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Caldera Trial Update
In yet another decision from the Caldera vs. Microsoft trial,
a judge has ruled that Caldera can sue Microsoft for "alleged violations outside the United States", because
Microsoft apparently has a global impact. With any luck, the pretrial
will start in August. You know, I'm beginning to wonder who
has the bigger legal team these days.
gets caught doing bad things and then has the audacity to get mad about it.
Antitrust law is retroactive, which means that even if something was perfectly legal when you actually did it, if it is subsequently declared illegal you are still liable.
This means that there is no way to tell if you are breaking the law when you do something, because the law doesn't exist yet! Microsoft's phalanx of corporate lawyers would never have broken existing laws, Bill is too smart for that.
software you can tell he believes all
software should come from him for some divine reason only he knows about.
As is the goal of all software development projects. If you were to take a straw poll on
Bill was never really a hacker in the first place like so many Unix
heroes were/are, he just funded projects and used other people's work to his
advantage
More FUD and lies. Bill's simply more successful than anyone else because he was the first to realise the truth: There is no such thing as a software project, there are only business projects with a software element.
Buying out every company with an idea and forcing companies to use only
your products isn't "Freedom to Innovate" Bill.
Force is the sole monopoly of governments. The only force here is that applied by the DOJ. Microsoft has no guns and no laws to compel people to obey, only the free judgement of the rational individuals who freely trade with them, everyone from the home PC user to megacorporations like Compaq and IBM. No-one has ever compelled you to trade with MS, you have always done do freely - it is a central fact that no-one has the right to buy whatever they want, only what they are offered for sale.
It has always been possible to buy components and assemble your own PC - even if you are incapable of doing so, you cannot demand the world adapt itself to your whims. You can only buy what is offered for sale - either a preinstalled box or take the time to find a niche manufacturer.
Microsoft's only crime is that they are the ALCOA of the 90's.
Clause 3: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." In
other words, ain't no such thing as retroactive law.
You're wrong. What constitutes a monoploy is not formally defined in law; it is open to interpretation by the court. If the court choose to regard an act as monopolist, there is no objective way to predict this before the verdict is reached, and vice versa.
The Sherman Act is deliberately vague like this. While the letter of the law cannot act retroactively, the spirit can, and that's what drives the verdict.
Right. Uh-huh. Now just TRY and get along WITHOUT using Microsoft products in
the corporate workplace. Just TRY to see how far you make it.
Try showing up to work naked and see how far you get in business. Try speaking Swahili to all your clients. Try putting orange juice in your car instead of petrol.
You see my point? Just because some things become
convention and some don't, that does not constitute coercion.
Of course, their chances are still way out there, but I'm starting to think that Caldera is actually going to get a settlement. I hope that they do, they deserve every penny that they get. I think that it's funny that the Microsoft Lawyers would even question that FACT that MS products have a global effect. Does anyone understand what the thing that is going to happen in mid-august is?
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -Brian Kernigan
The legal definition of a monopoly doesn't come out of the American Heritage dictionary. I don't think you need to have 100% of the market to be considered a legal monopoly.
Even so, while MS might not have 100% of the whole computer market, they definately have 99% of various submarkets. Consider mainline corporate desktops (for US organizations > 500 employees) - how many secretaries are *not* running Windows?
Another submarket is consumer desktops less than the cost of a iMac (~= $1000). Even if you want to pretend that Linux is a good consumer OS, you'd have a fair amount of trouble finding a preinstalled, low-end Linux system in CompUSA.
Of course, the marketplace is still wide-open for servers and engineering workstations and the like. But if Microsoft could successfully threaten IBM, the worlds largest computer company and owner of several operating systems, to downplay OS/2 - that tells you that Windows is pretty much the only game in town as far as the general market goes.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The American Constitution says the same thing:
This is from Section 9. As this is part of the original, unammended Constitition, it would seem that the founders put a higher priority on forbidding retroactive laws than on such minor issues as freedom of speech, press, and religion (which had to be added in a bug-fix, er, I mean ammendment, later).Given that, I see a couple of possibilities --
I know which explaination makes more sense to me ...
(Full text of the U.S. Constitution plus many other resources are available at http://www.usconstitution.net/.)
I don't know how antitrust law works in the UK, but in the US this is simply wrong. See my other post for more details.
IANAL. As I understand US antitrust law, while there are certainly areas of interpretation where it may not be clear what constitutes antitrust behavior, in general it's possible to know if you are breaking the law or not.
It is not, in itself, a violation of US anti-trust law to gain a dominant market share constituting a de facto monopoly. (I'm going to ignore de jure monopolies like the public utilities.) What it is illegal to do is to use that dominant market position to
As for the "Bill and his phalanx of lawyers would never willingly break the law" argument --- ROTFLMAO! Sure they would! And they certainly would (and have) push the boundaries of the law as much as they deemed profitable. Anti-trust enforcement in the US has a history of being "too little, too late". So it makes good corporate sense (in a bottom-line, worshipping the almighty dollar and stock valuation way) to do precisely the amount of anti-trust violation that you think you can get away with.
Now, whether Bill and Co. have managed to walk that line (of attempting world domination without being so egregiously in violation of the law that they suffer a serious setback at the hands of the DOJ) successfully or unsuccessfully is still an open question (since we don't know the results of the trial yet). Given that previous actions by the Federal Government against MSFT for anti-trust violations have amounted practically to little more than a slap on the wrist, we shall see. Maybe Bill was too smart to obey the law, if MSFT gets off too easily ...
But please, let's not have any of these conservative/libertarian/Randist fantasies about how Microsoft is being persecuted for simply being successful. Microsoft is being prosecuted for violating the law. A law that they freely chose to ignore, or at least dance right up to the line and stick a couple of toes over, believing they wouldn't get those toes stepped on hard enough to matter.
This is flat-out false. Read the U.S. Constitution, bub. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." In other words, ain't no such thing as retroactive law.
This means that there is no way to tell if you are breaking the law when you do something, because the law doesn't exist yet!
You been reading Kafka too much?
Microsoft's phalanx of corporate lawyers would never have broken existing laws, Bill is too smart for that.
Ridiculous. Bill just interprets the law the way it suits him--until he gets caught bending the rules just a little too far. Reminds me of another Bill we all know.
If you were to take a straw poll on /. you'd find many people who believe that all software should only come from the open source community by divine right.
Does open source hold a monopoly? By definition, no. Open source is not a monolith--it's a process. Microsoft IS a monolith, and a monopoly. You simply can't compare the two.
Bill's simply more successful than anyone else because he was the first to realise the truth: There is no such thing as a software project, there are only business projects with a software element.
No one blames Microsoft for being successful. We do blame them for abusing their position. That's where they broke the law.
Force is the sole monopoly of governments.
Ah. A card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party, I see. Mmmm-hmmm...
Repeat that statement while someone is pointing a .357 Magnum at your head and demanding your wallet.
The only force here is that applied by the DOJ.
Baloney. Microsoft also forced numerous companies to either be subsumed by them or be forced out of the game (WebTV, Hotmail, DR-DOS, Netscape, etc. etc. etc.). My Lord, they even had Intel majorly worried, incredibly enough. If you try to claim Microsoft doesn't use "moral force" (to use that giddy Libertarian term), then your credibility is at around null.
Just because someone is in government does not make them inherently an abuser of "moral force"--and, conversely, just because someone is NOT in government does not make them incapable or unwilling to do so, either.
Microsoft has no guns and no laws to compel people to obey, only the free judgement of the rational individuals who freely trade with them, everyone from the home PC user to megacorporations like Compaq and IBM. No-one has ever compelled you to trade with MS, you have always done do freely - it is a central fact that no-one has the right to buy whatever they want, only what they are offered for sale.
Right. Uh-huh. Now just TRY and get along WITHOUT using Microsoft products in the corporate workplace. Just TRY to see how far you make it. Your customers will abandon you, because you're incapable of opening even the simplest MS-Works document when they communicate with you. If things get worse, soon your Mac/Linux/Sun box will be unable to communicate with the other computers because they're using MS-TCP...thus cutting you off from the 90% of desktop computers in the workplace that are running Windows.
This is why we HAVE antitrust law!
Jeez...
cya
Ye Olde Webdesigner
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.