EULA Strikes again

If I can get a copy of this EULA, I think I'll hire an attorney to look into the implications.

It doesn't matter if it's against the law. You think the FBI is just going to jump out and make the world right, especially when the Navy is building all of its new carriers around Windows? Not a chance.

What matters is if an effective lawsuit can be brought. Being against the law only makes it easier to make one stick. You can't sue somebody for asking you to enter into an agreement even todo an illegal act, because you can't show damages. You can always say "no" and send the software back.

However, if you violate the agreement, and Microsoft sues you, you can slap them with a countersuit asking for arbitrarily high punitive damages.

The ACLU used to be good at setting up this sort of thing. Where are they now, anyway?

Really, copyrights protect programming (or at least should) in the USA anyway. The GPL as an "inoculant" seems to me to just be a pawn in the FUD game. The general public here's "opensource" and thinks "free software" (which is also mistaken) and supports it. The general public doesn't really know what virii are, but think they are evil. MS has resurrected an old fairly legitimate arguement about licensing (BSDvsGPL)not on the basis of any real comparison to a virus, but just totally on hype and lack of true understanding by the general public.

The thing that really freaks me out in that UELA is that if they keep going this direction, it will be illegal to NETWORK, yes, NETWORK any non MS product to an MS product.

Ok, yes, I imaginethey'll still let you network via the internet, just not internally, although they might be "nice" to us consumers and invent their own exceedingly expensive product to facilitate what we already can do if it's pressed in court. I guess we'll all switch workstations too at that point, if it comes....

I'm going to make one of my annoying little analyses that almost nobody thinks is true until it becomes obvious, and then everyone forgets that I said it first.

Some analysts have said that Microsoft opposes Open Source because they do not want competition. I don't think this is true, or at least not precisely true.

I speculate that the reason is this: The most effective way to make money using Open Source is with products that use established, public protocols to play fair with other products. Microsoft needs to maintain the fiction that this is impossible. Even the existence of Open Source systems, regardless of the market share, is a threat to this fiction. Therefore, they must be demonized and/or wiped out.

Consider the Halloween memo, which explicitly talks about de-commodifying protocols. Consider the proprietarization of networks, starting with Front Page and continuing onto Net. Consider my earlier analysis about XP to facilitate this proprietarization.

Also consider Microsoft's consistent reaction to the DOJ, that they tied their OS, browser, and whatever so tightly to each other because it was impossible to do otherwise and still innovate.

Open Source, if it produces synergy with loose coupling, undermines essentially ALL of Microsoft's legal arguments for the past three years.

Microsoft isn't stupid. They know that nothing they do will act against them in the appeals. It CAN'T. The DOJ is legally prohibited from considering anything not in the original suit. The best the DOJ could do would be to spend umpteen million dollars on a new suit that in three years would probably wind up in an equally untenable position.

However, if it can be demonstrated that synergistic products can produce innovation, then it means that Microsoft's position may be legally untenable. That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.