What wonderful lawyers MICROSOFT have; MS lawyers have managed to save MS bacon every time.
I think that they certainly deserve their bonuses this month and last month. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3143591.stm Too bad really. From what I hear, the E.U. awarded the software company $1.47 per copy of Microsoft Windows dating from 1995 to 2000 ( Windows 95 ) for popup software on the broswer. That amount comes out to 520 million USD. [ Personal Commentary ] I didn't know Pop-ups were originally supported in Netscape, got stolen and placed to work within I.E.? Sheech! [ Again, so much for MS claim to be the 'internet innovators' ]. But worse yet, is that this is history repeating itself, with shades of 1998; Too bad really, the US courts didn't learn anything at all. Please recall, the wierd timing of the original CALDERA settlement with Microsoft for a then $350 -450 million USD, just before the court proceeding of the D.O.J. settlement, about MS-DOS and DR-DOS; Everyone at that time was applauding for Caldera for the win; It was only hind sight afterwards that the settlement involved the re-incarnation of SCO, and the beginning of the end of CALDERA, and the litigated assault on LINUX from this company. Only that this time around, AOL got together with the MICROSOFT lawyers and settled before AOL could introduce this litigation bomb on MS corp. infront of a judge. As memory serves, AOL's settlement for NETSCAPE with MS was for a paltry sum of $750 Million USD. Gee, that means if pop-ups were worth a measely $1.47 per copy of Windows, then NETSCAPE could have been worth easily $10.00 a copy. ( at that time, Win 95 was worth around $75 a copy ) So, if AOL had actually tried defending Netscape, and held out for a couple of weeks more for a price, AOL could have been able to get a similar settlement from the government against MIOCROSOFT for a cost of around, oh say a cool $ 3,537,414,966.00 ( Thats 3.5 billion USD kiddies ). ===== So, be prepared More MS FUD in the future, and with that, I make the following predictions; [ No, I am not paranoid Dave, this is the trend I see ] - I believe that next OS release from MS will have a OS detection system, to damage or interfere with LILO and GRUB, [ To keep market share ] - I believe that AOL will have services provided to it's customer base, on the strict rule that it be contacted via a MS OS product; They've already pre-paid MS the license for IE for 8 years use, - Web Browsers like MOZILLA and OPERA will eventually be shut out entirely out of the newiest webservers from MS, much like NETSCAPE was out of W2K servers, only more aggressively, - MS will push desktop manufacturer's, hard drive builders, and other PC builders to make the MS the defacto product installed on the PC, and ensure that the boot partition is made unavailable for anyone trying to install LINUX or any other OS afterwards extremely difficult. [ Except of course, you upgrade with a MS product :) ] - The US dept. of Homeland Defense will introduce new rules of internet conduct that using any OS other than MS Windows is 'UNPROTECTED', and that anyone browsing with a UNIX variant OS will merely be 'blocked' from the US held IP addresses. This occurs when IPV6 is implemented for the internet, with the reasoning being the non-MS OS is not able to protect itself from worms and viruses. [ It would be MS FUD, not mine, ] Time limit for all this to happen; 3 to 7 years, the latest. [ Time quoted as from this date, AUG 2003 ] __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/general
