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Dell Says Re-Imaging HDs a Burden If Word Banned
N!NJA writes "In an amicus curiae brief filed on Aug. 24, Dell asked the judge overseeing the Eastern District Court of Texas to reconsider its order blocking sales of Word, part of the original ruling in favor of Canadian software developer i4i. In the worst case, the brief argued, the injunction should be delayed by 120 days. 'The District Court's injunction of Microsoft Word will have an impact far beyond Microsoft,' Dell and HP wrote. 'Microsoft Word is ubiquitous among word processing software and is included on [redacted] computers sold by Dell.' 'If Microsoft is required to ship a revised version of Word in Dell's computers, a change would need to be made to Dell's images,' Dell wrote. 'Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing.' An addendum to the brief notes that it was authored in Microsoft Word, part of Office 2003."
Except that's not what the injunction says. The quotes I can find say:
Given that Amazon.com "sells" some ebooks for $0, I doubt that shipping Word without charging for the license would pass the "selling or importing" ban.
The injunction itself needs to be modified, and given the case Dell and HP make here, it seems like the original injunction was poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
While true, it's also explicitly one of the factors that go into determining whether injunctions should be issued--- they're discretionary relief that is supposed to take into account any hardship the injunction might cause to nonparties.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Anyone who has visited the Dell website with any recency knows that Word is not bundled as a default "freebie-included-in-price" option. The default option is "No Productivity Software Added." Adding MS Works (which includes MS Word 2003) costs $79. So what's the "imaging" problem? Are we supposed to pretend this particular retailer, whose model is different from others because of user-customization options, is incapable of providing machines without a software option (particularly given that this is their default configuration?).... The place this impacts Dell the most I'd imagine is in relation to Enterprise level customers, and all those Colleges and Universities they are partners with --- who sell pre-configured machines with Word installed to their students. Of course, everyone has moved into their dorms in the next "120 days" and it's not like Enterprise customers in Canada won't deal with this from every PC retailer. I smell a rat.
No, the injunction was quite correct. Did you read what I4I said? They said they won't go after the existing copies, only new infringement.
Who else do you think has power to enforce this other than the patent holder?
This is an odd issue for the courts, as Microsoft did legitimately cheat I4I out (read the details), but on the flip side software patents are an unnecessary burden.
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production. None of the hardware is changing, only the software and only the office suite at that. There is no known case where removing Office (or just word from the office install) would cause any issues. Other than not being able to open a number of document types, but then, that's the whole point. It might take them a week or two, but they have 60 days or more, so it's not like it's going to hurt them. Further, they make new images regularly for new systems, it's not like they don't do this shit every day.
At the end of the day, this is a further play by MS's lackeys to fight this legitimate injunction on behave of MS. Nothing more. Nothing less.
People keep saying this on Slashdot, but have you ever bought a computer from HP? Compared to HP, and other computer retailers (most of them at least), Dell ships hardly any crapplications at all. In addition, Dell actually ships you a clean and working OS disk (with the crapplications on a completely different disk), HP puts both on the same disk making it impossible to reinstall your HP OS without also reinstalling the crapplications.
In short, Dell's one of the absolute best when it comes to shipping clean OSes.
Comment of the year
I'll post as an AC since I no longer work for Dell.
I think your customer rep needs a kick up his ass. I used to work in the Enterprise division of Dell earlier and (helped) developed Altiris plug-ins to deploy customer images. If your rep is selling you the consumer imaging tools and/or has not told you about how to deploy your config specific images from Dell's factory or deploy it using Altiris/3rd party plugins on a base image, he must be slacking off.
That said, in many cases, what you are doing is the right thing. Wiping clean the base image and loading your own is often a simple way of keeping images/patch levels to corp standards and to comply with license agreements.
Dell does try to make this process simple and they can provide you more tools to do your job better.
I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them.
Well, this paints a totally different kind of picture. Few quotes:
"Nine years ago, an unusual and powerful alliance approached a tiny Toronto software company with a fateful proposition. Microsoft was helping U.S. intelligence sift through relentless mountains of documents relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks but had few means to sort them out. This firm, i4i, had the software that could intuit crucial, revelatory patterns that its own software could not.
It wasn't long before Microsoft recognized the value of the firm's technology, and, as it is now famously alleged, pinched it."
"Their circumstances are more humble than they used to be, when i4i took up 21/2 floors of the building and employed roughly 200 people, with offices in Manchester, Paris, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C., and San Diego. âoeWhen Microsoft began offering their technology for free,â Mr. Vulpe says, âoeall of our customers went away.â"
It should be noted that it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time MS did something like this. They did it with Quicktime in the 90's as well.
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