Microsoft Wins WordPerfect Antitrust Battle With Novell 124
New submitter Psychotic_Wrath writes "After a long, drawn-out legal battle and a hung jury, a federal judge has dismissed Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft. The case involved allegations from Novell that Microsoft removed code from its Windows 95 operating system which created the need for further development to WordPerfect. Novell says this delayed the release of their product, giving Microsoft Word an unfair advantage. Groklaw has a detailed write-up on the decision."
Does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
... that Win 95 is now safe to use?
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Microsoft removed code from its Windows 95 operating system
Probably, just safer...
Actually, No (Score:4, Informative)
The headline was written by a moron who can't read. Novell announced they will appeal, so Microsoft only won this round, with a judge who was overturned on appeal last time.
So they removed APIs? (Score:1)
Who cares? Windows nor any other OS.. (remember the whole cocoa/carbon debacle with OSX?) gives any guarantee that APIs will never be deprecated.
Re:So they removed APIs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares? Windows nor any other OS.. (remember the whole cocoa/carbon debacle with OSX?) gives any guarantee that APIs will never be deprecated.
Remember the saying "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?
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Yes. No foundation in either reality or rationality.
Re:So they removed APIs? (Score:5, Informative)
You can't say that given all of the documentation released in public court cases there is any doubt Microsoft would pull stunts like last minute code changes just to make sure a competitor in the application side had to adjust for the code change, retest their software, and then send it to manufacturing which all means a big delay in release to the public. All the while, Microsoft's applications people knew well in advance of this and had their software applications read when the OS was released. Naw, that would never happen.
LoB
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Didn't NT 4.0 SP6 cause problems with Lotus Notes too? (fixed with SP6a if I remember)
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Yes, but breaking Lotus Notes is a good thing, on balance.
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Remember the saying "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?
The one that Lotus guys themselves said was BS? Yes, I do [proudlyserving.com].
If you really want to bring something up, start with AARD code - at least that actually shipped (in a beta version of Windows).
So they removed APIs? (Score:1)
They removed APIs after promoting them for use by clients. At the same time they internally did not use them.
Then, just before the release of the system, they withdrew them leaving the clients out in the cold.
This would be similar to your boss promising a raise, in writing, that you would get if you met or exceeded your deadlines. Then dropped the project you were working on, dropped your bonus, and laid you off.
Was that fair dealing?
Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis? (Score:1, Interesting)
Their take on the verdict comes off as biased, bitter in parts, and sarcastic in parts. Do they claim to be balanced, or are they partisan?
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Groklaw's original mission was to show that SCO's case against IBM was a load of malarky from the get go, using nothing but the facts and evidence provided in the case by each side's legal briefs. I don't know if that's bias, but Groklaw and PJ have proven over and over that they seem to know both the facts and the law and get it right every single time.
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:5, Informative)
If by "every single time" you mean "occasionally", sure. I've tried to pout out factual errors in their analysis in the past, but they refuse to approve any posts that disagree with them.
Your problem is that you mistaken overwhelming agreement on their blog with "always right", but that's only the case because they censor anyone that disagrees with them.
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I didn't say anything about the court documents. I was talking about factual errors they made in their analysis and reporting, from which most of the blog articles are drawn.
You do realize, they report on more than just what courts publish. They also report on actions by the parties, claims made by the parties, random stuff people claim on the net, etc..
And like I said, they refuse to publish almost any comment that doesn't agree with them, making it seem like there is overwhelming agreement with their ar
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Well - everyone who gives a damn at my house agrees with Groklaw. That's pretty overwhelming agreement, I would say.
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And people who vote Republican tend to agree with Fox News.
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Do you have examples for evidence or just conjecture?
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Oh, yes, let me give you links to the comments I made on groklaw that weren't approved.
Do you even think before you write?
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, how about this. The judge in this case is the very same judge that has ruled against MS in the Java case, and likened MS to kneecapping Tonya Harding.
Yet Groklaw implies that the judge has only ever ruled in favor of MS, and paints him as a MS shill. Why is that? Why doesn't their "research" show that?
The facts are, the judge has a history of ruling AGAINST Microsoft, but you wouldn't know that from the groklaw article. That is how they show bias.
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps he had such a history 10 years ago, but in this case, he has consistently ruled for MS (and been overruled on appeal). What the motivation for that is, I don't know.
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They don't appear to now, but they used to.. particularly during the ODF/MSOXML periods.
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:4, Informative)
While PJ, the original creator of Groklaw, has stepped aside and let someone else run it, they're still very good about providing the actual court documents and testimony from relevant court rooms. Even a casual examinatiion of the court documents reveals some astounding rulings in Microsoft's favor by this particular judge, including rulings that have already been overturned on appeal.
A judge who's already been overturned on appeal would seem to have every reason to be cautious and _not_ make other strange ruliings that would provide grounds for appeal, at least if that judge is honest and does not with to waste people's time. And this ruling does seem very strange.
Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure why you think it's strange. You do realize the whole case basically revolves around the "File/Open" dialog, and that WordPerfect didn't want to use that standard one, and because Microsoft (for whatever reason) decided to not give out an API to do some things with it, they decided to write their own instead of using the default one. One middle manager's decision (that wasn't overruled by someone higher up) caused the Office Suite to be delayed by 4-6 months. Although, there is argument whether Quattro would have been ready to go at that time.
Novell's whole argument is that they were delayed in release because they CHOSE to write their own custom File/Open dialog instead of using the default one, and that lead to their demise because of timing? According to them, IF they had chosen to use the default one they would have been able to deliver on schedule. This is just bad management.
Now, the reasons behind why Microsoft stopped that particular API is in question, and their motives may not have been altruistic, but it was a frigging BETA. They explicitly state that they can/may change/remove/add APIs at any stage of the beta. Sorry, but this is a silly lawsuit and should have been thrown out before it even made it this far.
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Microsoft Office still used the API that everyone else was told would not be in the release version of Windows.
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I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Office used the standard file open dialog box.
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The point is that Microsoft only stopped it for use by others. Microsoft Office still used the API that everyone else was told would not be in the release version of Windows.
That is incorrect. Microsoft didn't use it, they completely removed the feature, It was feature that was in the Beta but not available in the final product to WordPerfect or any product (including microsofts own)
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This is why Groklaw's excellent, direct publication of the relevant court documents is so very useful to understand the case. the trial transcripts are available, starting at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120602215245555&query=microsoft+novell+api [groklaw.net], and your claim is not consistent with _either_ side's claims.
Look for the key word "ISV" in the transcript, it's at the core of the problems and multiple violations of commercial agreements with Novell as a business partner, and is core to Micros
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Really, please read page 58, and 59 where they start to get into the meat of the complaint, which I will quote for you here:
WordPerfect understood the importance of integrating into the Chicago shell and the need to extend
58
Microsoft's common dialogs to provide the added functionality historically present in WordPerfect or to use the name space extension API's to extend WordPerfect's own dialogs.
Let me break that down for you a little bit. As the WordPerfect developers that you will hear from in this case will explain, WordPerfect had traditionally had a very powerful file open dialogue containing features and functionality well beyond that offered by Microsoft's Word. Within this new operating system, Windows 95, application developers had a choice to make. They could rely on the common open file dialogs provided within Windows 95, or they could create their own more powerful file open dialogue.
In either case, whichever choice they made, the name space extension API's in Windows would allow application developers to add real name spaces to whichever file open dialog was chosen.
Let's look at that in a little more detail. This is the Windows 95 common file open dialogue shown on the screen. It was pretty basic compared to what WordPerfect had done in the past. You couldn't search across different drives or folders. You could only search within a given location. WordPerfect developers had identified a long list of deficiencies with Microsoft's common file open dialogue. Here's a prototype of WordPerfect's file open dialogue.
And here, the name space API's in question were added and started to be documented in the M6 beta release as described on page 61:
The M6 Beta included partial documentation for the name space extensions in an SDK, software development kit. We talked about it. This is just a list of the API's. The actual exhibit is a much bigger document written in language
61
that only a software developer could love or understand.
Those APIs were then removed in M7, the very next milestone.
Reiterating what the "name space extensions" were about on page 64:
As you may recall, the developers at WordPerfect, later Novell, back in November of 1993, were very happy about Microsoft's decision to document the name space extensions. They liked the technology, and they determined to use it for the file open dialogs for all the parts of the PerfectOffice suite. The shared code team immediately started coding, with the expectation of receiving those extensions, and later they were coding directly to the name space extensions, as documented in the M6 Beta for Windows 95 in June of 1994.
From page 76:
Mr. Gibb will explain that the file open dialogue was critical path throughout this project. The evidence will show that Mr. Gates' decision resulted in a delay in Novell's efforts to produce a timely suite for Windows 95.
From page 120:
And here's the contract between Microsoft and WordPerfect which, of course, May 24, '94, just before Novell bought it -- so it's the contract binding on Novell as well. And the idea that Novell advocates in this case, I think, is
120
that somehow, because Microsoft in a very early version of the Beta, included the name space API's, they could never take them out. That was the deception. They've told us that these API's, these four, out of thousands, might be in the product, and then later you withdrew support for them.
... I think I've made my point. This was exactly about the File/Open dialog. Gibbs also said under oat
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If there remains any doubt, read page 133, where it's summed up pretty much exactly the same way I said:
So the NameSpace extension decision, and it's the only thing that Novell's lawyer told you this morning that Microsoft did wrong, the only thing, the only thing he said that caused all these problems and made these products late was Mr. Gates's decision in October of '94. That's what he said. There were no other, no other acts that Microsoft committed that he said caused any delay.
Those name space extensions, the ones WordPerfect wanted to use to integrate into the File/Open dialog were the only thing that Novell claims was the reason for their product delay. Straight from Novell's lawyer.
Groklaw provides FACTS. (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw provides the rulings in PDF and text form. Whether they have a bias or not,
the rulings are shown as is.
In the instant case the jury was eleven to one against Microsoft. Judge Motz -- who
flew in to handle this case from outside his district (!?!) -- ruled afteward that no reasonable
jury would have found for Novell and against Microsoft.
He has already been overturned on appeal once. He will be overturned again. /.
Microsoft shils notwithstanding (they pay people to say Microsoft-does-no-evil on
and other places), they will be found guilty.
It may not be relevant to much nowadays, seeing as Windows 95, Wordperfect, etc.
are all obsolete irrelevant things, but it's part of the legal process. Just like we don't
excuse rape because "Well it happened to you ten years ago" the same is true of
anticompetitive unlawful actions.
Sorry, Microsoft Fanbois, time to man up and quit modding everything you don't like
down. The truth is out there, and it will be set free. The Internet views censorship
as damage and routes around it (--Gilmore). The same is true for biased modding
and shil posting.
Ehud
Tucson AZ US
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It didn't need to mention them, thats the wonder of having a discussion - you aren't restricted to just the content of the parent post.
Every side has fanboys, especially here on Slashdot. Its fucking obvious - so why just rant about the Microsoft ones?
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It didn't need to mention them, thats the wonder of having a discussion - you aren't restricted to just the content of the parent post.
You just might want to read /.'s moderation FAQ. Your original post was indeed a troll as modded, and the post I'm replying to is indeed offtopic.
why just rant about the Microsoft ones?
Because it was a Microsoft fan/shill he was responding to. I would guess if it had been a Linux or mac fanboy comment, that's what he would have responded to and not said a word about Microsof
Re:Groklaw provides FACTS. (Score:5, Informative)
You may be entitled to your opinions, but you're not entitled to your facts. Fanboi-ism aside, a jury voted 11-1 in favor of Novell's claims, a verdict that was overturned by a judge.
The same judge had ruled in similar ways for Microsoft, and had been overturned on appeal.
What part of the facts are you unclear about?
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And what do *any* of that have to do with the rant that I replied to? Sure, the jury found 11-1 in favour, but I struggle to find the link between that and ranting about supposed Microsoft fanboyism and shilling with posts and moderations here on Slashdot.
Im not unclear about any of the facts, I am unclear as to how the fuck they support his pathetic, childish rant against Microsoft fanboyism.
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Consider a recent unfavorable post I made regarding Microsoft recently. Initially, the post was ground to a -1 Troll. Eventually, it was modded to +5 along with several other replies in the same vein and thread.
The power of fanboyism when an issue regarding Microsoft is posted is enormous. I find no pathos, and an adult response regarding the qualities of Groklaw, and the facts of the matter.
Indeed there are Linux and Apple prejudices here as well. My sense of the Microsoft version is that it has a differen
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Seems obvious to me that the judge is a microsoft fanboi! Relevance is important in these discussions!
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You have a strange idea of what a 'verdict' is. Verdicts require unanimous agreement of the jury, 11-1 is as good as 1-11. Only 12-0 or 0-12 count.
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Court cases are expensive, and cost the taxpayers a lot of money. If the next case is likely to result in a hung jury as well, at what point do you stop retrying? It's been 17 years.
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I always thought a unanimous agreement of the jury was only required in a criminal law case.
Oh wait - Microsoft. Yes, criminals.
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You have a strange idea of what a 'verdict' is. Verdicts require unanimous agreement of the jury, 11-1 is as good as 1-11. Only 12-0 or 0-12 count.
This isn't really true. It is the case in a criminal trial, but in a civil trial there are different rules. I sat on the jury of an employment discrimination case and to reach a verdict on each of about 30 questions we had to find a majority of 9 of 12 either way.
For the judge to rule that "no reasonable jury" could rule for Novell immediately following an 11-1 jury decision for Novell is a bit of a stretch, and a slap in the face of those jurors.
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Civil law differs from state to state. Some states require unanimous juries, others do not. Federal procedures seem to require unanimity. Because of the size of the trial, and the amount, my guess is that unanimous decisions are required.
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This is a Federal court. States do not have jurisdiction over Federal anti trust laws.'.
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You may be entitled to your opinions, but you're not entitled to your facts.
Have you tried religion?
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The same judge has also ruled against [capitalismcenter.org] MS in the past.
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abandoning 95% of the features with a simple product that does most things you want in a word processor
I bet the "5%" of features you use in a word processor are not the exact same set of features that I use, or other people use. Hence why there are more features than you use.
Re:Groklaw provides FACTS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you sure? I've switched from Microsoft Word to LibreOffice (nee OpenOffice) and stopped looking back. And before you say "Linux nerd" I run the package on three platforms: Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. LibreOffice satisfies my needs to do techical documentation for a Fortune 5000 company, and does so without breaking the bank.
And, lest you forget, WordPerfect's "niche" was in law offices. Before GUIs. When you needed sensible keyboard shortcuts to keep your productivity up. Those days are long gone. Everyone has pretty much the same shortcuts, so there is no advantage of one word processor over another on that score.
Novell would need to something really, really interesting and useful to break through the reduced competition.
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Eighteen years later and Word (and Libre Office last time I checked) cannot handle the formatting of reports and construction specifications correctly and reliably. The "Reveal Codes" function actually gave you access to all the markup data, so you could easily fix things like headline formatting improperly spanning a page break or footer conflicts.
If Word were still "free" because of licensing issues, WP5.1 would still be worth $5 to me if it ran. If they actually got 6.2(?) to work properly in Windows, $
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The Reveal Codes function seemed great, because in WP you really needed it. Every now and then WP would mess up the formatting codes and you'd need to delve in and fix them manually. Of course you could also use Reveal Codes to make an even bigger mess.
Word is full of half-finished features and kludges (like allowing text formatting to happen outside paragraph/character styles) that can't be fixed by adding a Reveal Codes function.
What Word needs is to be replaced with something like FrameMaker, where some
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In actual fact, Wordperfect was the (vast) majority market share holder and Microsoft expended enormous resources modifying their product to make users happy and winni
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Woerperfect was clearly a better product, fewer people used it
WordPerfect had serious quality problems moving into a GUI environment, and already "lost" by the time Windows 95 came out, with only a 15% marketshare. (per Ars Technica) The legal users who loved it so much were predominantly on the 5.1 DOS version and hadn't purchased a new copy in years.
Also, Novell belatedly bundled in Borland QuattroPro as their spreadsheet software; it was never considered to be in the same league as MS Excel.
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It may not be relevant to much nowadays, seeing as Windows 95, Wordperfect, etc. are all obsolete irrelevant things
Errr, that's a strange way of looking at it. I am with you most of the way, but the very reason that WordPerfect is now an "obsolete irrelevant thing" is that it was ousted by Microsoft, and their dirty tricks (rather than actual merit), which is what this case is about, were at least partly responsible for that. Otherwise WordPerfect might still be in general use today. Therefore the events of 15[?] years ago very much affect what we do today.
Actually, WordPerfect is relevant to me, a
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libreoffice --headless -convert-to odf fileToConvert.wp -outdir .
*yawn*
Google is your friend.
M
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Sorry for posting AC (though the content of this message will narrow me down to about 8 people). I worked on Word Perfect, although it was at Corel so well after the events in question. However, I have a good idea of how the software was put together and I have personally talked with several of the original authors. Whether or not Microsoft played these games, I personally don't believe that the failure of WP in the market place was really related to it.
WP 6 was a complete rewrite of WP 5 which was origi
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RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal next. (Score:5, Informative)
OP is right.
Judge Motz (who flew out of his district to run this court) ignored an 11:1 "hung jury"
and voted to say no jury could find against Microsoft. He's already once been handed
his case back on appeal because he's too pro-Microsoft.
There is no excuse to allow a JMOL (Judgment as a Matter of Law) -- implying no
reasonable jury would find for Microsoft -- when the jury was 11 to 1 in favor of
finding Microsoft guilty. This too will be returned to trial by the appeals court.
There's no excuse for the article to be on slashdot. It's entire "summary" is biased
and incorrect. The editors who approved it have no knowledge of facts. The
moderators who modded down the parent are clearly part of Microsoft's encouragement
of its staff to "read" slashdot (troll on articles) in the hopes they can mod down
disparaging articles.
Judge Motz is biased; he has flown from outside his district to judge this case; he
has been overruled on appeal ON THIS CASE before. It will happen again. All but
that last comment are facts.
See http://www.groklaw.net./ [www.groklaw.net]
Ehud
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Saying a case is won before the appeals are over is like saying a tie hockey game is won before sudden death overtime has finished. Don't be stupid you morons.
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How much money should the taxpayers keep spending on this? It's been 17 years. If Novell can't make their case in 17 years, perhaps they should consider that it's just not worth it.
Re:RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal ne (Score:5, Insightful)
This case is irrelevant.
Windows 95 is history.
No this case is relevant because WordPerfect is history.
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Re:RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal ne (Score:4, Informative)
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Judge Motz is biased; he has flown from outside his district to judge this case
It sounds awfully much like money changed hands.
Appeals (Score:5, Informative)
No, they did not win yet. Sure, they got a nice ruling from a judge with obvious animus towards Novell. The judge handed a ruling to Microsoft, nothing more. This same judge has already been overruled by the appellate courts and that is likely to happen again in this case. We'll see. But Microsoft has not the war, they've only won a battle.
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Well, Microsoft has won over Novell/Wordperfect ages ago, now Novell is just trying to get whatever they can. The lawsuit of course isn't over. However, I don't see any "war" left to fight in this one. It's more like the war has been long over and this is a left over skirmish that stubbornly refuses to go away. Hope Novell can keep this up until they get some court to acknowledge the damage done to them, but I don't see what difference it would make for the rest of us. Microsoft will continue to use similar
Re:Appeals (Score:5, Informative)
No, Microsoft won the war. This is but a side skirmish in a town which has lost all relevance. Whether Novell wins or loses is irrelevant because WordPerfect is dead, killed by the horrific mis-management which let them start with the post popular and most powerful consumer word processor on the planet and drive is so far into the ground that most /.ers with a 7 digit UID will wonder if that was the word processor that was bundled with Visicalc, or that ran on one of those computers that used tubes.
The bigger problem is that technology moves so many orders of magnitude faster than traditional brick and mortar processes that the laws and court system can't keep pace in its current incarnation. Patents lasting 28 years? Copyrights lasting 120 years? Common delay tactics and court backlog taking over a decade to resolve? Useless in an industry with a 6-24 month product lifecycle.
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Spoken by a truly clueless imbecile....so by your wrecking Microsoft should give up on the mobile device market since that keep up with the release cycle....
An illiterate calling someone an imbicile... thanks for the chuckle.
FYI, I believe the word you malaproped should have been "reckoning." And sorry for verbing that noun...
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Not necessarily. If the change is well-documented, then it is up to the developer to adapt to the change. The question here is that Novell alleged Microsoft made undocumented changes that broke the WordPerfect codebase. Now, this would be difficult to argue in the case of GNU/Linux since the "open" code of the kernel, etc
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I don't think the complaint is valid. I think vendors of software should be legally responsible for the software features they advertise and little else
Is there any real evidence that they sabotaged Novell's programs? The judge is saying that didn't happen.
So short of a conspiracy to conceal changes in the API from Novell for the purpose of making their product incompatible with Novell's apps, what's wrong? Does a software company have to keep every old API feature the same so everthing is backward compa
I have this recurring dream ... (Score:1)
One can only dream.
I wonder... (Score:1)
... Sometimes Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't. But then again, they have been damned inconsistent with their behavior.
On one hand, they may wish to deprecate parts of the OS. On the other, they may wish to maintain compatibility with some applications. And the fact that they maintain mutiple versions of the same APIs for different behaviors of different applications says they will, at times, do strange things to keep things running in a compatible way.
On the other hand, it seems s
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That process *seems* to work for Apple.
The MS way is to make it easier for developers by keeping archaic APIs around.
The Apple way is to make it easier for users by converging to a better design over time at the expense of making it harder for developers by deprecating APIs.
The only constant is change; the only difference is time. Fast change is called revolution, slow change called evolution.
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That process *seems* to work for Apple.
That process never worked for Apple. Are we forgetting that Apple needed to be bailed out about the time the quote in my signature was made?
History is littered with the corpses of operating systems that broke significant backward compatibility, with their nose dive coincidentally happening precisely at that compatibility break.
Apple has learned their lesson and they do not break API's nearly as rapidly as they used to. Do not confuse backward compatibility with hardware support. Apple is a hardware com
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Hehe... they break support of older hardware so that people don't NOTICE breaking backward compatibility. That's a thing a player like Apple can get away with though. They control the hardware and the software. In PC world, people would be very upset indeed.
But there should be no problem with reducing the amount of backward compatibility. 5 year old software is fine for backward compatibility. But we're talking about 20 year old software in some cases. It's got to go.
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It's not really depreciating something if during a product beta process, you create an API, then remove it before that product is released. There was no released product that had that API in it, and there should be no released products that depend on it.
Because WP6 was so perfect, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
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When a victim shoots themselves, despite the gun being in a locked safe, a safety, and trigger lock, being forced to load the gun themselves, and pull the trigger themselves... then yes.. they deserve to be a victim...
Uh... (Score:3)
The only thing i liked better about them was the desktop icon. The reason MS Word won in the end, especially, was because it had freaking pinball. [eeggs.com]
Re:Uh... wrong! (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who used WordPerfect in the days *BEFORE* it had Icons because it ran in DOS, that version (5.2) still could kick ass over ANY WYSIWYG Word Processor for most tasks. I'd still use it *TODAY* if it only ran on XP-7, had printer support, and I could get install disks. (Not to mention that it would be so lightning fast it isn't funny.) Yes, I miss it mightily (not the current Corel offering.)
If Novell wins what would that mean? (Score:1)
Almost Perfect (Score:2)
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Thanks for the link. I like reading stories of the Olden Dayes.
I appreciate the insight of other users on this... (Score:1)
In my opinion and limited but significant knowledge, killing an application in such a way is exactly (a) the power a company like MS has with their proprietary code base and (b) perfectly consistent with that I perceive to be their business model.