Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg,
this morning rejected Microsoft's request to stay the European Commission's
March 2004 antitrust remedies requiring it to offer European OEMs a version
of Windows XP without the Windows Media Player in it and to license certain
protocols to its competitors that would let non-Microsoft workgroup servers
interoperate with Windows PCs.
In his 91-page ruling, Vesterdorf rejected Microsoft's argument that it would
suffer irreparable harm by complying with the EC's decision.
Vesterdorf's ruling may foreshadow Microsoft's chances of getting the EC
decision quashed on appeal, a process that is expected to take four or five
years. Vesterdorf, who will also hear the appeal, found little or nothing of
merit... (more)
Paul Maritz earned a gazillion dollars running all of Microsoft’s software
development, becoming one of the richest men in America, according to Forbes,
before retiring in 2000. And now he’s turned traitor, putting his skills
and his fortune at the disposal of, gad!!!!, Linux.
Maritz is the key force behind a start-up called PI Corporation that promises
to strengthen the Linux desktop with... (more)
Apache commercializer Covalent - Apache being open source's pride and joy
-has broken up into two separate entities and several top executives
including CEO John Jack have left.
One entity, which will remain Covalent, will continue to focus on the Apache
Web server and the Tomcat support business. Covalent VP of field operations
Mark Brewer is now its CEO.
The new entity is called Hyperic... (more)
In a tacit admission of failure, IBM, the archetypal capitalist that
pioneered the personal computer two decades ago, is selling its loss-ridden
PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker partly owned by the communist Chinese
government, in a complex $1.75 billion deal that will make IBM Lenovo's
second-largest shareholder.
Losses forced IBM to abandon retail PC sales in 1998. In 2002 it sold... (more)
Hewlett-Packard quietly dropped the high-end version of its StorageWorks
Reference Information Storage System (RISS) archiving widgetry seven months
after it launched.
HP's marketing director for ILM products and solutions Gary Lyng said
Thursday that the 4TB version of the Linux-based appliance was discontinued
in December.
Brought out last May, the thing was the first RISS appliance an... (more)