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."

Comments

Actually, No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal next.

[gavron]

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 FACTS.

[gavron]

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

Re:Groklaw provides FACTS.

[postbigbang]

You may be entitled to your opinions, but you're not entitled to your facts. Fanboi-ism aside, a jury voted 11-1 in favor of Novell's claims, a verdict that was overturned by a judge.

The same judge had ruled in similar ways for Microsoft, and had been overturned on appeal.

What part of the facts are you unclear about?

Appeals

[Lorien_the_first_one]

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.

Re:Appeals

[Overzeetop]

No, Microsoft won the war. This is but a side skirmish in a town which has lost all relevance. Whether Novell wins or loses is irrelevant because WordPerfect is dead, killed by the horrific mis-management which let them start with the post popular and most powerful consumer word processor on the planet and drive is so far into the ground that most /.ers with a 7 digit UID will wonder if that was the word processor that was bundled with Visicalc, or that ran on one of those computers that used tubes.

The bigger problem is that technology moves so many orders of magnitude faster than traditional brick and mortar processes that the laws and court system can't keep pace in its current incarnation. Patents lasting 28 years? Copyrights lasting 120 years? Common delay tactics and court backlog taking over a decade to resolve? Useless in an industry with a 6-24 month product lifecycle.

Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis

[man_of_mr_e]

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.

Re:So they removed APIs?

[Locutus]

might be wrong. I recall word getting out that IBM had OS/2 running 32bit Windows 95 apps but the next beta release stopped that. Microsoft for some "unknown" reason decided to change their resource compiler such that an applications resources(menus, icons, etc ) were stored in the upper memory of the virtual address space while the rest continued to be loaded in the lower space.

You can't say that given all of the documentation released in public court cases there is any doubt Microsoft would pull stunts like last minute code changes just to make sure a competitor in the application side had to adjust for the code change, retest their software, and then send it to manufacturing which all means a big delay in release to the public. All the while, Microsoft's applications people knew well in advance of this and had their software applications read when the OS was released. Naw, that would never happen.

LoB