Caldera wins a round in MS suit

Manuka writes to us with "new information on the Caldera-Microsoft trial. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson ruled against Microsoft on four motions to narrow the scope of the Caldera suit. " This ruling ends motions vis a vis anti-trust, however, there are at least five other motions yet to be considered. This has been one of the first signs of activity since the six month reprieve on the trial.

Comments

Re:Bar Associations

[hawk]

Actually, I don't belong to the Iowa Bar, but to California & Nevada.

The DA certainly doesn't ignore the complaints (in the two or three instances I've seen), but what I'm getting at is that all the bar can do is call the DA, just the same as any citizen (though they'll probably be lent an ear much faster :)

The bar can't directly discipline a non-lawyer, since they only have jurisdiction over lawyers. It's handled as a criminal offense. In states where the bar is more tightly integrated with the state Supreme Court (from which it gets its power), I presume direct action along lines of contempt of court is (or could be) possible.

hawk, esq., the recovering lawyer (haven't sued anyone in more than five years [applause])

Re:yes.

[remande]

So what's wrong with personal vendettas? Personal vendettas can be fun.

Too bad Kanly is illegal in this country. It would save a lot of court costs. Sigh...

(This post is smiley-captioned for the humor impaired).

Re:Yes, Caldera is just gold digging

[Gleef]

At the time when Caldera bought DR-DOS, the only commercial value of the software was to bring this lawsuit. Novell didn't think it was worth it to go through the motions, so they sold the lawsuit to someone who wanted to. Caldera has a lot less to lose by baiting Microsoft than Novell does, so it was a good match. It's not sleazy, the lawsuit needed to be filed, Caldera wanted to be the one filing it.

In the meantime, they haven't been sitting on DR-DOS, waiting for the suit to save them. They've turned it into a viable and profitable embedded systems and thin client platform. Check out Caldera Thin Clients for more details. It's not sleazy at all to take a commercially dead product and find new markets for it.

Caldera deserves this one

[AT]

Of all the anti-trust suits outstanding against Microsoft right now (DOJ, Bristol, Caldera), I think Caldera's has the most merit.

There is overwhelming evidence that MS deliberatly tried to make Win3.1 (at least the beta) unneccessarily incompatible with DRDOS. This 1993 Dr. Dobbs article shows the code that does it and points out how it was deliberatly obfuscated, too.

Re:Caldera deserves this one

[flesh99]

I would seriously like an explanation on how making a product incompatible with a competing product is a monopolistic practice. Or is it only OK for the smaller company to do to the larger company.

Before you answer, think about this, all Linux distros are incompatible with MS, is this a bad practice...NO. So what if we open source our stuff, some people don't believe in Open Source and they have a right to that belief. What if the intentions of the creators of DR DOS were to steal the windows interface (a stretch, yes). You cannot force a company to release something they have copyrighted. I know that many people here despise copyright and IP laws, but fact is they exist and you have to work within that framework right now. This is a frivolous lawsuit, and for the first time ever I hope MS wins. As for Caldera winning a round, they have won nothing, alomost all cases like this have a dismissal motion filed when they go to before a judge the first time, and over 50% of the time the motion is denied. All that has happened so far is what usually happens. I guess Linux is bad because it was made not be compatible with MS-DOS, no wait it's about Unix...yeah whatever. Get a life folks this one is a bad lawsuit. I want to see Linux win because it is better, not because a lot of people file bullsh*t suits and wear MS down.

Re:would you rather amateurs???

[hawk]

If you want me to argue both sides, you'll have to pay me twice :)

Explain the logic of this lawsuit

[Mart]

Didn't Caldera buy DR-DOS after most, if not all, of the damage had been done? If so, then how can they sue for lost earnings? If it was obvious that DR-DOS had been closed out of the OS market when they bought it, then logically they should have been able to buy it comparatively cheaply, but then they should be unable to pursue Microsoft in the courts.

would you rather amateurs???

[hawk]

>Complete with higly paid professional lawyers ...
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Would you want amateur lawyers?

I once encountered a "self proclaimed lawyer." Actually, I encountered her victims, and my time cleaning up the mess was primarily pro bono. The real ugly thing about these is that the bar associations are powerless to stop them, as they have no jurisdiction over non-lawyers--all they can do is pass information to the district attorney.

ANd while there are rare exceptions, Lincoln was right about those who represent themeselves having fools for clients . . .

Re:Yes, Caldera is just gold digging

[IntlHarvester]

Actually, Novell knew they had a case, but was too chickenshit to spoil their 'relationship' with Microsoft.

And you're right about DR-DOS being a somewhat valuable product. Millions of PCs still run DOS, and Microsoft still charges $50 for it, so there's definatly a market.
--

Re:Now defunct?

[IntlHarvester]

Right. Don't forget that Microsoft orginally intended to replace DOS/Windows 3.1 with Windows NT. This failed largely due to backwards-compatibilty problems.

Windows 95/98 are just big piles of design comprimises designed to give the customer what they want (with some DirectX stuff added to kill the DOS game market). On the other hand, I have seem some really f*ing old DOS drivers loading successfully under 9x.
--