Court Clears Novell To Sue Microsoft Over WordPerfect

An anonymous reader writes "15 years after Novell sold the software to Corel, a court has given Novell the right to sue Microsoft over WordPerfect, which had a 50 percent market share in the early '90s."

Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[Walking The Walk]

From TFA:

The issue before the appeals court was whether the Caldera settlement [from the 1996-2000 case] also included the associated office productivity software, WordPerfect and Quattro Pro

The way I read that, it doesn't have to do with how many years ago Novell sold WordPerfect, it has to do with an old court case in which the parties are disputing what the settlement covered.

Re:Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[esocid]

It's an appeal to their 2004 case, in which a lower court ruled in Microsoft's favor. MS argued that Novell's allegations were subject to the deal with Caldera from '96. Calder acquired the rights to DR-DOS from that deal, then sued Microsoft, settled in 2000.

It was handed a $280m settlement from Microsoft, of which Novell got £35.5m.

Another swindle with MS lurking behind the curtain

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a Corel shareholder (then having major Linux and Office ambitions) when they were acquired in a shady takeover by company with MS affiliations.

WIKI: "In August 2003, Corel was wholly acquired by Vector Capital, a private equity firm, for $1.05 a share (slightly more than the cash in the company)."!!

I then invested whatever was left in Novell (then having major Linux ambitions, and the Office market manipulation suit against MS) when in March (this year) they were acquired in a shady takeover by company with MS affiliations/cash - Attachmate. (again for slightly more than the cash in the company!!).

WTF!!!

Being based outside USA in *both* cases I only received voting material *after* the crooked managements had already approved the swindles! My other brokers (holding same stock) never sent me any information whatsoever...

This market capitalism seems to work wonders! For the fucking insider swindlers!

When these scheming attachmate characters release what's left of my former Novell investment... any open-source companies looking for long-term investors? I can't wait to be screwed one last time by greedy insiders in cahoots with MS! Or any lawyers interested in...

Re:What?

[justthinkit]

lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text

This was true in Word for DOS. WinWord started making it a lot more complicated than that. Capsule summary: a document is now a file system.

while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.

No. In word, formatting is tied to the paragraph mark (PM) at the end of the paragraph. Delete the PM for paragraph #1 and all the text, etc. in that paragraph will inherit the formatting from paragraph #2. Hint 1: click that backward "P" on the format toolbar to reveal where the PMs are (I still use Office 2000 so have no clue how this is done in more recent versions of Office). Hint 2: copy the PM of the paragraph whose format you like and then past it at the end of the paragraph that got messed up -- problem solved.

Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect

Disclaimer: I still use Word 5.0 for DOS [slashdot.org] as my main word processor.