By William Fellows
Caldera Inc CEO Bryan Sparks and other spectators happened to get an early morning chuckle at Microsoft Corp’s expense during the antitrust trial in Washington DC last Thursday when Redmond attorney Richard Urowsky was questioning its key witness, MIT economics professor Richard Schmalensee. Is it your understanding that Microsoft’s more-advanced operating systems, such as Windows 95 and Windows 98, are more expensive or less expensive than earlier operating-system products, such as DR-DOS and Windows 3.x? Urowsky asked. I believe you meant to say MS- DOS rather than DR-DOS, Schmalensee replied. Sorry. I did mean MS-DOS, he replied. The answer holds for DR-DOS, too, but that’s not relevant, Schmalensee quipped. DR-DOS owner Caldera is currently pursuing its own private antitrust lawsuit against the Redmond giant. The Caldera suit, which is due to begin in June says that Microsoft put Windows 4.0 and DOS 7.0 together to create Windows 95 specifically to kill off competition. Caldera – which says it wants to be a mainstream operating system vendor – says the two are illegally tied together to create the impression that DOS on the desktop is dead. Caldera can run Windows 4.0 on its DR DOS MS-DOS equivalent, proving, it says, that in fact there is no real technical dependence between the two. Meantime Sparks says Caldera will do all it can to help the efforts of the so-called Windows Refund Day group (CI No 3,581). He added that Sun Microsystems Inc’s nascent plan to offer Solaris on an open source basis would be likely to help Linux vendors, including Caldera. He doesn’t think open source Solaris will compete with Linux as it is intended for use on higher-end systems.
