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.

Comments

Re:MS Spokesman Summarizes, plus other great stuff

[hawk]

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 . . .

DR-DOS vs MS-DOS

[Mija Cat]

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

Re:DR-DOS vs MS-DOS

[B1]

There's a good article in Dr. Dobb's Journal about the code which tests whether Win 3.1 is running on MS-DOS/PC-DOS, or a competitive DOS. It makes for an interesting read.

The DOS-detection code in Win 3.1 (aka the "AARD" code), had the following interesting characteristics:

• It tested an undocumented (and as far as I can tell irrelevant) DOS function that would only work properly in MS-DOS.
• It was XOR Encrypted, to trip up any attempts to use a disassembler
• Once decrypted, the code was self-modifying and obfuscated to make reverse-engineering difficult
• It was written to disable a conventional single-step debugger, making it that much harder to trace through the code

Dr. Dobb's goes into much more technical depth than I did, but it's pretty clear that this was a deliberate effort by MS to hide the AARD code.

I would love to hear MS's spin on all of this...why did they feel such a need to hide an irrelevant check for a competitive DOS product?

Re:naytewe

[Black Parrot]

> 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?

lawyer: no, that's not what it means

[hawk]

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.

ack: also

[hawk]

[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 . . .