Your Honor, Congratulations on a finding of fact that was exactly that. You are now faced with the decision of what to do to remedy the social and economic malady known as Microsoft. Mr. Gates has stated that the "solution" proposed by the Justice Department was obviously not designed by anyone familiar with the software business. The delightful irony of that is that even a manic salesman like Gates occaisionally speaks a striking truth. The DoJ approach resembles Microsoft software, in fact, being as it is, devoid of originality. Besides which, yours is an opportunity, and perhaps responsibility, to improve the very nature of the software business. In the technical-oriented Internet chat group I frequent, persons of all points on the love/hate spectrum vis-a-vis Microsoft do not expect the DoJ approach to be very effective. Converting a monopoly into a two-party cartel is not expected to have much effect on an organization that is proven to be utterly devoid of ethics. The DoJ approach has a number of other flaws. It is high-maintenance, creating executive branch jobs that are dependant on the existance of Microsoft. It enforces the distinction between application and operating system, which is a poor model, promulgated by purveyors of poor software. "Interoperability" is considered something to strive for in the world Microsoft dominates, which is a game they play to no one's advantage but thier own, while being considered a silly term for something that can normally be assumed in, for example, the unix world. The Internet is a result of this. Internets don't happen in the Microsoft world. What is known to be effective for technical purposes is the open-source model of software development. Public sourcecode is a wonderful resource. I am a Linux user and advocate because I own my copy of it, and if you get a copy from me, you own your copy. There is no "You lease..." inside the shrinkwrap. There's frequently no shrinkwrap. Linux, the Internet, and many other valuable resources that are now fighting off destructive dis-honest actions by Microsoft flourish because of the inate power of openness. Openness is the one thing Microsoft can not side-step. They have no response to it what-so-ever, like any other criminal. This is why they are unable to stamp out Linux. Your finding of fact was a revelation to me. The striking consistancy of Microsoft's culpability in every charge under question, and exposure of Mr. Gate's habitual mafia-don-like dealings and remarks, made some sense of something that had bewildered me for many years; the demise of the Amiga platform. I could never figure out why the goons that took over Commodore, the company that manufactured the Amiga, scuttled the company. Mere stupidity, which I have seen destroy companies up close, was not sufficient to explain the behavior of the management of Commodore Business Machines after the founder was driven out. What they are publicly known to have gained personally from destroying the best personal computer and operating system in the marketplace didn't add up. Well, given Microsoft's total disregard for corporate borders and ethical competition, it is in fact quite unreasonable to suppose that the saboteurs were not rewarded handsomely before or after they skipped off to the Bahamas. The Amiga was a terrible threat to Intel, IBM and Microsoft. A PC in 1988 was a pitiful thing compared to an Amiga. That is not mere nerd partisanship; that is a fact. It is still very sad to see what passes for multi-media innovation in the PC world in the year 2000. It's only been relatively recently that the big three have admitted that "multi-media", which they recently claimed to have invented, was a legitimate use for a computer, and not just a toy. This is wild extrapolation, of course. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps CBM was that stupid. Intelligence is finite, but stupidity seems infinite at times. My point is that there is no reason to suppose that the Amiga scenario I posit was unique or unusual. It is in fact unreasonable to suppose so. Considerations such as these do, I believe, pertain when considering remedies. For one thing, Mr. Gates is still quite convinced he's doing the world a favor, and that you and I are just plain stupid. This does not bode well for complex "solutions". Further, my point is Microsoft has no moral right to anything they have. That includes the sourcecode to all thier products. Thier copyrights in those works are ill-gotten gains. Publicizing the source to, say, Windows 98, will be genuinely and almost instantly remedial, simple, and will only be punitive upon Microsoft to the extent that they are not the great innovators that they constantly claim, having produced several indispensible new innovations since Windows 98 anyway. As a programmer, someone who knows software as well as Mr. Gates, but who can't function particularly well in a market Microsoft defines, since in that world money talks and technical merit walks, I ask you to do what many programmers, world-renowned and un-known, often ask; Your Honor, please sir, show us the source. Rick Hohensee Adelphi, Md. http://linux01.gwdg.de/~rhohen