THE WordPerfect case is being further analysed by Pamela Jones (PJ) over at Groklaw. Mark Webbink has not written quite so much recently, so it seems like Jones is back in charge as the dominant writer and FUD buster (which professor Webbink is reluctant to be). We draw inspiration from PJ and from Groklaw, so it is delightful to see her back. She says that the WordPerfect case carries on, as she noted the other day (the corporate press did not make it apparent). To quote the opening parts:
When Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled for Microsoft on its motion for judgment as a matter of law the other day, tossing out Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft, he explained his reasons at length. One of them was that there was, he asserted, no evidence of any realistic middleware threat.
However, here at Groklaw, we're continuing our project of trying to provide text versions of all the PDF exhibits from the Comes v. Microsoft antitrust litigation, and a volunteer posted an exhibit [PDF] he'd just transcribed, and as I was reading it to edit any mistakes, I started to say to myself, Hey, this contradicts the judge. My next thought was that maybe Novell never saw this exhibit. After all, one of the things that happened in this case was that neither party was able to easily find what the exhibits all were. There are thousands of them, and they were identifiable only by numbers, and numbers from other litigations. That's why we started on the project, to make them more easily searchable.
But then I started to dig a little, and it turns out that Novell did offer the court this very exhibit. It's Exhibit PX 44 in this PDF collection of exhibits, attached as an exhibit to Novell's opposition to Microsoft's motion for judgment as a matter of law.
The point isn't the amount, $2 billion or $6 billion. It's the emphasis over and over, as I'll show you, that it could be *any* kind of billions. In the end, after the trial, Google didn't have to pay so much as a penny.
Did you notice how he claims that what he wrote has been repeated in the media and read maybe billions of times? If all he did was factual reporting, that wouldn't be such a problem, although I'll have more to say about that at the end. But is it the case that his reporting was purely factual? Let's see.
What Does the Record Show?
I wrote earlier today that I thought Oracle should have to pay at least some of Google's costs from the trial, if only because I didn't think Oracle should be allowed to cause so much unmerited damage and then just walk away. Let me show you what I mean by unmerited damage that shouldn't be ignored by reviewing some of what FOSSPatents wrote about the case.
By my reading, FOSSPatents at least implied repeatedly that Google was a willful infringer, going so far as to assert that the judge held that suspicion himself, along with presenting multiple gloomy analyses of what the bad outcome for Google as a result could be.
Oracle has made an interesting offer to companies using a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Switch to our free Oracle Linux instead.
CentOS penguins maul Oracle's Linux migration pitch
[...]
Forum member Spearchucker fires back:
That 'support' word, right there, is the thing that makes me stay as far from Oracle as I can. It's like "Dude, here's the software. Have it, it's cheap/free." When things go wrong you get stung for exorbitant support/consulting fees, because, hey, you're tied in. With nowhere to go.
The fact it's Oracle behind Oracle Linux is the biggest sticking point. The CentOS penguins either don't trust Oracle or hate it for throwing its weight around in the open source community, hurting their friends and other projects, and trying to control open source - the Hudson and OpenSolaris projects.