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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.
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.
Who cares? Windows nor any other OS.. (remember the whole cocoa/carbon debacle with OSX?) gives any guarantee that APIs will never be deprecated.
Remember the saying "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
Remember the saying "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?
The one that Lotus guys themselves said was BS? Yes, I do.
If you really want to bring something up, start with AARD code - at least that actually shipped (in a beta version of Windows).
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.
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus