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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?
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.
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
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.
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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; }
That process *seems* to work for Apple.
The MS way is to make it easier for developers by keeping archaic APIs around.
The Apple way is to make it easier for users by converging to a better design over time at the expense of making it harder for developers by deprecating APIs.
The only constant is change; the only difference is time. Fast change is called revolution, slow change called evolution.
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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
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.
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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.
It's not really depreciating something if during a product beta process, you create an API, then remove it before that product is released. There was no released product that had that API in it, and there should be no released products that depend on it.
That process *seems* to work for Apple.
That process never worked for Apple. Are we forgetting that Apple needed to be bailed out about the time the quote in my signature was made?
History is littered with the corpses of operating systems that broke significant backward compatibility, with their nose dive coincidentally happening precisely at that compatibility break.
Apple has learned their lesson and they do not break API's nearly as rapidly as they used to. Do not confuse backward compatibility with hardware support. Apple is a hardware company and thrives off obsoleting old hardware as rapidly as they can. 5-year old software works on 1-day old hardware, but often not the other way around in the Apple world. So they are maintaining backward compatibility, but breaking forward compatibility as often as possible.
"His name was James Damore."
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.)
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.
...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 people who vote Republican tend to agree with Fox News.
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.
Hehe... they break support of older hardware so that people don't NOTICE breaking backward compatibility. That's a thing a player like Apple can get away with though. They control the hardware and the software. In PC world, people would be very upset indeed.
But there should be no problem with reducing the amount of backward compatibility. 5 year old software is fine for backward compatibility. But we're talking about 20 year old software in some cases. It's got to go.
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.
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)