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Caldera Evidence Might be Thrown Out in MS Trial?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wouldn't-that-suck dept.

Coleslaw wrote in to send us a link over at Wired which talks about the Caldera/MS Trial. Apparently the latest issue is that a couple versions of Windows might not be admittable as evidence that MS altered Win3.1 to make DR-DOS produce errors, and to encourage the use of MS-DOS. Interesting bit.

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Guilty! Off with his head! by Signal+11 · · Score: 3

    For speaking Heresy against the Holy Trinity (FreeBSD, Linux, and OS/2), we hereby sentence Bill Gates to the purgatory of Perpetual Beta, beyond the land of Broken Standards, in the Pit of The Unmoving Watch Icon.

    For burning the Sacred documents of Truth, we bannish ye from our domain forevermore, and declare thy software Proprietary and Inferior!

    May you burn in the hells of Eternal Tech Support for your crimes!



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    1. Re:Guilty! Off with his head! by Signal+11 · · Score: 3

      Oh yeah, and for that browser-integration stuff? We're not terribly happy about that either.



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  2. Microsoft, as always, is grasping... by Chief+Justice · · Score: 3

    ...for loopholes.

    Notice they don't say anything about whether the allegations are true: instead they demand that the *exact versions of Windows in question* be ruled inadmissable as evidence in the trial!

    The spokesman mentions offhand that admission of those Windows versions would 'violate the rules of evidence' but avoids mentioning the fact that they were simply presented as evidence late, after the standard discovery process.

    So basically, they are sidestepping the real issue, which is that the allegations appear to be *true*, as has been reported for some time now by various sources.

    To quote:

    'For example, Microsoft VP Jim Allchin said in a
    1991 memo that "I suggest (at least for systems) that we ... consider changing our apps to not run unless the OS is our OS." '

    (And it appears that Caldera is trying to introduce as evidence two versions of Windows in which this actually occurs.) ...


    'Sohn [the spokesman] said DR-DOS failed because it was outdated, not because of antitrust violations. "The world was moving toward graphical user interfaces," he said. "Microsoft bet the company on them. Novell and DRI didn't." '

    This is typical Microsoft crap. The issue is not that Novell and DRI weren't also developing a competitor to Windows; the issue is that Windows used DOS for its guts, and relied on the widespread installation of DOS and its application base to make Windows successful, but then decided that they could appropriate the DR-DOS portion of the market by breaking DR-DOS under Windows, selling MS-DOS with every copy of Windows, and and quietly sweeping under the rug the fact that all Windows really was was a fucking extension and driver set coupled with a no-brainer graphical shell, all of which could have been run on another version of DOS.

    And yet they protest vehemently against all the slings and arrows of truth. This is why Microsoft gets so little respect. Jeez...

    My 2...
    Chief Justice