They wanted all pieces of IE out. Notice that the states still aren't happy with that part of the current settlement, which more or less is just not making the very top level peice unavailable.
For antitrust, I believe it's the governments responsibility to stop the abuse, not to punish. The harmed parties are the the ones who get to do the punishing (see the Aol/TW lawsuit, the sun lawsuit for java, and the class action suits, etc.) Any armchair lawyers know how this is supposed to work?
Microsoft currently has driver signing, which menas they will soon if not already, decide which hardware will, and which hardware will not run on your system. By them controlling which hardware can run on the OS, Microsoft can influence the decisions of hardware manufacturers on what to produce.
This is plain dumb. Microsoft likes having broad hardware support for their platform. Driver Signing is about trust, and with almost every trust system in windows there are three settings: Ignore, Prompt and don't warn/do it.
Microsoft definatly fixes old code, what do you think a service pack is? You could take an argument that the service pack is only what a bunch of corperate customers demanded get fixed (and would be partially right) but then why bother developing all the error reporting software? (The dialog box with "Send" and "Don't Send")
Third who are you to say he did a bad job at MS?
Other then just taking at cheap shot as MS, you have no info about his job performance or even what he specifically did while working at "The Great Evil"
More to the point, Most of the comments I've read is talking about product design which is not the same as operations security. His track record there has been the semi high profile breakin a few months ago which was a case of stolen credentials from what I know, and the occasional minor web server defacement on secondary (not centrally managed) web servers.
That's right, the Ethernet controller is like my gall bladder - it's useless. It does nothing.
The networking works but it is just the local subnet. The only game I know that uses it right now is halo, and it works great. I'm intrested to know if anyone has tried bridging across a dsl connection, and how playable it is.
1) Part of the settlement already
2) What does "Asheron's Call" network interface have anything to do with the desktop OEM market monopoly. All products is inappropriate, keep the public disclosure to the relvent market and products.
3) The relevent part of 3 is handled in the settlement. Unless you are trying to increase the scope to include stuff not having to do with the case like the api on how the exchange protocol handlers talks to the exchange store.
4) I believe the 3 have access to this information, so what's the need here?
5) This is part of the settlement
6) below
7) This is just plain dumb. Microsoft is probably one of the reasons crypto export restrictions are as relaxed as they are now. The company has as much of a right as any other company to state an opinion and lobby for it, and this sometimes works in the public intrest.
Back to 6.
Microsoft is a company and should have a right to thier intellecual property. The settlement says RAND, which makes a lot of sense from a competitive market point of view. If open source can't play in that ball game, then there is a serious flaw in the open source model.
You can also read 6 as, "Since microsoft doesn't release everything as GPL, you can't create GPL software that uses any microsoft libraries" For example a GPL'd peice of software can't use a shared XML library shipped seperatly from the OS, or use the excel automation libraries. This is pretty much a limitation of the GPL and Free Software caused indirectly by microsoft licening, however I think it completly unreasonable to make microsoft GPL every library because the GPL's lameness.
There is an alternative to reverse engineering. With open specifications, multiple implementations can coexist.
It's more then just open specifications. Closed specifications are also commonly used. They are closed in that they contain patented technology which is liscened out.
Hmm. The GPL requires that derived works of a licensed work must also be released under the GPL. It does not require that unrelated work written by GPL software users be released.
Is this viral? It seems to me that if we're looking for biological metaphors, it would be more accurate to call it hereditary or heritable. GPLed code doesn't go out and infect your work. Rather, if you choose to "breed" new software from GPLed code, that software inherits the licensing traits of its parent.
The trick is the word "derived".
The most strict definition is to completly contain the orginial peice. The loosest definition is to take an idea or single line of code from the orginial. Since GPL hasn't been tested in court, so we don't know where the line is.
Hence, you might be asking for legal problems if you have a developer contributes to GPL code at home, and writes closed source during the day, since he might have taken derived ideas to the work code. It's enough for a lawsuit, and the stakes can be very high. Hence the term viral. It's like breathing around someone with a cold and taking it to work, you contaminate EVERYTHING. (Also losing any IP that is part of your closed source project, hence the IP destroyer comment)
The core of Microsoft's anti-GPL argument is, if you are a buissness, do you really want this type of risk?
Are they going to continue to tell us that Linux has no effect on them? On one hand it is a major competitor and on the other hand it is completely irrelevant to the issues at hand?
Acknowledging Linux as a competitor means that it has an effect on the buissness. However Linux isn't GPL (binary only modules and some LGPL, etc) and Linux isn't all the software under GPL. Also the parts of disccussion that apply to open source rather then just GPL include alot more code and software.
Even if all those projects where licenced under the GPL, everybody would be free to use the ideas behind the code (such as protocols) in theyer own software.
Just make sure your budget money to spend time in court to prove that you didn't "use" the GPL'd source in your closed source work, and if you lose for any reason, you lose everything.
Ignore for a momement the free software world, and look at building software for money. You want to put together a product and what to do it as fast as possible without reinventing the wheel. So you pay for tools and components to simplify your code and work. When you buy your tools and components, there are a large number of possible licences that you could choose from. Typically they would have something like a fixed initial price and potentially a kick back on each sale. This model works because the people who own the code get to decide it's fate and make money for thier efforts
Now bring in the world of GPL software. If you want to do traditional software development on free software, the GPL becomes your worst enemy. Say an employee read some GPL'd source at some point (mabye to fix a bug or something at home), and then worked on a product later in thier job. Someone says, "Hey this person did something with GPL'd software, this for-sale product proabably has GPL code in it." Now a court will decide if that code (that was worked on for profit with paid employees) should be thrown into GPL (making the software itself almost impossible to sell). Since most employers wouldn't want to have this risk, they tell thier employees who work on products that they can't even look at gpl source code let alone participate in a gpl project. Alot of employeers don't think about this risk and hence don't place the restriction, yet. Even worse then the source code release, is the release of the intellectual property tied up in the product into the GPL world. Suddenly the stuff that made product cool and competetive in the market place (able to make money) is gone as well, even if you had a patent (for the better or the worse) on it.
The primary long term effect when the first company loses source and IP this way is that as a programmer you will have to choose on working for a completely gpl world or you work in the rest of the world (that includes pay for software and other forms of open source software).
Having said all that and as a disclaimer, I've written a small amount of code I released under the GPL in college, since I took a header of id3 genre codes from another project rather then rewrite the header myself, but I wouldn't and can't contribute to a GPL project for as long as I get paid to write software in a for-sale product form, and I don't think there is anything wrong with selling software.
In the end what I think microsoft in not convinced of is part 9 of the open source definition, unless you are strictly dealing with binaries (which are not linked to each other) because it's not what happened, but what people and a judge thinks happened.
Was I the only one to notice that Microsoft quit shipping a free programming environment many, many years ago? Now why the hell would they go and do that? Because they hate developers. Developers are their primary source of competition.
Dude... You are smoking crack:
Platform SDK - Build environment, headers, libraries, example source, tools
Here is the msdn download center and here is the code example center. Just about every microsoft binary on the system is usable by a third party in COM without having to hack the source. All of MSDN exists for developers. What do you have to pay for? A gui, the convience of having MS send you updates to the sdk's on cd, and in the unversal subscription case the right and access to play with any ms development related products you don't already own. Also to get that remaining stuff free/cheap for students, Msdn is doing this
Also, the statement that Netscape had no chance of becoming a platform is dead wrong, and Microsoft knows it. It can be explained in four characters...".net"..net means your web browser is now a platform. How many of you really believe Microsoft's.net products will work just as well on third party browsers as on Windows/IE?
Did you listen to the appeals or read any of the associated documents?
Two things made netscape not a platform. One, the ceo said on the record that they had no intention of making a platform. Second, they never made the browser as a embeddable component nor a library for other applications to use.
Say I have a commercial code base, and have patented some truely unique idea in it. Government research releases something that has a lot of value for a lot of different products, so I want to use it to benifit my product too, except there is a catch, the gov released it as gpl. Now I can choose to use the work with my product and give up my patent to allow my code to because gpl along with the gov work, or I can choose to not use the goverment work and waste work that was supposed to benifit everyone.
There is a reason linux libraries are mostly lgpl.
An intresting angle to a subscription service based software is that people have different expectations then with a stand alone product. People will have higher expectations in terms of reliability, and can switch software with less financial impact. The result is potentially a more competative market model (esp compared to the OEM giving you everything you need).
There are a number of univerisities and other companies that do have access to the windows source code. Even if someone saw it from inside the firewall, it doesn't mean that they get any new information that isn't known in certain circles already. I don't see the new threat here.
>this from the guys who don't know how to remove IE from windows. Perhaps Judge Jackson's demonstration that he himself could remove IE in under 5 minutes has made "application removal" a focus issue for MS.
In terms of "application removal", it has nothing to do with if something is possible (almost anything in software is possible), but how many dependancies get screwed up in the process. The defrag in question by my guess has two dependancies.
1) Registration as a MMC snapin
2) The presense of the snapin in the "computer management" mmc control panel
In comparison pulling out IE completly would break a much much larger number of apps and features. ( hiding the ui from the desktop and start menu of course is a 5 minute thing )
So removing defrag is "easy" and safe to remove. Something like ie would require massive changes all of which reinvent the wheel plus then a ton of testing. Your comparison between the two is silly.
Oh, c'mon, do you really believe everything you read in the proxy? Boards never want you to vote for shareholder proposals.
I'm a bit new to proxies.
It looks itemized here at the very least. I'm mostly curious what extra this could provide that isn't already known, or is this some form of feel good thing, cause they aren't asking for a change of behavior.
1) OEM's sell more then hardware (normally). They also are selling a bunch of preinstalled software that has been tested (hopefully) together on the specific hardware they are selling. They pay less for the software they install for generally three reasons. Bulk selling, crippleware, and/or taking over the support side of the software. The larger the OEM the more inflexible the support part of the package is. The OEM copy of windows is legally tied to the machine for all three reasons. The bulk selling part has been more restricted by the early DOJ stuff (pre anittrust). The crippleware has to do with the license, the OEM windows can't be transferred (and neither is most OEM software). The support side is the biggest part. The OEM filters are the "basic" stuff out and any real issues are fed to ms by the OEM.
2) The bigger OEM's support people expect a certain environment to debug; modify things too much (repartition, reinstall, etc) and they can't follow the little scripts they are given to debug issues. This is a small part why OEM's didn't latch on to the free beos offer, it was a complete unknown support wise. There is a real investment in picking up and selling an OS.
People should understand what they are buying into with the OEM they go with, it's not just hardware. If you plan on doing things with your computer that isn't the OEM setup, make sure you understand your OEM's policy on it. I think there is a small market for a naked pc OEM that is completely OS agnostic when it comes to support (they only support hardware) and does no preloading.
As far as this page, it's the ms "be legal" program. Which is a marketing and ad campaign. A number of small to medium size companies use how easy it is to just copy software to avoid paying (I can think of three real fast that I've had dealings with. It does happen, which is funny since it's the exact opposite of "double" license problem with big companies). One part of the ad campaign is to reduce the naked pc market, but geez the ads are saying that you should install windows or anything.
If your favorite OEM is convinced by the adverts then
1) Ask them to support the OS you want
2) Find a new OEM that does meet your needs.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not what was being asked.
They wanted all pieces of IE out. Notice that the states still aren't happy with that part of the current settlement, which more or less is just not making the very top level peice unavailable.
Wow.. You just defined Microsoft Windows as open source.
Actually, starting with windows xp, no password is more secure, because then xp blocks usage of the account for remote/network access.
For antitrust, I believe it's the governments responsibility to stop the abuse, not to punish. The harmed parties are the the ones who get to do the punishing (see the Aol/TW lawsuit, the sun lawsuit for java, and the class action suits, etc.) Any armchair lawyers know how this is supposed to work?
24,064 mshta.exe
2,752,512 mshtml.dll
1,350,656 mshtml.tlb
438,272 mshtmled.dll
56,320 mshtmler.dll
62,976 browselc.dll
49,152 browser.dll
1,020,416 browseui.dll
71,680 browsewm.dll
581,632 wininet.dll
91,136 IEXPLORE.EXE
2,466,319 All of C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer
-------------
~8 Mb
1000Mb system32 - 384Mb dllcache = 626 Mb
8 / 626 = ~1.5%
1.5% of $199 is $3
Enjoy your $196 copy of windows!
This is plain dumb. Microsoft likes having broad hardware support for their platform. Driver Signing is about trust, and with almost every trust system in windows there are three settings: Ignore, Prompt and don't warn/do it.
Microsoft definatly fixes old code, what do you think a service pack is? You could take an argument that the service pack is only what a bunch of corperate customers demanded get fixed (and would be partially right) but then why bother developing all the error reporting software? (The dialog box with "Send" and "Don't Send")
Third who are you to say he did a bad job at MS?
Other then just taking at cheap shot as MS, you have no info about his job performance or even what he specifically did while working at "The Great Evil"
More to the point, Most of the comments I've read is talking about product design which is not the same as operations security. His track record there has been the semi high profile breakin a few months ago which was a case of stolen credentials from what I know, and the occasional minor web server defacement on secondary (not centrally managed) web servers.
The networking works but it is just the local subnet. The only game I know that uses it right now is halo, and it works great. I'm intrested to know if anyone has tried bridging across a dsl connection, and how playable it is.
1) Part of the settlement already
2) What does "Asheron's Call" network interface have anything to do with the desktop OEM market monopoly. All products is inappropriate, keep the public disclosure to the relvent market and products.
3) The relevent part of 3 is handled in the settlement. Unless you are trying to increase the scope to include stuff not having to do with the case like the api on how the exchange protocol handlers talks to the exchange store.
4) I believe the 3 have access to this information, so what's the need here?
5) This is part of the settlement
6) below
7) This is just plain dumb. Microsoft is probably one of the reasons crypto export restrictions are as relaxed as they are now. The company has as much of a right as any other company to state an opinion and lobby for it, and this sometimes works in the public intrest.
Back to 6.
Microsoft is a company and should have a right to thier intellecual property. The settlement says RAND, which makes a lot of sense from a competitive market point of view. If open source can't play in that ball game, then there is a serious flaw in the open source model.
You can also read 6 as, "Since microsoft doesn't release everything as GPL, you can't create GPL software that uses any microsoft libraries" For example a GPL'd peice of software can't use a shared XML library shipped seperatly from the OS, or use the excel automation libraries. This is pretty much a limitation of the GPL and Free Software caused indirectly by microsoft licening, however I think it completly unreasonable to make microsoft GPL every library because the GPL's lameness.
It's more then just open specifications. Closed specifications are also commonly used. They are closed in that they contain patented technology which is liscened out.
The trick is the word "derived".
The most strict definition is to completly contain the orginial peice. The loosest definition is to take an idea or single line of code from the orginial. Since GPL hasn't been tested in court, so we don't know where the line is.
Hence, you might be asking for legal problems if you have a developer contributes to GPL code at home, and writes closed source during the day, since he might have taken derived ideas to the work code. It's enough for a lawsuit, and the stakes can be very high. Hence the term viral. It's like breathing around someone with a cold and taking it to work, you contaminate EVERYTHING. (Also losing any IP that is part of your closed source project, hence the IP destroyer comment)
The core of Microsoft's anti-GPL argument is, if you are a buissness, do you really want this type of risk?
Acknowledging Linux as a competitor means that it has an effect on the buissness. However Linux isn't GPL (binary only modules and some LGPL, etc) and Linux isn't all the software under GPL. Also the parts of disccussion that apply to open source rather then just GPL include alot more code and software.
Just make sure your budget money to spend time in court to prove that you didn't "use" the GPL'd source in your closed source work, and if you lose for any reason, you lose everything.
Ignore for a momement the free software world, and look at building software for money. You want to put together a product and what to do it as fast as possible without reinventing the wheel. So you pay for tools and components to simplify your code and work. When you buy your tools and components, there are a large number of possible licences that you could choose from. Typically they would have something like a fixed initial price and potentially a kick back on each sale. This model works because the people who own the code get to decide it's fate and make money for thier efforts
Now bring in the world of GPL software. If you want to do traditional software development on free software, the GPL becomes your worst enemy. Say an employee read some GPL'd source at some point (mabye to fix a bug or something at home), and then worked on a product later in thier job. Someone says, "Hey this person did something with GPL'd software, this for-sale product proabably has GPL code in it." Now a court will decide if that code (that was worked on for profit with paid employees) should be thrown into GPL (making the software itself almost impossible to sell). Since most employers wouldn't want to have this risk, they tell thier employees who work on products that they can't even look at gpl source code let alone participate in a gpl project. Alot of employeers don't think about this risk and hence don't place the restriction, yet. Even worse then the source code release, is the release of the intellectual property tied up in the product into the GPL world. Suddenly the stuff that made product cool and competetive in the market place (able to make money) is gone as well, even if you had a patent (for the better or the worse) on it.
The primary long term effect when the first company loses source and IP this way is that as a programmer you will have to choose on working for a completely gpl world or you work in the rest of the world (that includes pay for software and other forms of open source software).
Having said all that and as a disclaimer, I've written a small amount of code I released under the GPL in college, since I took a header of id3 genre codes from another project rather then rewrite the header myself, but I wouldn't and can't contribute to a GPL project for as long as I get paid to write software in a for-sale product form, and I don't think there is anything wrong with selling software.
In the end what I think microsoft in not convinced of is part 9 of the open source definition, unless you are strictly dealing with binaries (which are not linked to each other) because it's not what happened, but what people and a judge thinks happened.
What ever happend to the IETF IMPP working group?
Dude... You are smoking crack:
Here is the msdn download center and here is the code example center. Just about every microsoft binary on the system is usable by a third party in COM without having to hack the source. All of MSDN exists for developers. What do you have to pay for? A gui, the convience of having MS send you updates to the sdk's on cd, and in the unversal subscription case the right and access to play with any ms development related products you don't already own. Also to get that remaining stuff free/cheap for students, Msdn is doing this
Also, the statement that Netscape had no chance of becoming a platform is dead wrong, and Microsoft knows it. It can be explained in four characters...".net". .net means your web browser is now a platform. How many of you really believe Microsoft's .net products will work just as well on third party browsers as on Windows/IE?
Did you listen to the appeals or read any of the associated documents?
Two things made netscape not a platform. One, the ceo said on the record that they had no intention of making a platform. Second, they never made the browser as a embeddable component nor a library for other applications to use.
Here is the gist of how gpl destories IP.
Say I have a commercial code base, and have patented some truely unique idea in it. Government research releases something that has a lot of value for a lot of different products, so I want to use it to benifit my product too, except there is a catch, the gov released it as gpl. Now I can choose to use the work with my product and give up my patent to allow my code to because gpl along with the gov work, or I can choose to not use the goverment work and waste work that was supposed to benifit everyone.
There is a reason linux libraries are mostly lgpl.
An intresting angle to a subscription service based software is that people have different expectations then with a stand alone product. People will have higher expectations in terms of reliability, and can switch software with less financial impact. The result is potentially a more competative market model (esp compared to the OEM giving you everything you need).
There are a number of univerisities and other companies that do have access to the windows source code. Even if someone saw it from inside the firewall, it doesn't mean that they get any new information that isn't known in certain circles already. I don't see the new threat here.
>this from the guys who don't know how to remove IE from windows. Perhaps Judge Jackson's demonstration that he himself could remove IE in under 5 minutes has made "application removal" a focus issue for MS.
In terms of "application removal", it has nothing to do with if something is possible (almost anything in software is possible), but how many dependancies get screwed up in the process. The defrag in question by my guess has two dependancies.
1) Registration as a MMC snapin
2) The presense of the snapin in the "computer management" mmc control panel
In comparison pulling out IE completly would break a much much larger number of apps and features. ( hiding the ui from the desktop and start menu of course is a 5 minute thing )
So removing defrag is "easy" and safe to remove. Something like ie would require massive changes all of which reinvent the wheel plus then a ton of testing. Your comparison between the two is silly.
Oh, c'mon, do you really believe everything you read in the proxy? Boards never want you to vote for shareholder proposals.
I'm a bit new to proxies.
It looks itemized here at the very least. I'm mostly curious what extra this could provide that isn't already known, or is this some form of feel good thing, cause they aren't asking for a change of behavior.
Didn't the proxy say that it's already publically itemizied, and this would just be a silly duplication of effort?
What am I missing here?
1) OEM's sell more then hardware (normally). They also are selling a bunch of preinstalled software that has been tested (hopefully) together on the specific hardware they are selling. They pay less for the software they install for generally three reasons. Bulk selling, crippleware, and/or taking over the support side of the software. The larger the OEM the more inflexible the support part of the package is. The OEM copy of windows is legally tied to the machine for all three reasons. The bulk selling part has been more restricted by the early DOJ stuff (pre anittrust). The crippleware has to do with the license, the OEM windows can't be transferred (and neither is most OEM software). The support side is the biggest part. The OEM filters are the "basic" stuff out and any real issues are fed to ms by the OEM.
2) The bigger OEM's support people expect a certain environment to debug; modify things too much (repartition, reinstall, etc) and they can't follow the little scripts they are given to debug issues. This is a small part why OEM's didn't latch on to the free beos offer, it was a complete unknown support wise. There is a real investment in picking up and selling an OS.
People should understand what they are buying into with the OEM they go with, it's not just hardware. If you plan on doing things with your computer that isn't the OEM setup, make sure you understand your OEM's policy on it. I think there is a small market for a naked pc OEM that is completely OS agnostic when it comes to support (they only support hardware) and does no preloading.
As far as this page, it's the ms "be legal" program. Which is a marketing and ad campaign. A number of small to medium size companies use how easy it is to just copy software to avoid paying (I can think of three real fast that I've had dealings with. It does happen, which is funny since it's the exact opposite of "double" license problem with big companies). One part of the ad campaign is to reduce the naked pc market, but geez the ads are saying that you should install windows or anything.
If your favorite OEM is convinced by the adverts then
1) Ask them to support the OS you want
2) Find a new OEM that does meet your needs.