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Comment of the Day - November 8, 2005 - Microsoft's D.C. legal firm had lawyers working with UNISYS

Posted by tadelste on Nov 8, 2005 7:04 AM
Lxer -Article; By StepheWalli

Stephe writes: The entire case was just wrong. The protesting companies made claims that were simply incorrect. That's why they lost. The reporting was sensational and wrong. That's why I wrote the article for USENIX ;login: once I was out from under the embargo of the appeals time frame. (I was the USENIX representative to the IEEE POSIX working groups, as Shane and Jeff both were before me.

[Ed: Interesting to get a perspective from the author of the article ten years after he testified at the hearing. If you have a difficult time getting to Stephe's article in the archives, need we say more?]

Related to:
Did Bill Gates Invent Linux and Has He Erased the Evidence?

How Microsoft Got its OS Declared an "Open System" and wound up in Government

"Dr. Heinz Lycklama represented the Microsoft/Unysis consortium."

Heinz was called in as a POSIX expert by the lawyers representing one of the protesting companies. (TiSoft maybe?) Dr. Peter Salus was also part of the debate for the other side ([HYPERLINK@www.groklaw.net]). So was Shane McCarron (who was Secretary of the IEEE POSIX Sponsor Executive Committee at the time). So was Dr. Jeff Haemer ([HYPERLINK@goyishekop.blogspot.com]).

I was the testifying POSIX expert on the Unisys side. Yes, Microsoft's D.C. legal firm had lawyers working with UNISYS external counsel (Wiley, Rein and Fielding). I was hired by W,R & F.

Sun was giving lawyers to one of the protesters on the other side, because it was bidding Sun servers. The other protesting company was bidding Mac as a client with SCO servers. (This was before the Mac was a creation of UNIX beauty and needed some funny emulator on it, and SCO was merely a cheap UNIX on Intel and hadn't been acquired by the Canopy Group as a litigation tool against IBM.)

The entire case was just wrong. The protesting companies made claims that were simply incorrect. That's why they lost. The reporting was sensational and wrong. That's why I wrote the article for USENIX ;login: once I was out from under the embargo of the appeals time frame. (I was the USENIX representative to the IEEE POSIX working groups, as Shane and Jeff both were before me.)

Transparency is a good thing.

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