The 'Hairy Guys' Vs. Microsoft 145
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "The IHT is running the best write-up I've seen on the Microsoft vs EU Anti-Trust case, featuring quotes from tridge (Creator of Samba) and Carlo Piana (the FSFE lawyer). Nicely contrasts the difference between the Microsoft legal Team and the resources the FSFE has to work with. I was the FSFE witness for the initial hearing and the first trial, and this article nicely explains what it's like to be there." From the article: "The settlements left a group of computer programmers and activists, united under the banner of the Free Software Foundation Europe, with a bigger-than-expected role in supporting the EU's goal of loosening Microsoft's grip over the software industry. Only half-joking, one observer at the court this past week called some members FSFE and allies 'the hairy guys' - in contrast to the well- groomed legal teams fielded by Microsoft."
All suit and no action (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Hairy Guys (Score:1, Insightful)
I won't waste a mod point on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, FWIW, I know one of the "smooth suited professionals" that Microsoft employs. And his opinion? That the arguments that Microsoft wanted deployed in court were, in summary "We are so important and so essential to the IT world that you must allow us to do whatever we want." Unfortunately, judges do not take warmly to this kind of argument. Judges like John Cooke have a clue about things like Firefox (and now knows a lot more about how kernels work and that Windows Embedded means that the Microsoft kernel need not be monolithic). They are also used to academic expert witnesses, and European academics can be very unusual indeed. I don't know what the outcome will be, but it is far from clear that the FOSS movement will lose, at least in the Eurozone.
Something has to come out of this (Score:4, Insightful)
The US case was largely dropped due to a change of US leadership and a short sighted attitude that it's best to have a big US IT monopoly than let things go abroad.
The EU case could easily disappear for similar reasons, the EU commissioners aren't democratically elected and have been known to take backhanders in the past.
This could have been settled a long time ago (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This could have been settled a long time ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Having to pay a premium to get a box without Windows is the definition of arm-twisting.
Re:I won't waste a mod point on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This could have been settled a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why does it hurt?
1. My kids go to school, where they run - guess what. They come home and insist they need MS Word, or Publisher, or Powerpoint, etc.. They don't say "I need to do so and so", because that isn't what they are taught. Oh, and guess who volunteered early on in the term of the present British government to provide IT training for teachers.
2. I do Unix support, and the machine I'm given to do it with runs - guess what. My working life is spent going through Win-to-Unix kludges to get needlessly limited access to the systems.
3. The kids come home, and want to play games. These come in versions that run on various proprietary consoles and
Inter Process Communication (Score:4, Insightful)
Right on. The REAL issue is not bundling. That legal strategy was designed by Real, Netscape and others to yield compensation dollars. The real issue is Inter Process Communication (IPC). A file is a form of IPC. A network message is IPC. If the details of the various forms of IPC are widely available products can interoperate and that is good. I believe that a product that is completely dominant in a market the details regarding it's IPC should be made available so as to reduce the liability associated with using that product. In this particular case that liability is the unfair business practice of forcing other companies out of a market by leveraging undisclosed IPCs. Secondarily there are a number of other very good reasons for having alternative programs that understand the same IPCs but it's not clear that they have legal bearing.