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Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:14 AM EST

The Register is crying about the loss to historians of the exhibits and transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft lawsuit. However, Groklaw will not let these Microsoft documents disappear. We have all of the materials, thanks to Groklaw members who had the foresight to save it all as it appeared, just in case.

Here are some of the exhibits and the court trial transcripts. You'll find the Bill Gates video deposition played to the jury here.

Eventually we'll make a permanent page. It's not finished yet, as we will be adding more descriptions on all the exhibits and notations on who was on the witness stand in each transcript, more exhibits will be added when time permits. You can help by leaving a comment on what you found of interest in a particular exhibit or transcript.

These documents are all public domain materials by order of the judge in the case.

-- MathFox

  


Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft | 236 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Corrections Here
Authored by: feldegast on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:20 AM EST
So Mathfox can fix them

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2007 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • Mathfox -> MathFox :-) - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:31 AM EST
  • Humility Please - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 01:25 PM EST
    • Patience Please - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 05:17 PM EST
    • The Register - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 05:31 PM EST
Thanks for saving our bacon -- Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:23 AM EST
Mathfox,

Personally, I consider this just about as valuable a service as all the work
performed by PJ on SCO vs MS.

A paranoid reader.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:30 AM EST
How about donating it to Project Gutenberg? http://www.gutenberg.org

[ Reply to This | # ]

Latest "The Register" article.
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:34 AM EST
This one is more positive, and a Groklawer gets a mention. Link

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off-topic
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:48 AM EST
According to news reports, the South African government plans to switch all
government departments to Linux. Government communications head Themba Maseko
said, "All new software developed for or by the government will be based on
open standards and government will itself migrate current software to
FOSS."

[ Reply to This | # ]

Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 10:53 AM EST
The torrent on thepiratebay.org (titled just "iowa") has does not
contain all the court tramscripts (it stops at 8 january) but it does have a lot
of pdf files more. So I'm merging these sources.

[ Reply to This | # ]

It is time for two new changes at Groklaw
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 11:06 AM EST
Sorry for posting anon, I can't find my login right now.

I think it's time for two new changes at Groklaw:

1. A process that auto-exports a locally browsable (perhaps auto-PDF generation)
version of the entire contents of Groklaw in static snapshot form, updated
weekly, available for users to download and mirror.

While I'm thinking primarily of comments, articles and analysis, the available
files, transcriptions, PDFs, etc. should also be available for easy mirroring.

It seems clear that the-powers-that-be will continue taking potshots at Groklaw,
and having a process that allows for the entire snapshot of Groklaw to be saved
in the event of a takedown, would be historically good. Think of it as a
backup, with the users acting as the redundancy.

This needs to be a feature, rather than individual users running a bot to slurp
all the html pages, because that will put undue stress on the server and keep
the bandwidth bill high.


2. With PJs absence, it highlights the fact that there is a SPOF (Single Point
of Failure) in the current configuration of Groklaw.

While it's nice to see the articles continue to get generated (thanks MathFox
et. al), Groklaw should be set up with a team of (para)legal commentators, so
that the temporary or permanent loss of any one of the commentators (sickness,
vacation, etc.) will not stop the flow of biting truthful analysis.

In essence, Groklaw needs to transition from a Santa's helpers to a redundant
architecture.

If they hobble a contributor, someone else can take up the legal analysis slack.
If they hobble the site, the content is not disappeared.

Let's not let this wake-up call go unnoticed. I'm sure there are many people who
can contribute in the way of code for the autogeneration system, and patches to
the GeekLog system to address redundancy, mirroring, and redundancy in legal
analysis contributors.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 11:42 AM EST
PJ, Mathfox,

Backups are of course, very necessary. How about putting the data onto DVD(s) so
other individuals may maintain backup copies? Copies could be sold at a nominal
cost to support their production in a fashion similar to John Young's
"Cryptome" site located at: <a href="
http://www.jya.com/"> www.jya.com/</a>

There's probably too much for single disk so perhaps breaking the data into
subcategories categories would be more helpful:

1) SCO, 2) Microsoft, 3) others

I'm sure anybody who wants to support the ongoing efforts of Groklaw would be an
early adopter. Researchers would find these "gold mines" helpful in
preparing manuscripts and other documents, librarians could add to their
libraries, lawyers would have more bullets for their 'guns', etc.


anon46

[ Reply to This | # ]

    Comes v. Microsoft, Gates Deposition
    Authored by: FrnchFrgg on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 11:47 AM EST
    I have transcoded anew the wmv files since the ogg theora ones provided on the
    site had problems with the speed of the video.

    Two rounds of video are on my http server:

    -one high quality, only transcoded and letting VLC choose the right parameters
    to loose the least of quality. Those are MPEG 2 + VORBIS in an OGG container
    (current version of VLC segfaults when encoding THEORA on half of the videos).
    They are roughly the same size as the WMVs (a little smaller) exept for one
    which is half the size (I cannot explain it, it is complete), and the loss of
    quality (if any) isn't noticeable.

    location: http://frnchfrgg-home.hd.free.fr/perso/gates/Gates<num>Depo.ogg


    -one low quality, MPEG 1 (it's purported to be better than MPEG2 at low
    bitrates) 64kbps + VORBIS 48kbps, all 320x240 except the first (352x240). I
    tried speex for audio, but it doesn't make smaller files (maybe because the
    background noise is difficult for a voice-optimized codec ?)
    They are 4 to 5 times smaller than the full quality OGG, and could be even
    smaller had I managed to make VLC produce mono output.

    location: http://frnchfrgg-home.hd.free.fr/perso/gates/low-<num>.ogg


    Hope that helps.

    (Already sent to MathFox by e-mail, but I am not sure if it reached him)

    _FrnchFrgg_

    P.S.: I don't know if or when I'll need to reclaim the disk space of those
    files, so you shouldn't rely on their availability on my server. Also keep in
    mind that it's my home server, mainly used as a debian repository, so do not
    expect godly upload rates from it.

    ---
    _FrnchFrgg_

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Register Update - They now know
    Authored by: john-from-ct on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 12:11 PM EST
    I posted a comment on the Register that the exhibits are available here.

    ---
    Just another greybeard geek!

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    When and how will Microsoft shut down Groklaw?
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 12:31 PM EST
    I suspect Microsoft's working on plans to block Groklaw itself.

    Would PJ's price to sell out as easily and cheaply as Hovsepian did?

    A half billion means little to Microsoft. If you were PJ, for what price would
    you sell?

    Any other techniques they might use?


    I like the earlier comment on this article asking for an easy way for random end
    users to mirror Groklaw - all the comments, all the articles, etc. Would a
    database dump feature or a rsync interface to groklaw be possible (legally and
    technically)?

    Mostly I really don't want to see Groklaw vanish; and after the Comes v
    Microsoft mirror comes up I'm pretty sure Microsoft will want it to vanish.
    Things tend not to last long when that happens.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Microsoft hit with $1.52 billion patent suit damages
    Authored by: Bill The Cat on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 04:59 PM EST
    Microsoft hit with $1.52 billion patent suit damages

    Yep, more proof that Microsoft is a honorable corporate citizen.

    ---
    Bill The Cat

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Newspicks: Can you patent code?
    Authored by: gfim on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 05:09 PM EST
    As I've said here (and elsewhere) a few times, whether pure code can or cannot be patented is not the important question for most people. We really need to know whether pure code (or documentation, or data files) can be an infringement of a patent. If there was a ruling that it could not, then 99% of the FUD from Microsoft et al would go poof.

    ---
    Graham

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    • Does it matter? - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 08:54 PM EST
    Exhibit Notations
    Authored by: DaveJakeman on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 05:14 PM EST
    You can help by leaving a comment on what you found of interest in a particular exhibit or transcript.
    Post 'em here:

    ---
    I would rather stand corrected than sit confused.
    ---
    Should one hear an accusation, try it on the accuser.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Iowa documents
    Authored by: grouch on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 06:47 PM EST
    The bits and bytes are still slowly marching up to my website. I think my wife is contemplating something desperate with the shotgun; it takes about a minute just to check email while this upload is going on.

    It will take at least a couple more days at my connection speed, but the following directories under http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org are now complete (any other directories you spot may have partial files and should not be trusted yet):
    010807/
    011107/
    011207/
    011607/0000/
    011607/1000 /
    011607/2000/
    011607/3000/
    011607/4000/
    011607/5000/

    Still to go are the 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000 directories under 011607 plus a directory named 122106. After that will be a 65M upload of what I grabbed from iowaconsumercase.org (which was different from what used to be at www.iowaconsumercase.org).

    There are text transcripts under http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/ along with "Media_Update" and other PDFs. All files were downloaded from the Comes v. Microsoft website during 2 separate mirroring downloads over the course of about 2 weeks. Sorry, but I don't have a clue about how to prove the files I'm uploading are the same as the ones I downloaded. You can compare them to other mirrors.

    ---
    -- grouch

    http://edge-op.org/links1.html

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft
    Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 09:46 PM EST
    if you can, setting up something like a torrent for the video would be best to
    keep the bandwidth usage low. you don't need a tracker, you can use a magnet
    link system.

    once it gets somewhere like mininova, it'll never dissappear.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Off Topic
    Authored by: artp on Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 11:58 PM EST
    Posted Non-Anonymous so that we end up with only one thread for Off Topic. Best
    solution for the maximum number of people. Because PJ asked us to do it this
    way. Because it's confusing otherwise. Because Anonymous posting is provided for
    those who need it, just for nice, but be nice in return. Because I ran out of
    reasons.

    I can't believe that the Off Topic threas is this far down.

    ---
    Every time I have seen a business move enterprise (business-critical) software
    to Windows, the company has gone broke if small, or lost lots of money if large.

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    Comes v. Microsoft: outline of Schulman initial expert report
    Authored by: aschulman on Friday, February 23 2007 @ 12:20 AM EST
    While the supplemental expert report that I wrote in Comes v. Microsoft has been made public, the initial expert report I wrote hasn't yet. The supplemental report was written after I had an opportunity to review Microsoft's Windows and Office source code, and for the most part merely provides additional bases for opinions that I had already given in the earlier report. The earlier report was based on reverse engineering of the Windows and Office binary code, upon many Microsoft internal documents (such as emails), and upon public documents such as patents, documentation at MSDN, and blogs by Microsoft employees.

    Since the supplemental report is already public, but may make little sense outside the context of the initial report, I have uploaded a copy of the table of contents of the initial report:

    http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/comes_v_microsoft/comes_v_ms_schulman_opinion s.txt

    Microsoft's attorney made the following statement at trial on Feb. 12:

    "MR. HOLLEY: Your Honor, very briefly before the jury comes in, I just wanted to report that over the weekend we'd had an opportunity to look at the approximately 50 internal Microsoft documents that Mr. Schulman refers to in his expert report. And we are -- we are of the view that none of them is sufficiently confidential to stop the document from being released publicly. So we have no objection to both the first expert report and the first deposition being released to the public."

    So there should be no problem in providing the initial expert report in its entirety. However, I am going to be overly cautious about this for the next few weeks. My goal is to upload not only the initial report, but also extensive comments on it, including links to the Microsoft internal documents from which it quotes. In the meantime, like I said, here is the table of contents of the initial report, to help put the supplemental expert report in context.

    I also think it would be great to have some balance provided by the technical expert reports that were submitted by expert witnesses called by Microsoft.

    Andrew

    [ Reply to This | # ]

    About the Settlement / Schools
    Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 23 2007 @ 10:03 PM EST
    Is it true part of the settlement is to supply Microsoft Software to schools
    (free of charge)?

    Wouldn't it be more appropriate if Microsoft had to pay for some other
    supplier's software, Redhat / Novell / Apple to be provided to these schools?

    Installing extending the Microsoft user base plays directly into the monopoly
    position, and this case was about monopoly abuse.

    In fact, it would make sense to have a law to make such a settlement illegal in
    monopoly cases.

    [ Reply to This | # ]
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