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Caldera vs. Microsoft Goes to Jury Trial
aculeus writes "TechWeb reports that Judge Lee Benson has dismissed all eight of Microsoft's motions for summary judgment on antitrust grounds, clearing the path for a trial to begin in Utah on Jan. 17. " Yes, the other court battle, the one that doesn't get talked about as much. The judge's decision to go with a jury means that he thinks that Caldera has basis for their legal complaints - a good sign, I suppose. The case itself is based upon Caldera's ownership of DR-DOS and fighting with Microsoft over that.
One case that didn't get dismissed is the DOJ case. the judge is supposed to give his verdict today. Hold onto your hats ladies and gentlemen. the stock market could get real nervous today.
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Deliberately stifling a competing OS by altering a package they control so it will only work with an OS they control.
So that's the definition of "tying"? Gotcha.
That's anti-competitive behaviour, and while it may or may not be legal (up to the jury) it certainly sucks. Got it now?
Well, I've always gotten the part about why it was a crummy (and not very intelligent) thing to do; I was just wondering why it's illegal, or at least civilly vulnerable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No, you are gravely wrong. It is much harder to buy of a judge than a whole jury, because...
Juries are extremely fickle. Microsoft will try to sway the decision by arguing, not facts, but that MS is unfairly beaten upon. The jury will then decide that it's true, why *should* these companies be allowed to keep suing MS for being successful, and Microsoft will get a vafourable decision.
-Brent--
Yikes! Maybe not even that!
Maybe not a shill for any particular interest.
You don't want to kill Microsoft. That's anticompetitive and just as bad. Just castrate it, because they've been raping the rest of the computer industry. Give them a choice: open source their OS's or split into three separate companies: MS-systems, MS-applications, MS-N(BC). Anyone who owns more than 5 percent of one of those companies can't own more than 1 percent of any of the others. Give them a year to divest. The prospect of having to sell all that stock in a year should drive them to open-source.
IIRC, a file on a FAT filesystem will release the blocks in the allocation table when deleted. The next file created will find the first available block(s) and allocate them. Thus, the ability to recover files from a FAT filesystem is related to the deleted file's position in the FAT, not at all to the age of the deleted file.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. See a lawyer licensed in your juisdiction if you need some.
>What did they mean by "tying", as in what MS did
>to DOS and Windows 3.1?
U.S. antitrust law prohibits the "tying" of other goods to monopoly goods, even if the monopoly is legal. Tying is the refusal to by the monopoly good (DOS) unless the tied good (windows) is also purchased.
>Seriously, though, I wonder how many people
>believe that this is just a money-grubbing ploy
>that is just now being filed by spoil-sports
>Caldera? I mean, to the man on the street, I'd
>imagine that a lawsuit concerning competing
>brands of DOS is pretty silly.
Only until you explain it. DR-DOS had 10% of the market, and growing. It worked better.
What are the damages for stealing this? Ten per cent of today's desktop OS market?
It's the remedies that really become interesting here. How do you put DR-DOS where it would have been? A full, royalty-free, license to all windows source code? An ownership interest in ms to reflect that share of the OS market--which would then be tripled (as an anti-trust verdict)? Or perhaps just 10% (before trippling) of microsoft's DOS revenue since then?
Then again, maybe microsoft shows the allegations aren't true and wins . . .
95% of the people who hate Microsoft hate it because it's successful. And of course, paradoxically they also hate Microsoft because it's unsuccessful (it's products are 'unsuccessful' because they don't run properly 100% of the time on 100,000 different hardware combinations). It's one of those paradoxes of American culture.
>By what moral principal should we (the people, therefore the government) be allowed to limit what they do to their own work, no matter how heinous?
That's really the question, isn't it? I think the answer is in the fact that MS has/had a monopoly. When millions of customers depend on Microsoft products, and MS can make one little code snippet that effectively scares people away from their competitors product, then that is illegal. It's not our moral principles that should then be questioned but theirs.
For example, BeOS could have little messages showing up saying that their OS won't work if Windows is installed on another partition (even though it certainly does, as win3.1 did with DR-DOS), and it's not illegal, because there aren't millions of customers who are effectively being forced/scared into using BeOS and deleting their Windows partitions.
At least that's my take on the whole situation.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
That's the biggest load of it that one can imagine. Caldera could not have afforded DR-DOS if it wasn't a failed product (for various reasons I am not going to dispute here).
This is a corporate-sized case of the ambulance chasing lawyer. With or without Microsoft's guilt, Caldera should get nothing.
Ray Noorda (the soreheaded ex-Novell exec who runs Caldera) is engaging in this activity because of his personal hatred of Bill Gates. It's really unfortunate, because Caldera is using Linux as a budgeon to pound on Microsoft for the exact same purpose. They don't have any of the vision of Red Hat.
I would say, offhand, that you've nailed the exact reason(s) why MS is in dire straits. You can only defend so many fronts at once; that's basic military strategy. No one company will ever be the end-all server / desktop / game / application / content author all at one time. They've simply spread themselves too thin, and are probably terrified to realize that they're now competing against extremely agile, tightly-written and narrowly-scoped projects, such as Sendmail, Apache, PS2, etc. (I deliberately left Linux and BSD out of this - I wouldn't exactly call them narrow in scope, although some might debate it).
No, I don't think that it's the DOJ who is writing Microsoft's eulogy. Their own half-baked global domination scheme seems to be doing it quite nicely.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, I've always gotten the part about why it was a crummy (and not very intelligent) thing to do; I was just wondering why it's illegal, or at least civilly vulnerable.
Disclaimer: IANAL
I believe the reason it's illegal is because it was artificial. Windows didn't require anything MS-DOS-specific in order to run; Microsoft merely implemented some checks and utilized some poorly-/un-documented tricks in order to prevent Windows 95 from operating on DR-DOS. Similarly, IE was hacked into the existing codebase of Windows for the "inseperable" defense they used in the DOJ trial.
If a product legitimately requires some underlying product to run, then I don't believe it's tying.
The whole Caldera case, in that light, is about whether Microsoft legitimately had a reason to glue MS-DOS and Windows 95 together, or whether they introduced some artificial dependencies/incompatabilities in order to destroy the market for other *-DOS operating systems. A similar theme was brought up in the DOJ trial with regards to IE, and whether IE has a legitimate reason to be so heavily "integrated" with Windows, or whether Microsoft resorted to some cheap hacks and word games to get a leg up on Netscape.
I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advise. etc. read the rest of the disclaimer elsewhere in this thread.
A summary judgment motion is an attempt to win without a trial. It claims that the evidence being offered by the other side, even if believed (at least the portions that a reasonable person could believe), isn't enough for the other side to win, and that judgment should therefore be entered now.
Microsoft filed separate motions for each claim made by caldera, claiming that that particular act didn't violate anti-trust law, and that therefore that portion of caldera's claim should be dismissed. On many of these, microsoft would be right if the facts were viewed on their own. However, it is the combination of actions (the course of action) that was called illegal, and thus microsoft failed.
No, you sound like a mindless drone
Pardon the boldface, please.
I must've accidentally typed a instead of a
when doing some formatting.
*sigh*
Ack!
(I think I'll just stop, now that I've made an ass out of myself...)
What does it mean when it says "dismissed all eight of Microsoft's motions for summary judgment on antitrust grounds"? Were the motions for dismissal made on antitrust grounds, or does it refer to the reasons for dismissal?
Yep, in my second life I was one of the brave souls who installed DR-DOS and tried to run Win 3.1 on it.
There were minor compatability problems, but Digital Research (the DR in DR-DOS) had solutions for 'em.
Of course, telling a PHB that you have to tell the OS to lie to the application didn't go over well, and within a year we were a pure MS shop.
The DOJ suit was, well, interesting...but this one has teeth and claws. DR went bust, in part because of this, so there's definite claims for damages.
And as for the MS FUD of "it's old technology", dog $hit! Caldera is positioning DR-DOS as a low-end embedded OS. Think about it...an army of experienced programmers, a well-tested well-understood very small kernel. Makes sense.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
This is a riot. I hope Caldera wins it. I'd love to see Billy Bob pay out the ying yang for this. I hate to constantly bash him and his company, but after all, they are The Machine. Maybe some good will come out of this. Maybe M$ will lose this and the antitrust battle and be broken up like AT&T.... I can only wish... ...Think Different...Use Linux --jaxn@cyberstreet.com
About time that this case got resolved one way or another... by the time this one comes out, nobody's even going to be using dos-derived systems any more and Red Hat will be the new Ultimate Evil. At which point it'll all have to start over.
I have to say that things are looking grim for Microsoft. First this, then today (according to CNN this morning) is also the day that the findings of fact for the main show are supposed to come out.
... Competitive! Ack! We don't want that.
Its going to be really interesting to see what happens. Most people seem to have pretty much accepted that Microsoft will come out on the bottom of the "Findings of Fact", and these are pretty difficult to challenge on appeal. In fact, the judge was apparently openly sceptical of Microsoft during the trial!
Personally though, I think the just punishment would be to make Microsoft port everything to Linux, including Bill G's "Smart House". Hold it... That would make them
Anyway... I really hope that they do something real this time, and not the kind of slap on the wrist they did in the early nineties -- they basically said "Bill, play nice now" and he said "alright dad" and that was the end of it.
What was absurd about that was that the original judge turned down the settlement as too lenient and they had to take it to an appeals court to get the settlement approved. Outrageous!
-- Slashdot sucks.
Have you ever thaugt every time you purchase a MS product a significant percentage of the amount of money you pay is destined to the continuously growing lawyers group in charge of defending MS against each of the continuously growing in number lawsuits against MS.
If this situation keeps growing Microsoft's sales will hardly be enough to pay all the lawyers working for them.
--
For a (short) time I was doing embedded software on symbol 3100 terminals (data collection terminals with integrated barcode scanner, keypad & lcd screens). They are compatible with 186 pc's.
;-)
Development environment: microsoft C 1.5, dr-dos (on the terminal) and an upload utility to flash a disk image into eprom.
And that is one of the most popular data aquisition terminals in the world. The new ones are much cooler though - based on ruggedised palm pilots
Where did you get your information that you can't run BeOS with Windows on a separate partition? This may be for an old version of BeOS, or just incorrect, because I have installed BeOS successfully on another partition on my machine, without a single complaint from it I might add...
"Deliberately stifling a competing OS by altering a package they control so it will only work with an OS they control."
Um..isn't that kinda like Ford parts only fit on Ford automobiles.
I don't think that the fact that Windows 3.X would work only on a MS operating system is anti-competitive. Should Windows 3.X been made to also run on OS2 and whatever else that there was available at the time? Is Windows 3.X considered an operating system by itself? I Don't think so simply because it does need a version of Dos.
You may disagree.
The arguement put forth is MS simple developed a piece of software, granted a very influencial piece of software, that ran on a MS operating system(MS-DOS). Isn't that what software companies do to-day. A product is developed to work on a certain operating system. Be it Linux, Windows, Mac ect.. The software manufacturer has the right to decide, usually decided by consumer demand, what operating system/s that their software is compatible with.
MS has done some incredibly anti-competitive things in the past. They deserve support from no-one. But, in this case, I think that Caldera are simply ambulance chasing hoping to nail the jack-pot. A large part of their case seems to be "He said, She said". I hope the justice system hasn't collapsed to the point that that's all you need.
First read, and think before reacting...
That would prevent blunders as this one....
off course, except if MS deliberately put an DOS checking code in win 3.1
If that is the case, it is more comparable of a Ford refusing to drive on tires not authorized by the Ford Motor Company...
"Deliberately stifling a competing OS by altering a package they control so it will only work with an OS they control."
Um..isn't that kinda like Ford parts only fit on Ford automobiles.
No, it's more like Ford cars work only on Ford gas and Ford roads - in the 50's, when you more or less HAD TO buy Ford if you were in US.
Sigged!
> 95% of the people who hate Microsoft hate it because it's successful.
I'm not sure I believe this. It's certainly not the reason I despise them. (OK, maybe you weren't talking about me and my ilk -- you said hate, not despise.)
Also, don't forget that the media made BG a star a decade ago on account of his success. He was portrayed as a culture hero for being a nerd that dropped out of school and climbed to the top. Yes, I know he started higher up the slope than most of us will ever rise, but the media has always played that down. This does not sound like a jealous response to his success either.
I just don't think the jealousy explanation holds water.
I think geeks despise BG & MS due to the quality of their products, their tendancy to deliver denials and excuses rather than fixes, and the stiffling impact that they have had on various facets of the business. And admittedly for some selfish reasons too, because we don't want to spend the rest of our lives using and supporting crappy MSware.
And I think the same feelings are spreading into the non-geek population. Probably only a few understand the bit about stiffling various facets of the business, but many, many, many are getting sick of years of losing their work and/or waiting for a techie to come around and re-install Windows so they can get started reproducing that lost work, and all the while shelling out for product upgrades year in and year out, to the accompaniment of endless promises of "forget what we promised (and failed to deliver) last time -- this time it's really going to be everything you ever hoped for!"
The non-geek population aren't fools. They hear the "ease of use claims", and wonder why their computers are such a pain in the butt to use. Some of them try phone support, and find out first-hand what we geeks discuss in the forums. Some overhear tech support's wry comments about "you expect that kind of problem with Microsoft" (I heard that very thing this week, AAMoF.)
If Microsoft's success is to be blamed at all, it's not because of jealousy, but rather because success has made their warts available for close inspection by such a large portion of the public. If MS had directed some of the tangible rewards of their success into wart cures over all these years, they might now be one of the world's most loved corporations rather than one of the most despised.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, the point is: Not only didn't Win3.1 work on DR-DOS, it was a deliberate "feature", as well. Microsoft actively crippled their product so not to work with a competing product - To use your car analogy, it would be like you wanted to buy a car - but all the gas stations in the nation have refitted their equipment so the gasoline handles (whatever the english word for it might be) only fit into Ford car gas tanks. You'd be forced to buy a Ford, even though you wanted Toyota - Just because there's only Ford gasoline around.
See the problem now?
Ah...and you sound like a Linux Zealot. All Hail Linus! You can wrap a dead toad in pretty paper. But it still don't make it a Christmas present.
I became aware of another potentially anti-competitive thing MS did some years back, which, as far as I am aware no one else has mentioned in the press before. If it wasn't anti-competitive, it was at least stupid, and MS users are the ultimate victims.
.BAK (first deleting any old .BAK file).
A standard proceedure for saving files used in "single user" apps, like word processors and spreadsheets, was developed many, many years ago, and used almost universally. The proceedure was you DON'T just overwrite the old file, you do the following:
* write the new file to a temporary file name
* Delete the old file -- or rename it to
* Rename the temporary file to the original file name.
This made sure that at no time was the only copy of the file on the disk deleted or dammaged. If the program crashed durring the save cycle, the original copy still existed. Great idea. Saved a LOT of people, and this is why it was used almost universally, and at Microsoft through Office v4.3.
Starting with Office 95, however, they changed the saving proceedure:
* Reset file pointer to beginning of file
* Overwrite existing file with new data
Obviously, this leaves the system at a fairly delicate point, should the app or OS crash after the file has started to be overwritten.
So far, things look just stupid. However, if we remember one of MSs chief rivals, Novell, and a feature of Netware 3.x and above, things look a little less innocent. Netware has a very nifty "undelete" feature, they refer to as "Salvage"ing files. Unlike most other OSs where this feature is provided by third party add-ons, with Netware, this is a CORE part of the OS. A deleted file is marked as deleted and put into the free disk space pool, but it isn't overwritten until the entire disk has been used, at which point the oldest deleted files are overwritten (Actually, Macintosh does much the same thing). Novell provides you a nifty utility (SALVAGE in NW3.x, FILER in NW4+) which can bring these files back up to the point they are physically overwritten (or Netware is told to "PURGE" the deleted files).
This is a really neat feature, or at least, WAS until MS re-did their file writing process. This ment you could bring back virtually ANY revision of a document, often weeks old. File get corrupted at 4:00pm? Don't loose an entire day's work by going to last night's tape, just SALVAGE the previous save! As far as I am aware, no other common OS has this kind of recovery feature standard (as I indicated earlier, Mac has 90% of it, but you have to get a third party program to actually recover the file). This was a clear advantage of Netware over NT as a file server, and it is something I walked people through many times, to much praise, I might add. 8) Obviously, SALVAGE doesn't replace a good backup system, but it is an appreciated feature.
It doesn't work any more. Word and Excel in Office 95 and later seem to go out of their way to never "Delete" the old file (thus, making it availble to SALVAGE). I'm not pleased with this. And, knowing Excel's tendancy to corrupt files, it is a very sorely missed feature.
In case you were wondering, Lotus Smart Suite DOES follow the "Temp file/Delete/Rename" proceedure, so it isn't an issue of Windows 9x API.
As I said, I can't prove that it was an attempt to minimize a Netware feature or if it was simple incompetence, but it is gone. It appears that MS has shot themselves in their customer's foot.
Nick.
Um, redundant...
I think this is one of the motions that the judge turned down because of bigger anti-trust issues, no?
The issue, for some, isn't the market value of DR-DOS, but rather a consistent pattern of behavior on the part of Microsoft. The current value of DR-DOS is a symptom, not the core issue.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is cheaper, and works better too.
Microsoft is a Pyramid (of steaming poo)
-or-
Check this out!
I think the basic principles of antitrust law in the US are: It's ok to get a monopoly through the standard free-market techniques, but once you've got it, there are certain things you can't do with it.
So, for example, if so many consumers buy Acme hammers that Acme gets 90% of the market share, that's just fine. Once that happens, though, if Acme goes to Sears and says, "you can only buy Acme hammers if you buy Acme nails to go with them", or pulls various other tricks that take advantage of its monopoly position, then the Federal government takes an interest.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
A lot of people out there who hear about this trial are going to say "DR-DOS? WTF is that? And if it's basically a dead product, isn't this Caldera or whatever you call it just trying to milk Microsoft's cash cow?"
In a way, I think this is true - DR-DOS is a dead product. However, I do think that Caldera has the right to sue Microsoft over this because of the development practices Microsoft had with respect to DR-DOS (ie. making applications that would work on MS-DOS, but break on DR-DOS, where the only difference in the code was some assembly that found out which operating system the product was running on).
In any case, what could the trial mean to Caldera if they win? OpenLinux is a good product and hopefully, the money Caldera would win from this trial will be funneled (in part, at least) to the development of more easy-to-use features for Linux.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
in the 50's, when you more or less HAD TO buy Ford if you were in US.
Ford lost their dominance of the US auto industry in the 1920's and 1930's. The companies that would be put together to build General Motors were able to push Ford into second place because Ford was too slow to improve their designs. Who would buy a 4 cylinder Ford Model T, which was available only in black when you could get a 6 cylinder Chevrolet in any one of several available colors for only a little more money?
Frankly, there was a lot more competition in the US auto market in the 1950's than there is now, in that there were 7 or 8 credible players (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, Packard, etc) and now there are only 3. Of course even that is a much better situation than what we have in the desktop OS and desktop office software markets, because even at their strongest, none of the big 3 auto makers controls more than 50% of the domestic market, and that is without considering competition from imports.
It would be nice if the computer industry was able to self-regulate that way, but it doesn't seem like it can when the only OS that seems to be able to make any headway against Microsoft is one that is essentially available for free.
It uses NetWAre filesystem as it's antive filesystem, on which you can mount namespaces, like, for example, Sun's NFS, Mac, OS/2, and VTAM (I believe, or some other IBM badass mainframe-related filesystem) and others.
Today with NetWare 5 you have the option of using NSS (NetWare Storage Services) which is an incredibly scalable and fast native filesystem. It uses a balanced tree database instead of a FAT/Directory. The database is object oriented, and allows mount times of about 15 seconds for volumes of Terabyte size (which Novell actually demonstrated a year ago).
Will I be flamed if I say Novell rules!?
Sigged!
I wish they were just GUIs. Windows would be so much nicer to deal with if you could just kill the GUI when it misbehaved, like you can under Unix.
The cake is a pie
I think you've hit on the exact reason that this legal stuff is just an interesting side-show. A few years back, I was beginning to think that legal action was the only thing that was going to rein Microsoft in. Now, I'm returning to my libertarian roots. The free market is handling the monopoly. I think they're pretty much at the crest, and are going to go the way of IBM. They'll always be powerful, and even dominant in some industries, but I think the time is coming soon where Microsoft will become one of the "old guard".
The cake is a pie
The Register has been posting snippets of some of the MS-internal e-mail that has been revealed by the case.
Interesting reading, indeed.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This just doesn't fly. If you look at the "Forbes 400" list, Micheal Dell is right up there, just a couple notches down from Gates. Yet you don't see any long rants about the evils of Dell computers.
There are plenty of successful companies that don't get the negative attention that Microsoft does. There's a reason for that.
The cake is a pie
How's about the bad deeds of the present:
A Bit of A Pyramid Scheme
for the clarificatoin. I admit that I am ignorant as to US history of car-industry. I guess I know better the IT history. I'm glad you cared to correct me.
Sigged!
I've thought about this...why they would do it, that is. I think the idea (Microsoft's) has been that they would try to corner as many technology markets as possible. Certainly they knew they wouldn't win every battle, but they would be able to take over many and tie them to Windows, the center of their empire. Since geography isn't really an issue this could actually work. Except that their center (Windows) is beginning to rot.
Of course this leads to an interesting idea--if everything is tied to Windows and Windows dies out, where does that leave the rest of the empire? Well, at that point I think Microsoft will cease to be an empire and become just another big software company instead.
numb
?syntax error
Well, what is good for most people isn't always good for everyone. I think that in general most consumers have benefitted from the breakup of AT&T, but as you note, that may not have been true for everyone. Unfortunately, the $3 long distance network access fee you are talking about isn't even something that is imposed by the phone company, but rather a sort of tax imposed by the feds.
So does that mean Ford is in trouble now, because their car parts won't work in a Chevrolet? If you hold MS to those types of "behavior," then you must hold all companies to it. Don't go changing the rules just because you ppl dislike MS.
Apparently my example wasn't clear.
I don't mean to imply at all that BeOS doesn't work when Windows is around (in fact it is set up to be pretty compatible with Windows).
What I was trying to illustrate was that a smaller OS who doesn't own the mindshare of every computer user _could_ do whatever they wanted - "no matter how heinous" - it would be up to the market to decide whether the change was for the better.
With MS, that isn't the case. If Windows changes, 99% of users just take the change, better or worse.
Sorry for any confusion.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Bill, will you please stop posting! And NO, I don't want you to speak at my office Christmas party. geez...
That's peculiar. I remember my Grandpa always having Studebakers. . .
AOL's IM protocol was stolen by Microsoft. AOL gave permission to make an Atari port, not a MSN port. But it was too late since they'd posted their spec's. AOL's only recourse has been to change their protocol to keep MSN from being compatible. THIS IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT form what happened when MS inserted a 'LIE' into its Lose3.1 OS that it could not work with DR-DOS. Lose3.1 was compatible with DR-DOS, MS just deceived the consumer into thinking it was not so that the consumer would be forced to buy its own product.
whatever...
I'm going to summarize some thoughts expressed in this and the other MS/legal thread, and speculate.
Let's look at it like MS getting it's fingers tied off and immobilized, or at least impared:
1. DoJ trial is giving MS fits, despite the spin-doctoring. Exposure of arrogant attitudes towards gov't investigators and some really weird Alice-in-Wonderland shenannigans.
2. This case now going to trial with some very specific legal meat wrt provable anti-trust actions on MS's part.
3. Win2k not being all that MS promised - more vaporware-type pronouncements from MS. Ship-dates slipping and features being dropped.
4. Corporate IT folks more concerned with Y2k fixes rather than going through another Sisyphus-like upgrade dance wrt NT 4.0 -> winy2k
5. More and more high-profile hardware vendors slipping into bed with Linux/*BSD for a quickie - and realizing it feels better.
6. More and more anti-MS press - not just the usual complaints, but talk about Alternatives!
7. Linux, and as a result other alternatives oses, getting a lot of media attention as well as financial/corporate recognition.
Hmmmm..... seven fingers? Not too bad. With that much clout tied down or impared, I think the time is just right for even more alternative os business planning on the part of the major hardware and applications vendors.
Even if the trials that MS is involved in last for months, or years, this is still good. The more MS is distracted, the more mistakes it will make - publicly. The more distracted MS is, the more breathing room hardware vendors will have to really look at alternatives - and promote them. And, more importantly, the more time alternative oses have to make inroads on traditional MS territory, the less impact, economically, a break-up of, whatever-punishment for, MS will have.
Nothing new here, but just my Friday $0.02.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
the $3 long distance network access fee you are talking about isn't even something that is imposed by the phone company, but rather a sort of tax imposed by the feds.
So? The fee was a direct result of the breakup, and it came out of my (then-impoverished) wallet. I can't get enthusiastic about a fee^H^H^Htax imposed on the people who aren't using the service. Something about subsidizing those long distance savings for others really bugged me.
Pete
Word does this now, but excel still uses the previous method, wonder why?
If an operating system is code designed to load programs and provide mechanisms for things like task-switching, file management, and power cycling, then even Windows 3.1 is an OS. It provided (non-preemptive) task-switching, a mechanism for starting and stopping programs (double-clicking the icon), file management, and cycling power.
Not to get too cosmic, but I'm reminded of what Tanenbaum once wrote, that there really is no disctinction between software and hardware. Similarly, operating system layers (like Windows 3.1, BASH, or the DOS shell itself) become the operating system. That's all an operating system every really is: An abstraction layer.
(None of this is meant to imply that MS wasn't being predatory with IE-bundling in Win98. Putting something as unintuitive as a web browser interface on a file manager is a totally monopolistic move, regardless of how "operating system" is defined.)
Doctors amputate Turkish earthquake survivor's arm [This story contains video]
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I hope that it doesn't.
And It PROBABLY Won't
This case is just plain stupid. Caldera didn't buy DR-DOS until mid 90s, and they are suing MS for anticompetitive behavior that occurred in the late 80s. Give me a break. Check out this article here to get the nitty gritty. This trial is BS.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
On the other hand, the competitive long distance networks coming into existance is one of the things that made the growth and commercialization of the internet possible. If you look at the big backbone bandwidth providers like MCI WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, etc, they are almost all outgrowths of long distance providers. Without the breakup of AT&T, it is likely that there never would have been a competitive market for data networks and the internet as we know it would not have been commercially feasable.
The idea of exposing a MS agent appealed to me, so I checked out some of his posts in other threads (via his user info page). The impression that I got was that he's more likely a BSD zealot than a MS flack. And maybe not even that.
Microsofts Punishment for what they did to DR-DOS should be a turn over of 80% of all of the profits from all of MS' operating systems. I mean seriously every product with the the exception of NT is Dos based and they illegally bundled Dos with windows. Lets not mention that this is battle of Good vs evil, seriously DR CPM was the origanal DOS and MS does not even deserve their existance. I mean have any of you seen what they want for the os next. Do you all see what they are charging for office, twice the price of their nearest competitor. Microsoft shows a lack of respect for their costumers in that they sell you software that is not only expensive but is just plain bad. Microsoft is out to destroy all competition and it isn't fair. If we do not boycott it will not stop, where is the techno consumer sense, will their be no end to this madness. I propose we stop the purchase of PC's because even to run Linux you get no chioce you are still a supporter. I say we make our voices be heard, I suggest that we put the pressure on PC makers to offer systems with alternative Operating Systems and systems without an OS. I say we go to the legions of Home and office users and try to convert them to the true computer operating systems. I say now and only now is the time to go down with the evil empire and in its's place a return to the power of choice. Why must the users of so called alternative Operating Systems suffer without the support of major software and hardware companies, when it doesn't have to be this way I say we must fight for our systems and the chioce. Why must we be forced to look like morons paying for something we do not use and do not want. Why must we be robbed by hand of a tyrant who controls secretly. Power to Apple, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Sun OS, Solaris, AIX, Digital Unix, IRIX, QNX, VMS, HP-UX and all the other oses that support consumerchioce instead of shoving it down their throughts. The reign of terror must end, the profiteering must end, the bad products must end, the lack of choice must end and the chioce to choose our OS must be ours again as it was in the begining of the PC era.
Ford Parts only work on ford autos, but another company could create compatible parts that worked on ford autos. Microsoft software only works with microsoft operating systems, however, they don't want any one else to provide software for their OSen.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advise. If you need some, see a lawyer in you own jurisdiction.
That a jury will be empaneled means two things
1) that one party ortheother demandeda jury,
and
2) that there are "questions of fact" to be determined--i.e., someone needs to determinewhich sides' version of what happened is true.
In the DOJ case, the judge was also the trier of fact (2). In this case, my guess (someone can go to the courthouse and check the pleadings to make sure) is that Caldera demanded the jury, expecting sympathy for the little guy (if I represented ms, I would want a bench trial [judge instead of jury]).
Once the jury decides the facts, the judge will then decide how the law applies to the facts.
The way the judge's opinion would enter at this point is in a ruling for summary judgment. If the facts as alleged by caldera were insufficient for caldera to win, the case would be dismissed. This could also happen if the evidence produced during discovery showed that no reasonable jury could find in caldera's favor.
[replying to myself] See the very end of my post. This is the summary judgment motion. The basis of microsoft's motions were to claim, act by act, that the acts were insufficient to show abuse of monopoly power. The strategy was to eliminate each act from the case on its own.
The problem is that caldera wasn't suing for a bunch of different bad things, they were suing over the course of action consisting of *all* of the bad things *put together*. Once more, microsoft seems to have been represented by the law firm of Larry, Mo, and Curly . . .
Microsoft is evil...I hope they take it up the poop shoot from the DOJ..Break them up..Use Linux..Did I miss anything?
Im just wondering whats more beneficial: the fact the M$ gets their face rubbed in the dirt (once again) or the fact that they are giving caldera some profile.Both ways Im pretty happy, such an offence should be justfully punished, lets see if M$ continues to pay for the bad deeds of the past.
Multiuser DOS, which I used to do support for, was built on to DR-DOS, and we never could work out why Windows 3.1 would not work with it. Now we know, but it is rather a lot too late.
The original Doctor Dark.
On the fact that Windows 3.1/95/98 are NOT OSes and are simply GUIs running on top of MS-DOS. Maybe they'll file an injuction so MicroSoft has to call it the Windows GUI System rather then the Windows OS? *S*
Cullinan reiterated Microsoft's position that Caldera's claims are ... based on an attempt "to get money from Microsoft."
Well, I figured that we were well past the "suing for an injunction stage".
Furthermore, he said the case is about obsolete technology.
I guess this wouldn't be the first MS person to admit it.
Seriously, though, I wonder how many people believe that this is just a money-grubbing ploy that is just now being filed by spoil-sports Caldera? I mean, to the man on the street, I'd imagine that a lawsuit concerning competing brands of DOS is pretty silly.
There were a couple of items that I'd appreciate some clarification on:
I'm quite sure that some of this has been hashed out in great length already. Therefore, a synopsis or a pointer to the discussion would be very welcome.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Bill...your really starting to piss me off! No you can't speak at my barmitzva!
you sound awfully like a guy who works for MicroSoft PR! Didn't MS fund a "grassroots support" campaign? How much dirty bucks do you get from MS to write your"unbiased opinion"?
"They don't have any of the vision of Red Hat. "
Pulling RedHat into the discussion won't get you any bonuses, because the people here can see right through you! You mention RedHat, while in another post you defend MS' success and the fact that it's unreasonable to expect it to make an OS that would work on 100.000 different hardware configurations. You actually despise Linux, and you hope that by throwing false compliments towards RedHat will turn people against Caldera!
Relforn, you are a slimeball.
Nice to read a rational, well thought out post. Well stated!
Microsoft has to pay its Attorney fees for its attempts to squash Caldera and DR-DOS. But it may be that Microsoft has Committed Financial Fraud besides its anti-trust and anti-competetive practices. I want to go very far, far away from Microsoft today.
Aye, there's the rub. For many years, I had an almost nonexistant long distance need, and I was paying about $5 bucks a month for service. After the breakup, one of the key things implemented was an access fee for long distance. IIRC, I was paying an extra $3 bucks a month for the long distance service I wasn't using, even if I never called out of the area.
Yes, my long distance charges went down. However, my wallet was thinner for many years because of the breakup.
OTOH, breaking up MS wouldn't bother me so much...
Pete Brooks
MS-DOS 6.x had an undelee, because FAT keeps deleted files until they are overwritten.
and loose the piranhas of war.
... and that's a _good_ thing. I really don't care about the merits of Caldera's suit, pro or con, but MS is plain _evil_, and needs to be brought down by any and all means available.
No one suit (not even the DoJ's) is likely to bring Microsothoth down, but enough of these attacks will nibble away at them until they're too weak to stand, and then it's all over
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Dear Microsoft,
- --
If DOS is obsolete technolgy, why is it being used as your flagship OS with a GUI, and why is it in use in 90% of home PC's? Shouldn't you be selling us new technology (NT), or maybe you can't get that working properly for the home.....
-----------------------------------------------
Seriously, Windows 9x is an illegal MS-DOS/Windows combination, as Windows 9x is just a GUI for DOS. But, how come no-one has written or altered a version of DOS so it can replace MS-DOS 7 on a win9x install? Even if there was no technical bnifit, I would run the 9x shell on DR-DOS, just because it is less M$...
IANAL.
Could it be that Microsoft asked for a jury trial if/once their summary motions for dismissal were denied? They haven't fared so well in their latest DOJ bench trial, if the press has been at all accurate about the judge's reactions.
Trial by a jury "of your peers" doesn't mean they'll get a bunch of techies. More likely they'll get a panel of people who don't know an awful lot about computer science or engineering. And these would have to be people who, if they have ever heard of DR-DOS, have no decided opinion one way or the other about Microsoft's conduct.
So isn't it at least remotely possible that Microsoft requested trial by jury? Perhaps in the hopes that average citizens could be swayed by Microsoft's assertion of the need for compatibility, or an argument that the only way Digital Research could have created DR-DOS to be as compatible as it was, was by--gasp!--hacking?
Just a thought.
A while ago, I took the time to read some of the material in the Caldera lawsuit on thier lawsuit page. Although I have long known and been exposed to the sleaze of Microsoft's business practices, this was an eye-opener even for me. The clincher is that most of the evidence comes from Microsoft's own e-mail logs, including the execs, and notably Bill gates himself.
Here are the URLs:
A summary page with links to all the below and more
Caldera's complaint
Microsoft responded by making a number of motions that the case should be thrown out. The court has ruled that each of these has enough merit to proceed to trial. Links to Caldera's responses to the MS motions are below - although theyre dryer than the complaint, they still make interesting reading (nearly all of these things are antitrust violations, notice how many were omitted from the DOJ trial):
Product Preannouncement
Licensing Practices
Product Disparagement
Technology Tying
Intentional Incompatibilities (looks like they have more here that they will reveal at trial?)
European and Japanese Claims
Tortious Interference (this one reveals some true MS evil, even if the formatting is whacked)
These are long, but well worth reading through. If the legal-ese gets a bit thick, just jump down a screen or two and pick up where the damning evidence starts again. This trial is likely to do much more damage to Microsoft than the wimpy DOJ bootlickers.
Please read and pass along to others so they can see the true nature of Microsoft. It's vital that we do this now - the PR blitz for Win2K starts at Comdex in just a couple of weeks and will go on through mid-2000! If we don't show the world what MS is really like, they'll support MS again.
WE need to show people that even if Win2K's the best OS on the planet (and it actully is pretty damn good) thaere are still good reasons not to do business with them!
Subject says it all. It really doesn't matter whether MS claims Caldera doens't have standing to sue. The court has said they do.
The market makes guesses about what the true value of something is. On any given day it's up or down but usually it's around the true value.
Occasionally the holder of an asset is spectacularly wrong about the true value, IPO offerings being a familiar case but you might also look at the value of the UK pound a few years back, the sad case of Bre-X, or the wild ride of Barings bank for some examples.
DR-Dos seems to be one of those cases if Caldera wins. Novell can then add the selling of DR-DOS to their long line of missed opportunities.
TML
Does anybody remember the PBS documentry "Revenge of the Nerds" about the development of home compuers? During the section about the IBM PC, ms needed an os to demonstrate ms basic on the pc for ibm. Not having such an operating system, they bought one called QDOS, aka Quick and Dirty Operating System. A rather large percentage of QDOS used code "borrowed" from CP/M-86, made by Digital Research. If you poke around on the Caldera website, you will discover that Caldera now owns CP/M as well. Interesting.....
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
The only reason Caldera renamed it back to DR-Dos, was to make it simple for the court to see that they owned that same poor product.
Once Caldera and Microsoft are through playing,
Caldera may open up OpenDos again, possibly GPL it.
Caldera bought DR-DOS at (presumably) fair market price. How can they sue for damages that occurred before they bought it? If DR-DOS was a serious competitor to MS, Caldera would not have gotten it for the price they did. In fact, the only reason Caldera could afford it was because it was no longer relevant. In short, any Microsoft damages against DR-DOS saved Caldera that much money when they went to buy it.
You've been able to replace MS-DOS with DR-DOS under windows 9x for at least two or three years now. Several of my machines have this combination. There are some downsides - virus checkers and system utilities are often baffled, but DR-DOS has more built in there in the first place. But it's been entirely possible to replace the MS-DOS underneath your Windows with DR-DOS for quite some time. Caldera used to have a free download of a beta version of DR-DOS (I think I've got 7.2 on my machines) - I'm not sure if it's still there. If it is, it's probably on the Lineo site now, since they re-did the Caldera site the other day and it looks like they're pushing the Lineo/DR-DOS/embedded content off the Caldera site.
This is an old feature of VMS. One of the really cool things about VMS was that it was very hard to accidentally foul up a file.
It worked a little differently from the Novell implemnetation (Novell's is a little cleaner):
Every time a file was written(or rewritten/modified/whatever), a new copy was made with an incremented version number tagged onto the end with a semicolon. (BTW, for those that are wondering, the 8.3 filename syntax was stolen from VMS for DOS, one of the stupider adoptions in history.) I worked like this:
FILENAME.TXT;1 (the old version)
FILENAME.TXT;2 (the new version)
yep, all this cruft just built up in your home directory until you ran the PURGE command to throw away the ones you no longer needed. PURGE with no options deleted all but the newest version, while there were switches (demarc'ed by "/", another thing DOS borrowed from VMS) if you wnated it to leave more, purge based on time, etc.
Not really elegant, but it worked well, was transparent to the applications (at least the ones DEC shipped), and saved my butt more than a few times.
If they don't pursue it, who's going to punish MS for that particular crime?
DOS got 8.3 from CP/M, which got it from one of VMS's predecessors - RSTS/E or RSX (were there any other DEC-originated OS's)
Just wondering what qualifies RedHat as the new ultimate evil?
1.) Is it the amount of development they've contributed to Linux?
2.) Is it the fact that they are at the forefront of trying to broaden the Linux user base ( I know how we all hate that?)
3.) Or is it the fact that they've somehow made billion$ on their IPO selling software that can be downloaded for free from any ftp site or for a buck at cheapbytes.com?
Don't hate them because their successful....if U have to hate someone hate MS for selling an OS in which the disk check utility overwrites your boot sector with garbage (Win98 ScanDisk bug bit me 2wice) or where power management is so screwy your machine turns of and random (had to spend more $$$ on Win98 SE)...
Oh yeah hope everyone's still boycoytting Amazon.
Bad Command Or File Name
Regardless of if Microsoft is a monopoly in the desktop market, can they win every battle they've chosen to fight?
In the handheld market Palm is not only surviving against Windows CE, but thriving. A few years ago a lot of people took it for granted that Palm would be road kill. Now if you were developing for the handheld market you wouldn't think about ignoring Palm's huge market.
In the low-end server market NT continues to be strong, but Linux & the BSDs are making progress in shops which a few years ago wouldn't have chosen anything but NT. Cost of the OS and the lower system requirments make NT a less attractive alternative to a lot of people.
In the high-end server where cost is less of an issue, the commercial Un*x makers & OS/390 continue to be the standard. They've got amazing reliability and can deal with many more users than NT currently can.
In the gaming market Microsoft is aparently fearing the growing power of game consoles like the PS2. Now they're reportedly making an entry into that market as well.
The desktop is one area where Microsoft really isn't facing a competative threat. Here the government & Caldera are persuing them for antitrust violations.
On the portal phase I don't think MSN has ever turned a profit despite a large amount of investment by MS.
Sure, MS makes tons of money and they certainly won't disappear from the market, but can even they fight so many battles? How much money can they spend on new markets, lawyers, & unprofitable segments before the markets they currently dominate start to suffer?