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U.S. Adds Years To Microsoft's 'Probation'
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Justice Department has added another two years to its agreement with Microsoft, extending the protocol licensing program that is part of the company's penance for anti-competitive activities. The organization feels Microsoft is providing documentation too slowly to its licensees." From the article: "At one time, the Justice Department and several state Attorneys General had sought a breakup of Microsoft in order to prevent it from abusing its Windows monopoly. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson at one point ordered such a move, though his ruling was later reversed on appeal. Ultimately Microsoft settled with the Department of Justice, agreeing to far more modest restrictions, including the protocol licensing program." Relatedly, regulators have cleared Vista of anti-competitive elements. They examined the OS on concerns an added search box may have given the company a home-field advantage.
I thought that probation was about...
well... you know...
keeping you from doing the stuff you got in trouble for .
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
"You haven't supplied the information you were required to as part of the terms of settlement, so instead of doing something about it, we'll give you more time."
This guy's the limit!
Two more years of looking the other way.
regulators have cleared Vista of anti-competitive elements. They examined the OS on concerns an added search box may have given the company a home-field advantage.
First software was designed to do stuff because it was needed.
Later, software was designed to do stuff that was cool.
Still later, software was designed to make money.
Then software was designed primarily by marketing departments
Now, software is designed by lawyers and the judicial system?
What a great world we live in.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well maybe this signifies that the Justice Dept now realizes WHY Microsoft was brought before them and that their measures taken thus far have proven futile in getting the company to change their tactics.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Here, here -- A toast, to two more years being everyone's favorite illegal monopoly!
Cheers!
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
What a complete waste of time.
Has the State involvement in this issue achieved anything?
And how much did it COST?
We're all sitting here paying tax through our noses.
Who's spending this money?
What are we getting for it?
How many millions have been spent on this excercise which has had no significant impact on the MS monopoly?
Meanwhile over in the EU, Microsoft has been accused of exaggerating what is being asked for
and the difficulty of providing it.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I can only dream of a computing experience, which has lack of unknown formats. I would really be a lot more happy to see wmv files to be played without any problem, or office documents openning flawlessly in various applications.
.doc file created with 200x version of Microsoft Word is just like the feces of this application. And if we don't want to make Internet or our networks sewer we should definately stop sharing those crap (literally) through the wires.
Real question is why should we stick to just one application for any format. If every unique application made their own file format, nobody would be able to share anything, and why does Internet ever exists if we won't be able share our documents.
That's not an open source issue, or free market problem. It's the lack of mentality for sharing of information. People really suffer from these compatibility problems, and if someone made a research about the lost and or wasted time related to these issues, it would be easily seen that it's very huge problem that computer users experience. And with the growing trend of DRM and stuff we will just suffer this more and more.
People should convert, open, edit any format with any application coded for them. To let this, those willing to create a format, should clearly state specifications for these formats, or clearly state that this format is just for a specific application and should not be shared so that users won't use those files for sharing. A
Relatedly, regulators have cleared Vista of anti-competitive elements.
Nooooooo! That means the search box remains with MSN selected by default!
Why can't Microsoft be "fair" and set Google default like with the other browsers!
I'm devastated.
What I don't understand is that since the DOJ judegement against Microsoft they've had time to rewrite their entire flagship OS from scratch, yet still haven't been able to document it? How naive does the government have to be?
(rant mode)
I dont know if this issue has been looked at by the US or EU but it is much more of a concern to me that MS is activly releasing / selling software that is so insecure to the point that it seems to go out of its way to prevent techies and end users from properly securing it in order to keep (often confidential) data safe from malware, viruses etc.
There is also the wider issue of MS through their lack of a proper security model facilitating the creation and operation of botnets which are used to the detrement of users, businesses and the internet at large.
I use Windows and find it annoying that I need to apply 3rd party apps in an attept to minimise security risks to my computer when the OS maker should have secured the software before release.
Its not that I hate MS for their propriatory nature etc but I find myself trying a few Linux distos in an attmept to find a viable alternative although I am into the frame of mind that for my next computer purchase I will go for a mac depsite the high prices and the fact that I enjoy building my own systems.
If Windows worked properly and had a good security model then I would be happy; I think MS are wasting their time trying to fight the "pirates" and that their real problem (and as such priority) should be to make an OS that is suitable for widespread use. They should secure their software and if they feel the need add an "anti-piracy" function like activation, genuine advantage etc then whatever but make the software safe for people to use first.
(/rant mode)
I don't approve of laws designing software, but I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with stopping people abusing laws to prevent software from being designed. I also have no problem with laws that enforce progress.
(The State of Oregon recently received some thinly-veiled threats from Microsoft's CEO over Oregon's active support for Open Source - both towards Oregon and towards all Microsoft shops in Oregon. Although not a part of the DoJ lawsuit, and therefore probably not a part of this review, I would feel a lot more comfortable if States receiving such threats reviewed their legality. Last I heard, "demands with menaces" was not considered an OK activity.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When the average person violates probation, they go straight to prison. They dont get a trial or a hearing to prove their innocence, nor does the state give them more time to get it right, or get their affairs in order.
The best word in the whole article is "settled" ... Microsoft settled with the government. This means if I get pulled over for speeding, I can settle with the office by giving him $50 and him leaving me alone, right?
When you settle in court, you settle with the person you wronged.... You can't settle with the enforcement -- or at least shouldnt be able to. Your punishment is your punishment.
So, Microsoft violates their probation. What *should* happen is this:
The company should be disbanded, all its assets forfeited and sold at auction. Anyone on the executive committee of the company, and anyone else who knew or should have known that this violation would have occurred, should be sentenced to at least ten years in prison, and their personal assets forfeited and auctioned off.
Nothing less that that would happen to you or me and the company we controlled, if we purposely used our company to violate federal laws. The last thing we'd hear from a judge is "I see you are having trouble complying with the orders of this court. Perhaps if we give you a few more years to work on it you can get back to us on how you're coming with the whole court-mandated actions thing, okay?"
You and I wouldn't get that treatment. We would go to prison, our assets woudl be seized, and it wouldn't make the news.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
How naive does the government have to be? ... "nucular".
Definition.
I'm all for giving the editors a hard time when they fuck up the English language, but this isn't one of those times.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The cynic in me suspects this is a move to ensure that the huge bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign donations keep rolling in from Microsoft at least through the next US presidential election. The only real downside of this ruling for Microsoft appears to be the risk of a less-friendly attorney general taking office -- that is, through a Republican Party loss in the 2008 presidential elections.
Wow! What a great explanation of the "issues of the case". You, sir, are a great man.
I'm not going to quote your awesome explanation here because it would overload the server's bandwidth. Because it was that good.
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
That legal strategy was designed by Real, Netscape and others to yield compensation dollars. The problem with Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior has to do with Inter Process Communication (IPC). A file is a form of IPC. A network message is IPC. If the details of the various forms of IPC are widely available products can interoperate and that is bad for Microsoft's market share. I believe that if a product is completely dominant in a market (e.g. Exchange / Outlook mail system on corporate intranets) the details regarding it's IPC should be made available so as to reduce the liability associated with using that product. In this particular case that liability is the unfair business practice of forcing other companies out of a market by leveraging undisclosed IPCs. Secondarily there are a number of other very good reasons for having alternative programs that understand the same IPCs but it's not clear that they have legal bearing.
who gives a rip about bundled software? Everyone bundles. Duh. Their biggest crime is their illegal collusion with hardware vendors. That's their biggest lock on the market. Everything else flows from that- all those nice customers to bully and abuse, all those captive devs trapped in lardy Microsoft Foundation Classes, and their giant politician-purchasing war chest. The DOJ doesn't want to punish MS, it's just a big empty show.
we will end no whine before its time
Those who try to document Microsoft's abuses find that there are too many to investigate and explain.
For example, Ed Foster's Gripelog has a story about Microsoft's Harshest EULA. Windows users who download the "High-Priority Update" called Windows Genuine Advantage Notification are required to agree to a new contract. Ed says, "Not only does Microsoft place restrictions on your right to criticize the software, it won't allow you to uninstall the software or to test it in an operating environment."
EULAs are a unique kind of contract in that they supposedly allow one party to the contract to force new contract provisions on the other. Contract law has always held that forced contracts are illegal.
If you buy, agree to the terms of use, and install Windows for your company and train your staff to use it and applications you buy for it, your total cost is far greater than the cost of Windows. Yet EULAs supposedly allow the software provider to change the contract provisions at any time, with no restrictions whatsoever. Your only option if you don't agree to the new contract provisions is to lose all the money you have invested and stop doing business until you can get new software. This is especially severe when a company has a monopoly on the operating system your business software needs to run.
The concept of fairness is completely absent from EULAs. Those who write EULAs believe that they can do anything they like. If you go to your kitchen and find a Microsoft employee eating your ice cream, check your EULA; maybe Microsoft has decided that Microsoft employees can raid your refrigerator.
Take Apple, for example, they bundle a lot more into their OS than Microsoft does but they aren't even glanced at. Including the 'search' feature that is talked about in TFA pales in comparison to Spotlight in OSX - but no one has a problem with Apple.
Apple's not a monopoly.
Others will raise the fact that "it's different for Microsoft because they have a monopoly". Which is true - but they have a monopoly because their Operating System is designed to work on the most popular systems available. Almost anyone can install Windows on almost any computer.
What does that have to do with them being a monopoly? They're still a monopoly and can't leverage their monopoly position to prevent market competition. If Microsoft designs an OS for everybody's computers, and it becomes popular, that doesn't magically give them the right to tie their browser to their search engine and their music to their media player using their media technologies, etc. etc. etc.
My biggest problem with the continued litigation and dragging down of Microsoft with superfluous rules is that it doesn't help the consumer. These regulations are supposed to help the consumer - but they don't.
Of course it does! It helps the consumer because it helps competing, superior products when entering the market. They don't have a gigantic convicted monopolist tying things into the dominant platform to make it so nobody else can compete with anything.
Or do you think it's okay for Microsoft to have threatened OEMs in the 90s with increased Windows licensing fees (and even outright revocation) if they included software from other companies that competed with Microsoft products? That would kill any OEM, because Windows is the dominant monopoly platform--a classic case of coercion through leveraging the monopoly.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Do you mean Republican Congress' stance on Bush, or the Justice Dept's stance on Microsoft?
In two years there will no longer be a need for Congress to look the other way at the Bush adminitration's looking the other way at big business's looking the other way at customer security and the NSA looking for every way to look at you!
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Bill Clinton does the same thing and he gets impeached.
I always wondered why the DoJ settled this case. They already had a conviction. The conviction was not reversed, only the penalty was. This was in the penalty phase! Imagine a bank robber being convicted, and then the prosecution going into settlement talks over the penalty.
OK, now I'll stop pretending to be naive. I knew in 2000 that if Bush was elected, his administration would drop the ball on this case. Was I right?
As it turned out, that should have been one of my lesser worries about a Bush administration.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Jackson's findings of fact were not overturned. They are here. Penfield's Conclusions of Law and Order are here. The findings of fact were not overturned. Both are available as .html or .pdf or wpd files (but not, interestingly, as .doc [=MS Word] files).
Penfield's remedies are here. The gutted final judgement produced by the DOJ cave-in and the Appeals court kowtowing to MS is here here. It's a mere slap on the wrist. "Pretty please, play nice, now, or at least don't get caught flagrantly breaking the law." I wonder how much $jack the DOJ and US Appeals court judges cost. Less than an hour's profits, I'd bet. Ask your MS pals.
More on this and other MS litigation over here.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Microsoft is not being punished "for succeeding". Being a monopoly is never illegal. It is, however, illegal to use your monopoly status to leverage your way into new markets and to keep competitors out.
Thus, this anti-trust stuff is the middle ground you seek . It's perfectly fine to be a monopoly, but punishes abuse of the monopoly status (e.g. pushing OEMs to sign deals to exclude BeOS boy I wish that OEM licensing deals would see the light of day!).
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
The equality was provided by Windows being so ubiquitous, certainly, but this would also be true with sufficient competition amongst several equal OS vendors (as opposed to one monopoly and two roughly equal bit players). If there weren't Microsoft to dictate APIs, vendors would use a set of standard, cross-platform APIs (e.g. QT, wxWidgets, OpenGL, SDL,) and open standards for drivers would likely also have come into existance and be well-established.
I would arge that the open standards were much more important . If each vendor had their own, proprietary slots instead of USB, firewire, ATA, PCI, etc. history would likely have turned out much, much, much differently. It was the open standards that let you buy an IBM today and a Gateway tomorrow and not have to throw away all of your hardware.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Then why would anyone want to become a monopoly?
Windows users who download the "High-Priority Update" called Windows Genuine Advantage Notification are required to agree to a new contract.
Yes; we agree to a contract covering the WGAN tool, not Windows. The EULA for Windows XP is not affected.
it won't allow you to uninstall the software
The licence actually says "you will not be able to uninstall the software". That is not the same as you aren't allowed to uninstall it; MS are not denying you permission, they're saying that it isn't possible. In other words, they have not provided an uninstallation tool. I see nothing in the licence that forbids you from ripping it out yourself, if you are so able.
If you buy, agree to the terms of use, and install Windows for your company and train your staff to use it and applications you buy for it, your total cost is far greater than the cost of Windows.
As it is for any OS or application; I'm not sure I see the relevance. If you give everyone Linux (whether freely downloaded or bought and paid for), you still have training costs and quite possibly costs for commercial apps. The total cost may be lower (especially if you don't buy the distro or a support contract), but it's still higher than just the cost of the OS.
If you go to your kitchen and find a Microsoft employee eating your ice cream, check your EULA; maybe Microsoft has decided that Microsoft employees can raid your refrigerator.
That sort of crap would be struck down by a court in seconds. Just because something is in a contract (even an honest to goodness, negogiatable, signed on the dotted line contract) doesn't necessarily mean that it's enforceable. For a clearly absurd example, if my employment contract stated that upon leaving the company, I had to give them my first born child as a replacement, that would not be enforcable. For a more realistic example, some/most anti-compete clauses are not enforcable as they contravene restriction of trade laws.
Yes, it's a crap licence, but it's not quite as bad as either you or Ed Foster make out.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Behavior that is perfectly acceptable on a level playing field (or allowed, some of it may be immoral but that is another issue) is one thing. The behavior of a monopoly is another matter entirely.
Unless you literally translate 'being a monopoly' as being identical to 'being successful' then there is clearly a difference here. A monopoly can not be leveraged to gain more monopolies or to push out competition in another area. What everybody else is doing doesn't even come into the picture.
There is no shortage of evidence that Microsoft viewed the netscape platform as a threat to their control via the windows desktop. IE and Netscape raged in a war that continued for years until Microsoft finally put the product directly into their operating system. This was a direct move to leverage their monopoly to gain a browser monopoly.
RedHat may include a browser, but redhat does not have a desktop monopoly. Redhat including a browser does not guarantee that browser will dominate the market and become a monopoly.
By including an application in windows where users are sure to interact with it microsoft essentially fills out the windows blank check with whatever new market they want a monopoly in. That is what is illegal. It is illegal because we have an economic system that depends on everyone competing and nobody actually winning. If somebody wins the system breaks and stays broken. It is a known flaw in capitalism and there nothing wrong with patching the flaw with laws that prevent the damage from spreading.