly insane with hatred who post here making the linux crowd look totally unstable to the mainstream.
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.
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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
"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?