I disagree. But thats okay. The case isn't over, and generally we dont execute people or even lock them up (except in cases like murder, etc) until the case is fully adjudicated. Especially in civil cases.
Except that's not true. For criminal cases, there's usually some time between the guilty finding and the sentancing. During that time, the guilty party is put in jail, pending sentancing.
As far as the existance of Linux precluding MS from being a monopoly, how so? As far as I know, Microsoft owns more than 98% of the desktop OS market. They have a complete stranglehold on that market and the existance of Linux has not made any statistically measurable dent on that market share. In the server environment, linux is doing better, but Microsoft has never had a monopoly in that environment.
IMHO, calling microsoft a "near-monopoly" in the desktop systems world, is either misinformed or apologetic.
Right, the article said "near-monopoly control of..desktop software". They do not have a monopoly in all desktop software, just OS's.
Re-read the quote. Provided here for your convenience:
Thanks to its dominant, near-monopolistic position in what may be the best business on the planet -- system software for personal computers -- Microsoft continues to generate huge amounts of free cash flow.
Now, of course it doesn't specifically say "Operating Systems" software, but it clearly does not say "desktop software". IMHO, "system software for personal computers" means OS. Maybe you disagree.
Of course the case can be appealed. So what? They're still an illegal monopoly. It doesn't matter if the case goes on for 1 million years. Until a judgement comes out saying that they are not an illegal monopoly, the standing judgement is applied... which is that they are an illegal monopoly.
And as far as not understanding why Linux has anything to do with Microsoft's status as an illegal monopolist, well, you can either help me understand what you were talking about or you can post out smart alec comments. The latter does nothing to convince me of your opinion.
One other question for you, personally. I went to your website. Very nice design. Clean and well organized. But I'm confused about how you can see AOL-TW as evil and not see the things that Microsoft has done and continues to do in the same light. How is it that Microsoft gets off the hook from your "evil" label?
True. But the decision about whether or not Microsoft has a monopoly is over. That's been ejudicated and appealed, with no further apeals pending. They are a convicted illegal monopoly. The only part of the case that's left is deciding the fate of the illegal monopoly... which presupposes the existance of the illegal monopoly. IOW, in order to be at this point in the trial, Microsoft must be an illegal monopoly.
2. The trial is only about Desktop Operating Systems. There are tons of other software products at MS and in the software world.
So? None of their other software changes the fact that they are an illegal monopoly.
3. Linux.
I don't understand what Linux has at all to do with the fact that Microsoft is an illegal monopoly.
You could have said, "breadbox" instead of "Linux" and I'd be no more confused by the association.
But there is one number that Bill Gates & Co. can point to that is heading inexorably upward: the amount of cash Microsoft has on hand. Thanks to its dominant, near-monopolistic position in what may be the best business on the planet -- system software for personal computers -- Microsoft continues to generate huge amounts of free cash flow.
"near-monopolistic"? I believe that it's been proven and upheld in appeal, that not only are they a monopoly, but they're an illegal monopoly.
Why is it that every single financial analyst and financial advisor or management group seems to be perpetually apologetic to Microsoft?
Hello! Finance world! They're guilty. I'm sorry that it hurt your portfolio. But even if it did hurt your portfolio, the only one to blame for that is yourself. You invested in them and took the risk of trusting your money to their business practices. Trying to justify their business practices in order to reclaim your stock value is morally corrupt. Accept the facts, take the loss, and move on.
But that was Bobby Boucher, pronounced "Boo-shay". This is Rick Boucher. I think his name is pronounced "Bow-chir". At least that's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced on TV. (I don't live in Virginia, tho).
This is very dangerous and misleading! There's much law which says you are NOT THE OWNER of the copy, and so you are not reading section 117 correctly. I know, it sounds wrong. I know, it sounds illogical. But that's the law. There's no gimmick, no magic.
What about this, which is a court finding that says that despite the EULA, the exchange of money for software is a sale. From the article in question:
"The Court understands fully why licensing has many advantages for software publishers. However, this preference does not alter the Court's analysis that the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license," Judge Pregerson writes. If you put your money down and walked away with a CD, you bought that copy, EULA or no EULA.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't CD-R's include a small royalty paid to the music industry in order to compensate for the fact that music may be copied onto that media? There was a big bruhaha last year when the royalties were expected to go up. Heck, Rick Boucher asking questions based on this assumption.
So, it seems to me that the music industry is already getting compensated for the sales of CD-R's. And since that's the case, they have nothing to complain about.
I have worked for two different banks, both of which blocked everything, including 22. They then set up proxies which would allow 80 & 443 out to the world, monitored by proxy authentication.
The reason that blocking port 22 is so important is that SSH enables trivial tunneling. This will allow anyone in the corporation who runs outbound ssh to determine what the corporations inbound security policy is. Or translated from business-speak to techno-speak: those who run ssh are allowed to let any TCP port back into the corporation.
Breaking the firewall policy is not something that large corporations, especially banks, are fond of.
What "most people" wanted is not a question of guessing. This is a fact that can be measured by the market share of Netscape relative to IE at the time.
Also, MS did try to deal with the supplier in most demand (Netscape) but there dealing wasn't in an attempt to distribute Netscape, rather to try to get Netscape to agree to voluntarily concede the windows market to Microsoft. Netscape declined this deal (for obvious reasons). The fact that MS didn't enter into a deal to distribute Netscape is not evidence that MS didn't think people wanted Netscape. It's evidence that MS thought that people's desire for Netscape could remove MS's power... especially since Netscape ran on other OS's than Windows.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess depending on your perspective) this is probably pretty easily defended. The difference between an embeded OS and a consumer computer OS is pretty significant. In the embedded OS, you can take out a bunch of features and not consider the OS to be crippled. Whereas the lack of those features in a general purpose consumer computer would make that OS crippled.
The reason is that in the embedded space, the OS tends to be used for very specific services. Thus removing any services not related to the one being provided does not cripple the OS. But in a general purpose computer, as the name implies, the OS is expected to do a huge variety of things. Hence losing some of those features would cripple a general purpose OS, but not cripple an embedded OS.
An analogy: an automobile that came with no radio, no cup holders, no airconditioning, a net instead of a drivers window, and no doors, would by consumer standards be crippled. However those same things that cripple a consumer car are requirements on a car that's going to race for NASCAR.
So while it's interesting to see that MS *can* modularize their system. It's not a very compelling argument.
(Just a minute, I gotta get on the asbestos suit on... ok flame away.)
Yeah, maybe, but I got a TV card for helping a friend debug a linux problem. A TIVO costs $399 + $200 (?) for a permanat subscription.
It may not be as good as TIVO, but I don't really wanna pay $600 for a TIVO. Maybe eventually. But as long as this software exists, I can emulate the functionality using existing hardware. Recognize that? It's the Linux way: Save money by leveraging existing hardware.
But it does fluctuate beyond your control. The deal is this: all internet bandwidth is shared. No, I'm not kidding, all internet bandwidth is shared. The only question is where is it shared and do the share points have enough bandwidth to support all the people wanting to share it.
So even if you have 160K/s, the ability to get to any particular site on the internet is a function of going through the shared bandwidth of your ISP to the shared peering relationship with it's NSP, through the shared bandwidth of your destinations NSP and ISP and finally through the shared bandwidth of the site that you want to get to.
The idea that DSL bandwidth is somehow guaranteed bandwidth is exactly the marketing that the DSL providers want you to believe. All internet bandwidth is shared.
And whoever said that the DSL provider has DS3's, as if those things don't cost anything has never tried to buy one. A DS3 is 45Mb/s. The only way that a DSL provider can afford a DS3 is if they oversubscribe that thing by at least 5 to 1. Then you get close to the thousands of dollars per month that those things cost.. and that's without profit.
I'm confused. I subscribe to Time Warner cable, and I have a cable modem. But the cable modem is provided by one of three ISP's: Road Runner, Earthlink and AOL. When the article says that Time Warner is going to charge extra how will that work? I used to subscribe to Road Runner and now I subscribe to Earthlink. Who owns the bandwidth?
Maybe not enough on an individual level, but multiplied across millions of people, the cumulative harm is significant.
You can take a dollar from a bunch of individuals and not cause much individual harm, but when you do it in the stock market, through inside informaiton, or the publication of information to uphold a stocks price while you dump yours, it's a violation that the SEC comes after you for. Each individual instance of harm is not much, but the cumulative total harm is enormous, illegal, and prosecuted.
MS should not be held to a different standard. It doesn't matter if the amount of harm that they did to each individual is minor, on an individual basis. The cumulative effect of that harm was to extend their monopoly. And for that harm, which you concede, compensation must be made. Some sort of remedy must be imposed. Something that prevents an illegal monopolist from taking advantage of the penchant that they have of harming their customers.
Heck, there are also netinst cd's availabe. These are CD's that have only enough stuff to get the disk partitioned, the base os, and network drivers installed. The rest you get from apt-get. The netinst cd's are usually less than 50MB to download, compared to 650MB for a full cd iso image.
The first netinst cd for debian that I ever saw was here. Now, we also have this one and this one.
How does not having a specific browser pre-installed harm consumers?
Because consumers wanted netscape, not just a browser. They wanted netscape. They asked for it. They asked Dell and Compaq to preinstall it. And when Dell and Compaq (and others) tried to set up a system that met their customers demand, Microsoft threatened to end their licenses for win95, and IIRC, win98. Back then, you'll recall, netscape enjoyed 90%+ market share. Every OEM out there wanted to preinstall it to meet the demands of their customers, but backed down due to threats from MS.
Are the court documents the only things that you've read? How can you not know how MS's decisions directly harmed consumers?
I'm arguing that MS's choice to prevent it's users from getting a preinstalled version of netscape harmed the consumers... especially inlight of the market share that netscape had at the time. Clearly consumers wanted netscape. MS prevented them from having it as a result of their practices.
And I'm not arguing against comingling. Preinstalled software, is very clearly, a consumer demand. What I'm arguing is that one company, in a monopoly position precluding the consumer's choice of what software is preinstalled directly harms the consumer.
It may very well be difficult to show damages for the purpose of remedy. But that doesn't mean that the harm to the consumer wasn't done. It seems to me what you're arguing is akin to Bin Laden arguing that he shouldn't suffer any sort of punishment for his attacks on WTC because the short term result of the attack was a more unified america with less political bickering about small stuff. Making such an argument ignores the fact that 2000+ lives were permanantly lost.
IMHO, it's the same with Microsoft. Being able to show that people like not having to pay for a browser is one positive effect of Microsoft's monopoly power. But we are ignoring the fact that we've got a long term illegal monopoly problem on our hands. Which, by definition, harms the entire economy (including consumers) through the permanant loss of competition. The only one who benefits from MS's actions is MS. Everyone else is harmed directly and indirectly by the impact on the economy. Is that harm hard to measure? Yes. Is it non-existant? No.
I'm not trying to suggest that netscape must be preinstalled. And I'm not suggesting that you be forced to use netscape. I'm suggesting that by removing the choice, that's harmful. Most people (at the time) wanted netscape. Removing that choice as a preinstall option was harmful.
Back then netscape was superior to internet explorer.
That may be true, but it still doesn't change the fact that microsoft caused consumers harm by precluding them from having a preinstall of Netscape, when as you say, it was superier to IE.
All I'm trying to do is answer the question: Did MS's actions cause consumers harm. I think the answer is yes. danhaskett disagrees, and thinks that it's impossible to prove harm because now the environment is completely different. And he's right that the environment now is different, but I think that's irrelevant.
I think it's irrelevant because it doesn't matter what the environment is like now. A harmful act was committed. Think of it this way. It's not a acceptable excuse for Bin Laden to say that he should avoid punishment because the product of his actions ended up with the US becoming more united and less concerned about petty bickering. That may very well be a good thing that came about from his harmful act, but that doesn't enable him to avoid the consequences of that act.
As long as you didn't choose to have Netscape preinstalled. And the reality is that the action by MS literally "cut off Netscape air supply". There was no confusion by the circuit court nor the appellate that this action was harmful to consumers. And, I have read all of the rulings issued by both of those courts.
Damages would be easy to prove. XXX violated the license, implemented a GPL'ed version of CIFS, and made it publicly available. This new implementation competes against Microsoft's own product, and thus hurts sales.
Right those would be the damages that could be proven from *any* competing implementation, not just a GPL'd version. What I'm asking is how would Microsoft be able to prove damages from the fact that the code is licensed by GPL. A competing implementation is not the damage. The license specifically grants access for competing implementation. So the damage doesn't have to come from the fact that it's a competing implementation, but from the fact that this competing implementation is GPL'd. Doesn't it? Wouldn't MS have a much harder time demonstrating damage from the choice of license for the competing implementation?
Of course, there are multiple ways to lose in court, and the merits of the case aren't always important.
Good point. The EFF might step in, but probably not a good idea to rely on it. Probably a better solution would be to dual license samba. One under something like the BSD license that would implement the spec. And then another one under the GPL that copied from the BSD samba. Of course, leaving that BSD samba version entirely unused with all new features going into the GPL version.
It almost looks to me like MS is trying to get Samba to switch licenses to a BSD license. Is there something that MS wants that samba has?
Slashdot Mirror
Except that's not true. For criminal cases, there's usually some time between the guilty finding and the sentancing. During that time, the guilty party is put in jail, pending sentancing.
As far as the existance of Linux precluding MS from being a monopoly, how so? As far as I know, Microsoft owns more than 98% of the desktop OS market. They have a complete stranglehold on that market and the existance of Linux has not made any statistically measurable dent on that market share. In the server environment, linux is doing better, but Microsoft has never had a monopoly in that environment.
IMHO, calling microsoft a "near-monopoly" in the desktop systems world, is either misinformed or apologetic.
Re-read the quote. Provided here for your convenience:
Now, of course it doesn't specifically say "Operating Systems" software, but it clearly does not say "desktop software". IMHO, "system software for personal computers" means OS. Maybe you disagree.
And as far as not understanding why Linux has anything to do with Microsoft's status as an illegal monopolist, well, you can either help me understand what you were talking about or you can post out smart alec comments. The latter does nothing to convince me of your opinion.
One other question for you, personally. I went to your website. Very nice design. Clean and well organized. But I'm confused about how you can see AOL-TW as evil and not see the things that Microsoft has done and continues to do in the same light. How is it that Microsoft gets off the hook from your "evil" label?
True. But the decision about whether or not Microsoft has a monopoly is over. That's been ejudicated and appealed, with no further apeals pending. They are a convicted illegal monopoly. The only part of the case that's left is deciding the fate of the illegal monopoly... which presupposes the existance of the illegal monopoly. IOW, in order to be at this point in the trial, Microsoft must be an illegal monopoly.
So? None of their other software changes the fact that they are an illegal monopoly.
I don't understand what Linux has at all to do with the fact that Microsoft is an illegal monopoly. You could have said, "breadbox" instead of "Linux" and I'd be no more confused by the association.
"near-monopolistic"? I believe that it's been proven and upheld in appeal, that not only are they a monopoly, but they're an illegal monopoly.
Why is it that every single financial analyst and financial advisor or management group seems to be perpetually apologetic to Microsoft?
Hello! Finance world! They're guilty. I'm sorry that it hurt your portfolio. But even if it did hurt your portfolio, the only one to blame for that is yourself. You invested in them and took the risk of trusting your money to their business practices. Trying to justify their business practices in order to reclaim your stock value is morally corrupt. Accept the facts, take the loss, and move on.
Sheesh.
I guess that's better than turning it into soap!
But that was Bobby Boucher, pronounced "Boo-shay". This is Rick Boucher. I think his name is pronounced "Bow-chir". At least that's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced on TV. (I don't live in Virginia, tho).
What about this, which is a court finding that says that despite the EULA, the exchange of money for software is a sale. From the article in question:
Here's a link to the full text of the decision.
So, it seems to me that the music industry is already getting compensated for the sales of CD-R's. And since that's the case, they have nothing to complain about.
I have worked for two different banks, both of which blocked everything, including 22. They then set up proxies which would allow 80 & 443 out to the world, monitored by proxy authentication.
The reason that blocking port 22 is so important is that SSH enables trivial tunneling. This will allow anyone in the corporation who runs outbound ssh to determine what the corporations inbound security policy is. Or translated from business-speak to techno-speak: those who run ssh are allowed to let any TCP port back into the corporation.
Breaking the firewall policy is not something that large corporations, especially banks, are fond of.
Of course, the fact that you can tunnel tthrough firewalls on port 80 and port 443 does not sit easily with these type of corporations.
What "most people" wanted is not a question of guessing. This is a fact that can be measured by the market share of Netscape relative to IE at the time.
Also, MS did try to deal with the supplier in most demand (Netscape) but there dealing wasn't in an attempt to distribute Netscape, rather to try to get Netscape to agree to voluntarily concede the windows market to Microsoft. Netscape declined this deal (for obvious reasons). The fact that MS didn't enter into a deal to distribute Netscape is not evidence that MS didn't think people wanted Netscape. It's evidence that MS thought that people's desire for Netscape could remove MS's power... especially since Netscape ran on other OS's than Windows.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess depending on your perspective) this is probably pretty easily defended. The difference between an embeded OS and a consumer computer OS is pretty significant. In the embedded OS, you can take out a bunch of features and not consider the OS to be crippled. Whereas the lack of those features in a general purpose consumer computer would make that OS crippled.
The reason is that in the embedded space, the OS tends to be used for very specific services. Thus removing any services not related to the one being provided does not cripple the OS. But in a general purpose computer, as the name implies, the OS is expected to do a huge variety of things. Hence losing some of those features would cripple a general purpose OS, but not cripple an embedded OS.
An analogy: an automobile that came with no radio, no cup holders, no airconditioning, a net instead of a drivers window, and no doors, would by consumer standards be crippled. However those same things that cripple a consumer car are requirements on a car that's going to race for NASCAR.
So while it's interesting to see that MS *can* modularize their system. It's not a very compelling argument.
(Just a minute, I gotta get on the asbestos suit on... ok flame away.)
Yeah, maybe, but I got a TV card for helping a friend debug a linux problem. A TIVO costs $399 + $200 (?) for a permanat subscription.
It may not be as good as TIVO, but I don't really wanna pay $600 for a TIVO. Maybe eventually. But as long as this software exists, I can emulate the functionality using existing hardware. Recognize that? It's the Linux way: Save money by leveraging existing hardware.
But it does fluctuate beyond your control. The deal is this: all internet bandwidth is shared. No, I'm not kidding, all internet bandwidth is shared. The only question is where is it shared and do the share points have enough bandwidth to support all the people wanting to share it.
So even if you have 160K/s, the ability to get to any particular site on the internet is a function of going through the shared bandwidth of your ISP to the shared peering relationship with it's NSP, through the shared bandwidth of your destinations NSP and ISP and finally through the shared bandwidth of the site that you want to get to.
The idea that DSL bandwidth is somehow guaranteed bandwidth is exactly the marketing that the DSL providers want you to believe. All internet bandwidth is shared.
And whoever said that the DSL provider has DS3's, as if those things don't cost anything has never tried to buy one. A DS3 is 45Mb/s. The only way that a DSL provider can afford a DS3 is if they oversubscribe that thing by at least 5 to 1. Then you get close to the thousands of dollars per month that those things cost.. and that's without profit.
Remember: all internet bandwidth is shared.
I'm confused. I subscribe to Time Warner cable, and I have a cable modem. But the cable modem is provided by one of three ISP's: Road Runner, Earthlink and AOL. When the article says that Time Warner is going to charge extra how will that work? I used to subscribe to Road Runner and now I subscribe to Earthlink. Who owns the bandwidth?
I'm so confused.
Maybe not enough on an individual level, but multiplied across millions of people, the cumulative harm is significant.
You can take a dollar from a bunch of individuals and not cause much individual harm, but when you do it in the stock market, through inside informaiton, or the publication of information to uphold a stocks price while you dump yours, it's a violation that the SEC comes after you for. Each individual instance of harm is not much, but the cumulative total harm is enormous, illegal, and prosecuted.
MS should not be held to a different standard. It doesn't matter if the amount of harm that they did to each individual is minor, on an individual basis. The cumulative effect of that harm was to extend their monopoly. And for that harm, which you concede, compensation must be made. Some sort of remedy must be imposed. Something that prevents an illegal monopolist from taking advantage of the penchant that they have of harming their customers.
The current DOJ settlement does not do it.
The first netinst cd for debian that I ever saw was here. Now, we also have this one and this one.
Evolution comes close to doing something like this already with it's "Virtual Folders". You might want to check it out.
Because consumers wanted netscape, not just a browser. They wanted netscape. They asked for it. They asked Dell and Compaq to preinstall it. And when Dell and Compaq (and others) tried to set up a system that met their customers demand, Microsoft threatened to end their licenses for win95, and IIRC, win98. Back then, you'll recall, netscape enjoyed 90%+ market share. Every OEM out there wanted to preinstall it to meet the demands of their customers, but backed down due to threats from MS.
Are the court documents the only things that you've read? How can you not know how MS's decisions directly harmed consumers?
And I'm not arguing against comingling. Preinstalled software, is very clearly, a consumer demand. What I'm arguing is that one company, in a monopoly position precluding the consumer's choice of what software is preinstalled directly harms the consumer.
It may very well be difficult to show damages for the purpose of remedy. But that doesn't mean that the harm to the consumer wasn't done. It seems to me what you're arguing is akin to Bin Laden arguing that he shouldn't suffer any sort of punishment for his attacks on WTC because the short term result of the attack was a more unified america with less political bickering about small stuff. Making such an argument ignores the fact that 2000+ lives were permanantly lost.
IMHO, it's the same with Microsoft. Being able to show that people like not having to pay for a browser is one positive effect of Microsoft's monopoly power. But we are ignoring the fact that we've got a long term illegal monopoly problem on our hands. Which, by definition, harms the entire economy (including consumers) through the permanant loss of competition. The only one who benefits from MS's actions is MS. Everyone else is harmed directly and indirectly by the impact on the economy. Is that harm hard to measure? Yes. Is it non-existant? No.
I'm not trying to suggest that netscape must be preinstalled. And I'm not suggesting that you be forced to use netscape. I'm suggesting that by removing the choice, that's harmful. Most people (at the time) wanted netscape. Removing that choice as a preinstall option was harmful.
That may be true, but it still doesn't change the fact that microsoft caused consumers harm by precluding them from having a preinstall of Netscape, when as you say, it was superier to IE.
All I'm trying to do is answer the question: Did MS's actions cause consumers harm. I think the answer is yes. danhaskett disagrees, and thinks that it's impossible to prove harm because now the environment is completely different. And he's right that the environment now is different, but I think that's irrelevant.
I think it's irrelevant because it doesn't matter what the environment is like now. A harmful act was committed. Think of it this way. It's not a acceptable excuse for Bin Laden to say that he should avoid punishment because the product of his actions ended up with the US becoming more united and less concerned about petty bickering. That may very well be a good thing that came about from his harmful act, but that doesn't enable him to avoid the consequences of that act.
IMHO, the same thing should be true with MS.
As long as you didn't choose to have Netscape preinstalled. And the reality is that the action by MS literally "cut off Netscape air supply". There was no confusion by the circuit court nor the appellate that this action was harmful to consumers. And, I have read all of the rulings issued by both of those courts.
Doesn't change the fact that MS's actions caused consumers harm by precluding a consumer having it preinstalled on their system.
Right those would be the damages that could be proven from *any* competing implementation, not just a GPL'd version. What I'm asking is how would Microsoft be able to prove damages from the fact that the code is licensed by GPL. A competing implementation is not the damage. The license specifically grants access for competing implementation. So the damage doesn't have to come from the fact that it's a competing implementation, but from the fact that this competing implementation is GPL'd. Doesn't it? Wouldn't MS have a much harder time demonstrating damage from the choice of license for the competing implementation?
Good point. The EFF might step in, but probably not a good idea to rely on it. Probably a better solution would be to dual license samba. One under something like the BSD license that would implement the spec. And then another one under the GPL that copied from the BSD samba. Of course, leaving that BSD samba version entirely unused with all new features going into the GPL version.
It almost looks to me like MS is trying to get Samba to switch licenses to a BSD license. Is there something that MS wants that samba has?