Novel gets $440 mill in coupons and Microsoft gets $40 mill in cash. Pretty good deal for hollow threat from MS.

Oh please mister computing god who we can not exist without, don't throw us into the brier patch. Novel is a bunch spineless fools that should have attacked MS for patent and intellectual property infringement when they had the chance.

Ballmer must live in a parallel universe or perhaps he lives in Alice's looking glass world where everything is topsy-turvy. In the real world the rest of us live in, Microsoft is the one who steals intellectual property form everyone else. If we accounted for every idea that Microsoft has stolen over the years, Microsoft would not be worth a termite ridden, wooden nickel.

Someone please slap some sense into Ballmer!

Ballmer has always acted very questionably, in my opinion.

Remember when the Newton was being introduced, and he tried to get in to see it, but only people with press credentials could get in, so when the cab pulled up with all of the press materials, Ballmer tried to grab them and run off?

How about back before Microsoft had a database, and Borland was hosting a database conference at their site -- and Microsoft people were caught copying files from Borland employees' machines in their offices, away from the conference area? (I'd heard it suggested that this was a Ballmer-planned raid but I really don't have any confirmation of that one.)

Maybe Ballmer also needs to go after Al Gore, because maybe he feels that Microsoft really invented the internet. I gotta wonder if Microsoft's illegally infringing code is the same imaginary code that SCO was claiming to be in use.

chuck

Everybody knows that:

Apple Innovates (rarely copies, and if it does, improves tremendously like with the Mac idea from Xerox from the DoD).
Microsoft copies Apple.
Linux copies from all it can

And what? Everybody knows that...