Court Clears Novell To Sue Microsoft Over WordPerfect

An anonymous reader writes "15 years after Novell sold the software to Corel, a court has given Novell the right to sue Microsoft over WordPerfect, which had a 50 percent market share in the early '90s."

Comments

Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[Walking The Walk]

From TFA:

The issue before the appeals court was whether the Caldera settlement [from the 1996-2000 case] also included the associated office productivity software, WordPerfect and Quattro Pro

The way I read that, it doesn't have to do with how many years ago Novell sold WordPerfect, it has to do with an old court case in which the parties are disputing what the settlement covered.

Re:What?

[justthinkit]

lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text

This was true in Word for DOS. WinWord started making it a lot more complicated than that. Capsule summary: a document is now a file system.

while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.

No. In word, formatting is tied to the paragraph mark (PM) at the end of the paragraph. Delete the PM for paragraph #1 and all the text, etc. in that paragraph will inherit the formatting from paragraph #2. Hint 1: click that backward "P" on the format toolbar to reveal where the PMs are (I still use Office 2000 so have no clue how this is done in more recent versions of Office). Hint 2: copy the PM of the paragraph whose format you like and then past it at the end of the paragraph that got messed up -- problem solved.

Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect

Disclaimer: I still use Word 5.0 for DOS as my main word processor.