06.24.12

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Techrights and Patents, Antitrust

Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Novell at 9:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Our goal to be justice and focus to be software patents in months to come, with emphasis on Android and Linux

THE latest of Android is going to be shown soon, so as a developer I am very excited. Having said that, in a world polluted by patents developers are in a trap they often underestimate until they become bigger and get sued. Next month I will try to catch up with two months of news about software patents (there’s considerable backlog in my mail client).

Boycott Novell is no longer a priority, but Groklaw keeps on looking at Novell, the context being Microsoft antitrust:

The jury at this trial eventually deadlocked on damages, although they all agreed Microsoft was guilty of anticompetitive behavior or so the jurors who talked about it indicated, so we are waiting for the judge to decide if there will be a second jury or whether he will hand a win to Microsoft without a second trial. While we wait, we’re putting the transcripts here, as text, so we can learn more about trials and for historians, so that searching by keywords will be easier.

I just posted an exhibit, as text, in our Comes v. Microsoft antitrust trial exhibit collection, #1309 [PDF], that seems pertinent. It’s an executive level email to Frankenberg on what Novell should do going forward in that Microsoft saw them as a real threat and was willing to do anything to destroy them. The email’s subject line is “High-Stakes Strategy Decisions.” The part that I found interesting is that this May 25, 1995 email indicates that Novell thought of itself then as Microsoft’s only real competition, and that as of that point, it felt it was holding its own. Microsoft at the trial portrayed Novell as a bunch of lead-footed bunglers, who destroyed their own chances. But that seems to be a latter-day revisionism. The email says:

Microsoft knows that Novell has the potential to become a long-term major player in general-purpose software, and REGARDLESS of whether we position ourselves in that way, Microsoft knows that we’re in that position, and will stop at nothing to destroy us.

The point of the litigation, from Novell’s viewpoint, is that a few months later, when Windows 95 was released, Novell was stabbed in the back by some Microsoft dirty tricks involving documentation, so Novell couldn’t be ready by launch date with WordPerfect. This email supports Novell’s position, rather than Microsoft’s, given the date.

It is nice to be able to use Comes vs. Microsoft even 5 years or more after it was first released to the public. Microsoft’s crimes and evidence of them are not going away, Time does not heal injustice. Microsoft receives a lot of coverage in Techrights because Microsoft commits many crimes. █

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