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Microsoft Critic Received $9.75m After Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "Just this month, Microsoft paid almost $20 million to the Computer and Communications Industry Association to make an anti-trust lawsuit go away.
FT.com has just revealed that *half* of that payment was pocketed by Ed Black, the president of CCIA and one of MS's fiercest opponents over antitrust issues. His payment was approved by the CCIA board, which includes Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and Oracle. And here's a quote from this article at Groklaw: Could this be why Nokia quit the CCIA right after the settlement was announced, saying matters were not handled "in the proper way"?"
I guess this just goes to show that everyone has his price.
Granted, $9.75m is a nice price to have... don't think I'd be too quick to say no myself.
T.
Firstly because of the settlement. They should have let it go to court, settlements imho always give the impression that it isn't to do about justice, but just about money.
Secondly because to say the least, it seems very dubious that Ed Black pockets half the money himself. It's not like he was damaged personally in the case to which the settlement applies, or was he?
This smell fishy and I can't blame Nokia for saying 'all nice and well, but we won't be part of this.'
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Could this be an unwarranted inference on the part of the poster?
Interestingly, Nokia is a Scandinavian country - and these countries tend to have strong anti-corruption laws (especially Finland) - corruption is regarded as highly unethical and unacceptable from a social POV. If this act had been committed by Fins, or in Finland I imagine people from both sides would be doing jail time by now...
It has to be said:
1. Get to head of industry body
2. Criticise Microsoft
3. ????
4. Profit!
Although, I guess the ???? bit has been worked out now.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Nokia's a Finnish company, and I'd like to think it reflects on their corporate culture. Finland's known for the relative lack of gravy. Transparency.org seems to think so anyway.
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I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Couldn't they just have arranged an "accident" for him?
They did - hence the news reports... $20M to silence a critic is a good deal, but to discredit them as well it's a bargain.
Why is it that nowadays the media isn't capable of calling a spade a spade anymore? Here we got a case where the position of the writer is quite obvious, and he describes the case is a matter that leaves any thinking person no other conclusion than to assume bribery. But the writer (or at least his editor) just can't dare to actually say the word out loud. If they'd be talking about elephants we'd be hearing somthing like "Ah, yes. We got a big, gray animal here, with four huge round legs, and two flappy ears, and in the front there's a long, flexible trunk...", but they'd never dare to actually use the 'E'-word. I thought this incapability of calling things by it's name were just limited to election issues (and certain presidents' behaviours), but it seems that in general we can't expect the media to call things by it's proper names anymore.