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Microsoft Wins WordPerfect Antitrust Battle With Novell
New submitter Psychotic_Wrath writes "After a long, drawn-out legal battle and a hung jury, a federal judge has dismissed Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft. The case involved allegations from Novell that Microsoft removed code from its Windows 95 operating system which created the need for further development to WordPerfect. Novell says this delayed the release of their product, giving Microsoft Word an unfair advantage. Groklaw has a detailed write-up on the decision."
... that Win 95 is now safe to use?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
The headline was written by a moron who can't read. Novell announced they will appeal, so Microsoft only won this round, with a judge who was overturned on appeal last time.
Who cares? Windows nor any other OS.. (remember the whole cocoa/carbon debacle with OSX?) gives any guarantee that APIs will never be deprecated.
Their take on the verdict comes off as biased, bitter in parts, and sarcastic in parts. Do they claim to be balanced, or are they partisan?
Groklaw has been heavily bias for while now. It started off well but has been on the slide for a long time now, it is a shame as the original intent seemed to be unbiased legal opinion.
OP is right.
Judge Motz (who flew out of his district to run this court) ignored an 11:1 "hung jury"
and voted to say no jury could find against Microsoft. He's already once been handed
his case back on appeal because he's too pro-Microsoft.
There is no excuse to allow a JMOL (Judgment as a Matter of Law) -- implying no
reasonable jury would find for Microsoft -- when the jury was 11 to 1 in favor of
finding Microsoft guilty. This too will be returned to trial by the appeals court.
There's no excuse for the article to be on slashdot. It's entire "summary" is biased
and incorrect. The editors who approved it have no knowledge of facts. The
moderators who modded down the parent are clearly part of Microsoft's encouragement
of its staff to "read" slashdot (troll on articles) in the hopes they can mod down
disparaging articles.
Judge Motz is biased; he has flown from outside his district to judge this case; he
has been overruled on appeal ON THIS CASE before. It will happen again. All but
that last comment are facts.
See http://www.groklaw.net./
Ehud
Groklaw provides the rulings in PDF and text form. Whether they have a bias or not,
the rulings are shown as is.
In the instant case the jury was eleven to one against Microsoft. Judge Motz -- who
flew in to handle this case from outside his district (!?!) -- ruled afteward that no reasonable
jury would have found for Novell and against Microsoft.
He has already been overturned on appeal once. He will be overturned again. /.
Microsoft shils notwithstanding (they pay people to say Microsoft-does-no-evil on
and other places), they will be found guilty.
It may not be relevant to much nowadays, seeing as Windows 95, Wordperfect, etc.
are all obsolete irrelevant things, but it's part of the legal process. Just like we don't
excuse rape because "Well it happened to you ten years ago" the same is true of
anticompetitive unlawful actions.
Sorry, Microsoft Fanbois, time to man up and quit modding everything you don't like
down. The truth is out there, and it will be set free. The Internet views censorship
as damage and routes around it (--Gilmore). The same is true for biased modding
and shil posting.
Ehud
Tucson AZ US
Saying a case is won before the appeals are over is like saying a tie hockey game is won before sudden death overtime has finished. Don't be stupid you morons.
No, they did not win yet. Sure, they got a nice ruling from a judge with obvious animus towards Novell. The judge handed a ruling to Microsoft, nothing more. This same judge has already been overruled by the appellate courts and that is likely to happen again in this case. We'll see. But Microsoft has not the war, they've only won a battle.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Groklaw's original mission was to show that SCO's case against IBM was a load of malarky from the get go, using nothing but the facts and evidence provided in the case by each side's legal briefs. I don't know if that's bias, but Groklaw and PJ have proven over and over that they seem to know both the facts and the law and get it right every single time.
This case is irrelevant.
Windows 95 is history.
Novell is just looking for some sort of revenue stream for its outdated business.
This is also a lesson in that the legal system is too slow for the technology industry. It's 2012 and they're in court over Windows 95 ?!
So it's 2012; what is Novell doing to stay relevant in a handheld computing World?
We all like to bash the movie and music industries for trying to keep their "outdated" business models working. This is no different. We have a mostly dead company going after an old stodgy company while the rest of the computing industry is moving along.
I guess this article would be more of an interest to legal geeks.
While PJ, the original creator of Groklaw, has stepped aside and let someone else run it, they're still very good about providing the actual court documents and testimony from relevant court rooms. Even a casual examinatiion of the court documents reveals some astounding rulings in Microsoft's favor by this particular judge, including rulings that have already been overturned on appeal.
A judge who's already been overturned on appeal would seem to have every reason to be cautious and _not_ make other strange ruliings that would provide grounds for appeal, at least if that judge is honest and does not with to waste people's time. And this ruling does seem very strange.
This case is irrelevant.
Windows 95 is history.
No this case is relevant because WordPerfect is history.
... in which the theme of the movie "Liar Liar" gets applied to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in real life, and in a courtroom they are forced to be completely forthcoming about the backroom politics and decisions went into such situations.
One can only dream.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
... Sometimes Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't. But then again, they have been damned inconsistent with their behavior.
On one hand, they may wish to deprecate parts of the OS. On the other, they may wish to maintain compatibility with some applications. And the fact that they maintain mutiple versions of the same APIs for different behaviors of different applications says they will, at times, do strange things to keep things running in a compatible way.
On the other hand, it seems simple enough that they should, in the name of progress and innovation, drop legacy support and focus on current things.
One thing is clear, regardless of which side of the fence you may be on, Microsoft has created a messy legacy of software which really needs to be cleaned up.
slashdot was crippled by mod changes and asshole users, then mostly finished off by reddit. I dont even bother logging in anymore, I just come to see how the mods are trolling the readers with microsoft posts. they do not disappoint in that capacity :D
you'd advocate this cleanup which is one of the most dangerous, lengthy and expensive tasks an OS group can attempt? You'd advocate producing a result which would require major rewrites of the large majority of third-party apps? You'd advocate an approach which, if successful, would provide an excuse for current customers to consider switching platforms? (well if I have to buy all those new rev apps.....why not change to brand y?)
I've been at a similar point in an OS where some advocated evolution, I choose revolution. Now 6 years later, technically I was right. Performance was enhanced 4-500%. But what were the business costs of focusing the necessary resources for a total rewrite...they were considerable and the success of a product can be doubt because of lost sales while people wait for the rumored next great thing. Think of the rumor of a new car model with a bunch of new buzzword features...what does that do to current model sales?
Don't be so certain you know the right answer.
Dittos. I switched to hacker news and reddit for geek news, stuff that matters, and cool links. (That was around the time my account was temporarily banned for over a month) When I come back to slashdot, it's like a stale sample of what I get elsewhere. With much lower quality comments. And, no that's not from the trolls (I find most of them hilarious). Also, reddit has /r/gonewild. Let's be glad /. doesn't!
If by "every single time" you mean "occasionally", sure. I've tried to pout out factual errors in their analysis in the past, but they refuse to approve any posts that disagree with them.
Your problem is that you mistaken overwhelming agreement on their blog with "always right", but that's only the case because they censor anyone that disagrees with them.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You can return to your circle jerk.....
I can remember back in the day with other people using WP6 for Windows how they would tell it to print and it would get confused about which text to put where on the page. I'm sure that was all Microsoft's fault, right? Or how the serious users of WP for DOS would use the show codes mode all the time, which doesn't go very well with WYSIWYG editing. Some of WP6's problems were entirely WP's fault.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I should like to point out "pout out" should be reserved for beauty contests.
It damn well should be over. The issues at hand are 17 years stale.
I didn't say anything about the court documents. I was talking about factual errors they made in their analysis and reporting, from which most of the blog articles are drawn.
You do realize, they report on more than just what courts publish. They also report on actions by the parties, claims made by the parties, random stuff people claim on the net, etc..
And like I said, they refuse to publish almost any comment that doesn't agree with them, making it seem like there is overwhelming agreement with their articles.
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AndNovell is history because they didn't keep up with hundreds of other software companies -- not just Microsoft.
How much money should the taxpayers keep spending on this? It's been 17 years. If Novell can't make their case in 17 years, perhaps they should consider that it's just not worth it.
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Microsoft torpedoed Novell at every turn. When Windows NT came out, every week there was a patch for Windows 95 that broke the Novell client. Novell would release a patch and Microsoft would break it again.
As someone who's used word perfect, it phasing out isn't exactly a huge loss for the world...
The only thing i liked better about them was the desktop icon. The reason MS Word won in the end, especially, was because it had freaking pinball.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Well - everyone who gives a damn at my house agrees with Groklaw. That's pretty overwhelming agreement, I would say.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Just asking what this would mean if Novell would win this. Would this mean that the close gardens that stop people from selling what ever app they want to dream up? Will the restrictions of following guidelines have to be removed (at least from MS stores). Since if we take this to the extreme: Win RT doesn't allow x86 (except for some internal MS items) so would this mean MS would have to allow anyone to those APIs since they apparently did port the x86 stuff to RT? Would this mean the Apple only APIs that people can't use on the iDevices would be forcefully opened to allow developers to use them? Just like how during the Anti-trust case against MS force MS to document it's APIs that they specifically told people not to use but people did because of the tighter integration it allowed?
I'm serious I really don't understand what this 17 year old case would affect things in todays world.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
When Windows NT came out, every week there was a patch for Windows 95
Where did you get those patches?
The did not have a built in 'update' system until win 98. NT4 didnt have one either. You went to their FTP site and hopefully knew which one to get. Then you only did it if something was BROKE or was a major service pack.
It wasnt until the patch system came into being that people regularly installed all the patches.
Novell's main product was sharing files and printers. That was it. Oh it did 500 other things. But that is what people bought it for. Once windows could do that. Novell main product was history. It was an obvious extension to the OS. Which is why they bought ...
Wordperfect had the problem of rewriting their whole product from the ground up (and then not quite getting it right). They even stuck to using those crazy keyboard macros instead of coming up with a somewhat usable GUI. Then the GUI they did have was a horrid pain to use. Then when they finally 'got it'. They ended up with a rather clunky interface. Going from a 80x40 text interface DOS app to a WYSIWYG interface and event driven system is not like flipping a switch. Yeah in the end MS ate their lunch because MS did something they didnt want to do. They came up with a good enough product at a decent price point. Novell was hoping for vendor lockin because of file formats. That didnt work very well for them did it?
I'm sorry, did Novel wind up with that software? I was pretty sure they off-loaded it on some other sucker before it sunk. Let's see, when I supported it it was Borland. Loved WP 6 because I could reveal the horrifically twisted and ugly automatic page code and swamp it out. Hands down better than Word 5/6 at the time. Always shocked to see a WP file float through our press department from a client. Some of the youngsters don't even know what WP is.
No get off my lawn!
Groklaw does more research than anyone, and it's accurate.
You're about on the same level as proclaiming doom and gloom in Google vs Oracle - of which, Groklaw was again correct.
Go back to Florian and lay off the fuckin spin, please.
What factual errors have they made? They don't draw from factual errors - at most all they've ever had are a few typos in spellings as noted by their corrections.
Do you have examples for evidence or just conjecture?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Well, how about this. The judge in this case is the very same judge that has ruled against MS in the Java case, and likened MS to kneecapping Tonya Harding.
Yet Groklaw implies that the judge has only ever ruled in favor of MS, and paints him as a MS shill. Why is that? Why doesn't their "research" show that?
The facts are, the judge has a history of ruling AGAINST Microsoft, but you wouldn't know that from the groklaw article. That is how they show bias.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Oh, yes, let me give you links to the comments I made on groklaw that weren't approved.
Do you even think before you write?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
If you haven't read it, Almost Perfect is a good (free) book about the rise and fall of WordPerfect from the guy that ran the company for quite a while.
Perhaps he had such a history 10 years ago, but in this case, he has consistently ruled for MS (and been overruled on appeal). What the motivation for that is, I don't know.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They removed APIs after promoting them for use by clients. At the same time they internally did not use them.
Then, just before the release of the system, they withdrew them leaving the clients out in the cold.
This would be similar to your boss promising a raise, in writing, that you would get if you met or exceeded your deadlines. Then dropped the project you were working on, dropped your bonus, and laid you off.
Was that fair dealing?
I'm not sure why you think it's strange. You do realize the whole case basically revolves around the "File/Open" dialog, and that WordPerfect didn't want to use that standard one, and because Microsoft (for whatever reason) decided to not give out an API to do some things with it, they decided to write their own instead of using the default one. One middle manager's decision (that wasn't overruled by someone higher up) caused the Office Suite to be delayed by 4-6 months. Although, there is argument whether Quattro would have been ready to go at that time.
Novell's whole argument is that they were delayed in release because they CHOSE to write their own custom File/Open dialog instead of using the default one, and that lead to their demise because of timing? According to them, IF they had chosen to use the default one they would have been able to deliver on schedule. This is just bad management.
Now, the reasons behind why Microsoft stopped that particular API is in question, and their motives may not have been altruistic, but it was a frigging BETA. They explicitly state that they can/may change/remove/add APIs at any stage of the beta. Sorry, but this is a silly lawsuit and should have been thrown out before it even made it this far.
Not to mention every version of WordPerfect for Windows was worse than its predecessor. The last remotely usable version was 7. 8 was so unstable, I couldn't use it (it crashed every 5-15 minutes).
As someone who used WordPerfect in the days *BEFORE* it had Icons because it ran in DOS, that version (5.2) still could kick ass over ANY WYSIWYG Word Processor for most tasks. I'd still use it *TODAY* if it only ran on XP-7, had printer support, and I could get install disks. (Not to mention that it would be so lightning fast it isn't funny.) Yes, I miss it mightily (not the current Corel offering.)
Funny how GrokLaw forgets to mention that the same Judge had previously ruled against Microsoft in the 2002 Sun case. (Just one random article)
Or also that he rejected MS's (hilariously self-serving) class action "settlement offer" (Another example article.)
In fact, this this article asserts this judge was biased against Microsoft:
Oh, there was a 11-1 hung jury? Well, of course, juries can never be wrong, say, like award ridiculous damages for infringement on two claims of a single patent whose validity is still doubtful (The recent RIM case.).
Oh, he's flown in from outside his district to oversee this case? Could just maybe possibly because he has a lot of experience with Microsoft anti-trust cases?
Oh, right, this is /. and OF COURSE MS is evil and so OF COURSE let's ignore all the inconvenient facts and call the Judge corrupt.
Actually, the jury was 12 to 0 in favour of Microsoft being guilty, however they were hung over the size of the damages... this is what's so absolutely stupid about the entire case... Microsoft lost, yet won...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
You, sir, are a liar. Groklaw doesn't
preapprove comments, so there is
no truth in your smear.
...matter, which is one of the main reasons I continue to look at slashdot. Thanks for all insights provided.
In my opinion and limited but significant knowledge, killing an application in such a way is exactly (a) the power a company like MS has with their proprietary code base and (b) perfectly consistent with that I perceive to be their business model.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Judge Motz is biased; he has flown from outside his district to judge this case
It sounds awfully much like money changed hands.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
And you could live in a tardhome for all we know.
I'm surprised anyone takes Groklaw's analysis seriously after their insane conspiracy theory about "Microsoft is funding Pystar to undermine Apple's EULA and therefore the GPL." I mean what the fuck?!
All the source material posted there is great, but you can outright ignore 90% of the editorial content and be smarter for it.
I worked at a company that used Wordperfect (site license for mere pennies), and actually preferred it at the time to Word. Then they started copying Word, and the interface became flat out horrible. There was / is plenty of room to innovate.
And people who vote Republican tend to agree with Fox News.
I can't read this post without picturing hipster shades.
Of course not, and they have always been biased. Why do you think twitter the fucktarded troll has been using this as a source along with Boycott Novell?
They don't appear to now, but they used to.. particularly during the ODF/MSOXML periods.
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The point is that Microsoft only stopped it for use by others.
Microsoft Office still used the API that everyone else was told would not be in the release version of Windows.
You can return to your circle jerk.....
Whatever that means ....
Oh wait .... MICROSOFT IS EVIL!
I keep forgetting Slashdot is is a bunch of people stuck in adolescence.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Office used the standard file open dialog box.
This is why Groklaw's excellent, direct publication of the relevant court documents is so very useful to understand the case. the trial transcripts are available, starting at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120602215245555&query=microsoft+novell+api, and your claim is not consistent with _either_ side's claims.
Look for the key word "ISV" in the transcript, it's at the core of the problems and multiple violations of commercial agreements with Novell as a business partner, and is core to Microsoft using its monopoly position to lock out competitors from office suite products. Microsoft had a contractual obligation with Novell to publish those API's, and suddenly stopped doing so shortly before release, when Novell had already committed their engineers and project plans to working with those API's.
That's not "changing from the BETA", that's bait and switch.
Really, please read page 58, and 59 where they start to get into the meat of the complaint, which I will quote for you here:
WordPerfect understood the importance of integrating into the Chicago shell and the need to extend
58
Microsoft's common dialogs to provide the added functionality historically present in WordPerfect or to use the name space extension API's to extend WordPerfect's own dialogs.
Let me break that down for you a little bit. As the WordPerfect developers that you will hear from in this case will explain, WordPerfect had traditionally had a very powerful file open dialogue containing features and functionality well beyond that offered by Microsoft's Word. Within this new operating system, Windows 95, application developers had a choice to make. They could rely on the common open file dialogs provided within Windows 95, or they could create their own more powerful file open dialogue.
In either case, whichever choice they made, the name space extension API's in Windows would allow application developers to add real name spaces to whichever file open dialog was chosen.
Let's look at that in a little more detail. This is the Windows 95 common file open dialogue shown on the screen. It was pretty basic compared to what WordPerfect had done in the past. You couldn't search across different drives or folders. You could only search within a given location. WordPerfect developers had identified a long list of deficiencies with Microsoft's common file open dialogue. Here's a prototype of WordPerfect's file open dialogue.
And here, the name space API's in question were added and started to be documented in the M6 beta release as described on page 61:
The M6 Beta included partial documentation for the name space extensions in an SDK, software development kit. We talked about it. This is just a list of the API's. The actual exhibit is a much bigger document written in language
61
that only a software developer could love or understand.
Those APIs were then removed in M7, the very next milestone.
Reiterating what the "name space extensions" were about on page 64:
As you may recall, the developers at WordPerfect, later Novell, back in November of 1993, were very happy about Microsoft's decision to document the name space extensions. They liked the technology, and they determined to use it for the file open dialogs for all the parts of the PerfectOffice suite. The shared code team immediately started coding, with the expectation of receiving those extensions, and later they were coding directly to the name space extensions, as documented in the M6 Beta for Windows 95 in June of 1994.
From page 76:
Mr. Gibb will explain that the file open dialogue was critical path throughout this project. The evidence will show that Mr. Gates' decision resulted in a delay in Novell's efforts to produce a timely suite for Windows 95.
From page 120:
And here's the contract between Microsoft and WordPerfect which, of course, May 24, '94, just before Novell bought it -- so it's the contract binding on Novell as well. And the idea that Novell advocates in this case, I think, is
120
that somehow, because Microsoft in a very early version of the Beta, included the name space API's, they could never take them out. That was the deception. They've told us that these API's, these four, out of thousands, might be in the product, and then later you withdrew support for them.
... I think I've made my point. This was exactly about the File/Open dialog. Gibbs also said under oath and testimony that they could have delivered on time if they used the standard File/Open dialog, but they chose to make their own custom one.
If there remains any doubt, read page 133, where it's summed up pretty much exactly the same way I said:
So the NameSpace extension decision, and it's the only thing that Novell's lawyer told you this morning that Microsoft did wrong, the only thing, the only thing he said that caused all these problems and made these products late was Mr. Gates's decision in October of '94. That's what he said. There were no other, no other acts that Microsoft committed that he said caused any delay.
Those name space extensions, the ones WordPerfect wanted to use to integrate into the File/Open dialog were the only thing that Novell claims was the reason for their product delay. Straight from Novell's lawyer.
> Their take on the verdict comes off as biased, bitter in parts, and sarcastic in parts. Do they claim to be balanced, or are they partisan?
Well, you could say the Freedom Fighters like Washington et al. back in 1776 were heavily biased pro United States. I concede they didn't respect England's interests on equal footing.
Biased is bad when the bias helps the bad guys.
The first thing a bad guy says about a good guy is that he is biased -- because he knows the good guy wants to be unbiased as part of being good, so that's a winner tactics... because if the bad guy is biased, he can always say: "well, of course, since I'm the bad dude and all... duh!".
It's somewhat tortuous, but it's like asking someone if he lies -- both an honest man and a liar would answer the same.
DOS-Box, my friend.... enjoy! Screaming fast as well!
The point is that Microsoft only stopped it for use by others. Microsoft Office still used the API that everyone else was told would not be in the release version of Windows.
That is incorrect. Microsoft didn't use it, they completely removed the feature, It was feature that was in the Beta but not available in the final product to WordPerfect or any product (including microsofts own)