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Groklaw Putting Comes v. Microsoft Docs Online
An anonymous reader writes "PJ of Groklaw is working on putting the documents from Comes v. Microsoft online, to make them searchable and accessible to everyone. If you don't remember their history, the plaintiffs got these documents from Microsoft during discovery after fighting the lawyers tooth and nail. After realizing how embarrassing the documents were to Microsoft, they put them online and later got a very large settlement from Microsoft by agreeing to take their website down. The web being what it is, these documents had already been mirrored and were later (legally) made available on the Pirate Bay. Now Groklaw has put them online and is looking for people to help transcribe them, so that documents like the infamous Evangelism is War presentation will not be forgotten."
I had one of the people working on the case come talk to my college class. The documents provided to the law office were on paper. The office had an impressive cluster of computers used to do optical code recognition on all the documents so that they could be indexed and searched. There were tons of documents. It was not easy technically, and they worked a lot of hours.
The person I talked to always hoped someone would take this on. They couldn't give up their work for public domain, but there was a ton of computer history contained in those files.
This is why I wish the internet would become a development platform for application (GUI driven in this case). If this was the case the platform wars (to borrow Microsoft terminology) would be over and developers would code for the internet. Google, with chrome os etc, seems to be an ally in this, not that they are benevolent benefactors, just that their business aims and the open source community desires align.
What would it take to code in any number of languages (in the way we can now code in javascript) for the web.
Is that right around the same time Microsoft started thinking about using its bulk and business practices to achieve marketing ends, is right around the same time its innovation, risk taking, and other admirable traits about the company slacked off. I mean, yeah, it might have been hurtful to Borland for Microsoft to buy the superior Fox and use it to crush dBase, but at least the market did get a better product. And it might have been wrong to use Windows money to fund the development of Visual Studio to propel it past Turbo C++, but, again, the consumer got a better product. Even IE4 was better than Netscape.
But this email is from 1997, when MS had won the OS wars, the browser wars, and since then, what has happened? MS has lost its focus on computing entirely. Folding the Windows NT core into the Windows 95 shell to get first Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 were the best things the company did, and since then, we've had really not much to write home about.
This is my sig.
there was a ton of computer history contained in those files.
Indeed! There're many interesting bits in these emails that explain quite well some of the things we suffer every day.
"One things I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific. It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this" - Bill Gates
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered well by others people browser is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPIETARY IE capabilities" - Bill Gates
Submitter here.
Yes, it was mirrored by others (thankfully people had the foresight to mirror this stuff right away). In fact, one person who had all the files asked what to do with them (either here or on Groklaw, I don't recall), and I was the one who suggested it be put on the Pirate Bay. I don't know for sure that he took my advice, but I do know that a Comes collection appeared there shortly thereafter.
It's not just the Streisand effect. There have been a lot of people involved in Microsoft's dirty tricks campaigns over the years and now that the company's on a downhill slide, many of them are looking at their past roles with a bit of regret. The whole dirty house of cards isn't far from tumbling down.
Even James Plamendon, who created Microsoft's Evangelism program, authored that evangelism presentation and is responsible for much of Microsoft's brutal MSOOXML campaign has recanted. He's stated that he regrets his actions and is writing a book about it.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If you had enjoyed the benefit of playing with SVR2 through a 30" high def graphical terminal in 1984 as I did, Microsoft's "innovations" in Windows 2000 some 15 years later might seem a bit less amazing. In 1984 we had aerial photos on LaserDisc overlaid with terrain data that we could draw on, and real-time position data in a distributed database with mesh networking for geotracking important operational assets. You could take a bomb to all but one node in the system, and that last node would stay up and have the latest propagated data. Yes, it took three or four seconds to redraw when you shifted scale or moved the map, but it was 1984. We had csh, ksh, X-Windows with widgets that looked better than W2k's. Networking was assumed. It was a multiuser system with an evolved system of managing user security that persists to this day. This was about nine months after Microsoft had invented the remarkable "subdirectory" concept with DOS 2.0, and 14 years before they included an IP stack by default. </sarcasm>.
Back then it took about 12 minutes to draft a professional one page letter using a CPT dedicated word processing station with full-page WYSYWIG and a SCSI daisy wheel printer. Today you can do a Google maps mashup of your own Cell GPS geolocation data in real time, and it takes about 25 minutes to craft a one-page letter. So the advantage of 25 years of progress is that technolgies are cheaper and more common and individuals are less effective.
A default install of SVR2 included development tools - grep, lex, yacc, awk, sed, an assembler, compiler, and cross-compiler for new hardware architectures, the source for the OS and all the tools, an ip stack including email. It was a multiuser environment. The processor performance graph, to give an example, included an animated graph of the pen writing the data on the scrolling log - an unnecessary but artful use of screen space that I miss to this day.
Rock solid? Windows 2000? Give me a break! If you think W2k was rock solid you have low standards.
Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever,[15] but it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda.[16] Over nine years after its release, it continues to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month.
Windows 2000 was a remarkable advance in the scope of "Microsoft operating systems". People who know better found nothing special in it. It wasn't as good as eight year old Jolix then, and it still isn't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In my world the prevention of progress is evil. To profit from the prevention of progress is corporate evil. The prevention of interopability through obfuscation of interfaces is the epitome of evil.
Man will move forward or he will not. Any institutional prevention of progress is an effort to prevent the survival of Man, as a species. We have been distracted by the profit motives of this Redmond, WA corporation long enough.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It might not have done anything to further their propagation (although the fact that MS paid to have them removed at least indicated that they might have been worth a look), but I still find it very puzzling that in this day and age, someone actually thought "oh noes, our sekret filez are on the intarweb, I'll just pay to have them removed" (duh). Maybe he was from sales, or marketing.
Removing stuff that's on the network works fine for the media publishers after all, so Microsoft shouldn't have any problems doing it.
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