General Business

For Microsoft, No "Good" Open Source Deed Goes Unpunished

And it might cost it over $3 billion

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

17th of March 2008, 18:08 GMT

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For Microsoft, no "good" open source deed goes unpunished. The Redmond company is bound to find this out the hard way, via an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2004 by current partner Novell. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to put an end to the multibillion-dollar lawsuit filed by Novell over its WordPerfect application, by rejecting Microsoft's appeal. At the end of 2006, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark Windows-Linux interoperability

agreement, and the two companies have cooperated since then on bridging their proprietary and open source products. But ahead of tying the knot for the two operating systems, Microsoft and Novell had a tad of unfinished business, regarding the Redmond company's monopolistic ways.

The Redmond company's appeal was meant to turn around a previous decision from a lower court which concluded in Novell's favor, ruling that the open source software company could sue Microsoft under federal antitrust law. Novell alleges that in the mid-1990s, the Redmond company leveraged its Windows monopoly in order to undermine WordPerfect's market. WordPerfect is an alternative to Microsoft's Office System, only that it is no longer owned by Novell, having been sold to Corel.

"Microsoft specifically targeted WordPerfect and Novell's other office productivity applications because they threatened Microsoft's Windows monopoly," Novell revealed in a court filing as cited by Bloomberg. The open source company accused Microsoft of failing to share interoperability information that would have made WordPerfect integrate seamlessly with Windows 95. The lawsuit brought forth an email from Bill Gates in which the Microsoft co-founder and Chairman allegedly ordered to postpone the sharing of interoperability information specifically to give Office the edge in comparison with its rivals. Novell is seeking in excess of $3 billion worth of damages.

TAGS:

Microsoft | Novell | WordPerfect | antitrust

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