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To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (23325)	5/1/1999 6:21:00 PM
From: Thure Meyer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

I'm sure you've been following the Caldera case as well, here is a M.J. Foley article from last week. >> It can be tough to separate fact from fiction. But, as has been proven in the U.S. Department of Justice vs. Microsoft antitrust case, an e-mail trail makes things a little more clear cut. The trail is quite well-defined in the 188-page Caldera consolidated statement of facts, the crux of Caldera's defense in its own antitrust suit against the Redmond, Wash., software giant. Caldera made the document publicly available this week on its Web site. Caldera and its lawyers have been dangling promises of lots of tantalizing documentation for quite a while now. I was intrigued. (Seems like other folks have been tempted, too, including one of the company's three law firms, Summit Law Group in Seattle. Summit admits it has taken on the Caldera case on a contingency basis, meaning the firm is contributing all of its time for free because it believes the case has merit. If it does, Summit will get its cut later.) There are a lot of interesting excerpts in the statement of facts, including "snippets" from Microsoft documents and email messages. Microsoft claims these sound bites are out of context and thus invalid. It even went so far as to issue a press release earlier this week, calling Caldera's statement "pulp fiction." I'm no lawyer, but it sure seemed to me like a number of the excerpts gave weight to Caldera's charges of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), illegal product tying and contractual licensing terms in violation of antitrust laws. Whenever deflecting criticisms levied by Caldera, Microsoft officials have claimed that Caldera is attempting to dredge up out-of-date concerns that are no longer relevant to the operating system market. After reading through the statement of facts document, I would beg to differ. It's true that DOS is no longer a red-hot market. But the Caldera case is about more than the untimely death of DOS. It's about business practices. "It's only been recently that people have come to see a new side of Microsoft," says Ralph Palumbo, lead Summit Law Group attorney on the Caldera case. "There is a pattern of practices to kill the competition...We think there's a great deal of good that can be done by having much more public access to Microsoft's business practices." Summit and the DOJ both are counting on their respective antitrust cases involving Microsoft to lessen, if not remove, the "veil of secrecy" in which Microsoft's deals with OEMs, ISVs, ISPs and Internet Content Providers have been shrouded, says Palumbo. Already, Caldera and its attorneys claim to be seeing results. "In 1994 and 1995, no one would talk to us about Microsoft's business practices," Palumbo says. "They would say Microsoft won by their brilliance and innovation. But that public perception was not based on reality. People now are willing to step up and say 'here's what they [Microsoft] did to me.' " If even half of the claims in Caldera's statement of facts are true, Microsoft truly deserves its "Evil Empire" moniker (and journalists truly should hang their heads in shame at being snookered so easily by Microsoft-provided product leaks). What do you say: Does Caldera have a case? Talk back below and let me know. << Does Caldera have a case? Anyone trying to do software development in the late 80's and early nineties knows they do. MS deliberately made Windows 3.1 incompatible, wrote bogus error messages to the screen, etc. This case interests me in particular because I was using DR-DOS in the early 90's only to switch because MS made it more and more difficult use. There came a point when Windows 3.1 wouldn't run at all .. This is one of the key moments in establishing the MS monopoly and its good that it is being discussed. I have downloaded the deposition - its pretty interesting reading. Thure