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SCOTUS Ends Novell's Anti-Trust Cast Against Microsoft
walterbyrd (182728) writes in with news about the end of the line for a Novell anti-trust claim against Microsoft. "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday brought an end to Novell Inc's antitrust claims against Microsoft Corp that date back 20 years to the development of Windows 95 software. By declining to hear Novell's appeal, the court left intact a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from September 2013 in favor of Microsoft. The court of appeals unanimously affirmed the dismissal of Novell Inc's claims that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act when it decided not to share its intellectual property while developing its Windows 95 operating system. Novell was seeking more than $3 billion."
There was more to it than just not sharing its IP, such as deliberately misleading the company, and changing the APIs mid stream to break interoperability.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
What kind of "cast" did they use? Is there a new spell-book that us magicians can buy that where we can learn a spell to make /. editors proofread articles?
I am not sure it is fully about the company when it gets to that level, but society in general. They are sanctioning MS's action and it tells these companies they can do those things and just drag out the case long enough that it no longer matters, just because they have more money.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Same as the Old Oligarchy
We won't get fooled again
Meanwhile Google hasn't paid more than $1 billion in taxes to France, and almost all tech firms have done the same thing, not paying taxes to the US, based on legal fictions and tax havens (a fancy term for a way they can make the middle class pay for their infrastructure and legal protections without paying even 1/3 the tax rate you do).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Dragging out a case is not new.
I don't think this case was worth the risk of SCOTUS setting an accidental precedence. I'd like to think that SCOTUS was thinking along the same lines.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Who said anything about expecting one company to help another out? What I except is that when I am working with a company they are not going to actively stab me in the back.In this case MS told them what they APIs were, then pulled it out from under them at the last second, to intentionally sink their product. If they would not have not given them the APIs there would not have been an issue, as then MS would not have been working with them and they could have developed something else, however by working with them and then pulling the APIs they intentionally sabotaged the product. By itself that still would not have been an issue, except they intentionally planned that.
As for a monopoly, there certainly was in the desktop, and the current state, after losing the antitrust and having to change practices, is not proof that there was not at the time.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
The Republicans are why the software industry was destroyed here in Seattle. http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/2...
Too bad Seattle is such an Republican enclave - you should try to get more Democrats to move there if you prefer their tax policies.
Not that the article doesn't use some pretty skewed statistics. It compares the tax burden with 4 exemptions to that of 1. Hey, guess what, if you're supporting 1 person on 6 figures you pay more taxes than if you're supporting 4. That's what progressive taxes are supposed to do.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Novell fucked up when they tried to make everyone pay out the ass for eDirectory, and Microsoft included a reasonable adoption of LDAPv3 in Windows 2000 Server.
That was the beginning of the end for Novell. Today, the world runs on Active Directory.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And what is wrong with Hippies? They were right. Was Vietnam a good war? Is making love not better than war?
If the taxes just came from capital gains, then you eliminate stocks and companies become privately owned -- or they trade stock in other countries. There's no one solution. Economic activity where money is made is where you tax.
Or we could just stop paying banks to make loans -- and just pay all the people, which I think is the only viable solution for a future where most labor gets replaced by robots.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Not just that, had Novell defined IPX in a way that would have allowed them to globally define & extend it, they could have been the de facto IANA and laid out the Internet assignments, instead of letting IPv4 mushroom until it became a pain. Also, had they created a Netware subset OS that could have been a desktop OS, they'd have done fine there as well. Instead, by switching to Linux, they just handed things over to Microsoft by putting a UNIX like OS into the equation.
A long time ago.
Novell owned the network File/Print market and pioneered the e-Directory (NDS) environment. Microsoft was playing catch-up the whole way.
The biggest problem with Novell was that you couldn't develop applications on the Netware platform. Microsoft offered ISVs the ability to develop software on the platform (Windows) on which it would run. When Novell purchased Unix, I thought that they would fully integrate NCP (Netware Core Protocol) into Unix. This would allow ISVs to develop software on the same platform on which their software would run. Had they done so, Microsoft would have lost the server wars and been relegated to the desktop.
But Novell didn't do the necessary integration, and the rest is history.
As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.
tl;dr version: Novell killed themselves and Microsoft moved into the vacuum created when Novell imploded. The resolution of this lawsuit just puts the cherry on top of the whole mess.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I'd agree with your legal take on it. However, regardless of legality, there is still the incentive for a company in Microsoft's position (controlling both the OS - Windows - and competing software - Word) to pull this sort of dirty trick to the detriment of the market and the consumer, but for their own self-benefit. It wasn't a part of this trial, but Microsoft had already pulled this type of trick before. It told all the software companies that OS/2 was going to be the GUI successor to DOS. So companies like WordPerfect got busy porting their DOS apps to OS/2. Then at the last minute, Microsoft dumped their partnership with IBM, declared that Windows was now the successor to DOS, and oh by the way here's a nice new word processor we made called Word which runs on Windows, since WordPerfect hasn't got their Windows version ready yet...
The cleaner solution, which allows companies to volunteer info this way but which eliminates the incentive to hurt the consumer (and competitors) for their own self-benefit, is something those of us opposed to Microsoft's tactics back then have always called for. Break Microsoft up into two separate companies - one which makes operating systems, and one which makes applications. If they had been broken up, Office for iOS and Android would have been released years ago instead of just recently. It's pretty obvious Microsoft was holding it back in hopes of using it to steer people towards Win Phone 8 and Win RT, and slowing down abandonment of Windows as their OS for productivity apps.
You see the same problem playing out in ISPs - where the companies which own the wires are also providing content, and deliberately throttling the content of competitors (e.g. Netflix's speeds on Comcast improved immediately after their agreement to pay Comcast, long before any new infrastructure could have been installed). Or how cellular service providers are able to lock down the phone you buy to their network - forcing you to buy your phone from them or from a third party who is getting their phones from them.
The incentive for this anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior disappears if you simply prohibit companies from owning both the platform/pipes and the content that runs on that platform/goes through the pipes. Can you imagine what the automobile market would've been like if Standard Oil and Ford had been one company, and only Ford cars had been allowed to fuel up at Standard Oil gas stations?