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Caldera claims MS emails proof of illegal competition

And the Caldera emails do seem a lot heavier than the ones the DoJ released...

MS on Trial Court filings by Caldera earlier this week claim that Microsoft internal documentation shows that the company used a series of misleading and anti-competitive strategies to damage sales of DR-DOS. The rival operating system was a strong challenger to Microsoft's MSDOS prior to the release of Windows 95, and Caldera (which 'inherited' DR-DOS from Novell) is suing Microsoft, claiming antitrust violations. Caldera's claims are to some extent ancient history, but the company contends that in addition to blocking sales of DR-DOS prior to the launch of Windows 95, Microsoft simply packaged MSDOS and Windows together to create Windows 95. There is some degree of truth in this, and Caldera's case has been aided by Microsoft emails from Bill Gates (Bill's careless emails) showing that the Microsoft boss saw 'integrating' the two and widening the boundaries of Microsoft's Windows intellectual property as weapons that could be used to reduce Novell's (as then was) ability to compete. Gates' emails also help by pointing to the market share DR-DOS had managed to achieve, and musing loudly about how much more money Microsoft could have made out of MSDOS if it had used integration and intellectual property protection to a greater extent on it. Caldera claims, with copious MS email support, that Microsoft used misleading product announcements, scare stories about bugs in DR-DOS and possible copyright infringements, exclusionary licensing deals (MS $50k to buy out Vobis DR-DOS deal) and blocked Novell access to Windows information. One of Caldera's expert witnesses has estimated the cost of this as $1.6 billion - this would be quite a windfall from a product Caldera got from Novell more or less for free. ® Complete Register trial coverage

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