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SCOTUS Ends Novell's Anti-Trust Cast Against Microsoft

Posted by samzenpus on from the end-of-the-line dept.

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."

11 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. way to over simplify the issue win the summery by thaylin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not surprised by this ruling at all. The current Supreme Court is very friendly towards businesses acting badly.

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      I read the internet for the articles.
    2. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Informative

      That phrase has quite a lot of bogus spin attached to it. They take something pretty mundane and turn it completely inside out. Based on the phrase as stated, you would think that Novell was expecting Microsoft to give up all of it's trade secrets when all it was really expecting was the details of a standard public interface.

      This is just one of the many bad side effects of an overly expansive notion of "intellectual property" and of corporate privelege in general.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by Sun · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Novel narrative is this:
      Microsoft shared the interface with Novel during the beta, encouraging it to rely on it. Then, a few months before release, and after WordPerfect was already dependent on those interfaces, Microsoft changed them and declined to share the new ones with Novel. When Windows 95 finally came out, MS did, in fact, publish those interfaces, but by then it was too late for Novel to ship WordPerfect with Windows 95's launch.

      Had MS not shared those interfaces to begin with, Novel could have worked with an internal implementation.

      Shachar

    4. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by hAckz0r · · Score: 5, Insightful
      No, what they did was to dup Novell into developing a complex product using an API that they provided, but planned on changing at the 12th hour to defeat their competition out of the gate. Their goal was to make Novell look so bad in the eyes of the consumer that nobody would ever trust the product again. This is pure maliciousness and way over the top. Its one thing to simply not give information, its entirely another to mislead and make your competition do what you tell them, and then change it so that it is guaranteed not to work.

      .
      Bottom line: If you shake hands with Bill Gates you had better count your fingers.

    5. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 4, Funny

      On Slashdot, all accusations against government officials are deemed to be true. Evidence is not required.

      Yeah, but they pretty much are... oh, wait, I see what you did there.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    6. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by cusco · · Score: 4, Interesting

      literally hundreds of billions of dollars of lobbying efforts

      I don't think you understand what the word 'literally' means. You're off by at least three orders of magnitude. And "very old"??? Ford is an old company, US Steel is an old company, Barclays Bank is a very old company, Hudsons Bay Trading is a very old company. Microsoft barely makes it beyond "not new".

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    7. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by nobuddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Thomas is corrupt, a total money shill that votes the way he is told, and pushes the rest that way. His wife makes millions as a Koch lobbyist, yet he never recuses himself from cases that involve the people that pay his wife millions.
      Relevant example (there are many many more like this):
      http://crooksandliars.com/karo...

      Scalia is also a corporate shill. He attends the Koch right-wing money events, and consistently votes the way the Koch brothers tell him to.
      http://www.politicususa.com/20...

      Roberts, Alito, and kennedy are less corrupt, but do not hesitate to take tremendous pay for "speaking engagements" at the right wing events and vote consistently with Koch interests.
      http://www.politicususa.com/20...

  2. Re:What would this ruling have changed, today? by thaylin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    When you cant win, ad hominem.
  3. Re:LOL@Novell by unixisc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Novell Killed Themselves by NotSanguine · · Score: 4, Informative

    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