The settlement is not disclosed? Then what’s this? This settlement was announced a couple of weeks back and was confidential. But here it is! As many of you know I was an expert witness in this case and I’ll tell my tales one day since I never signed any sort of non-disclosure agreement regarding the settlement or the case. Of course I was never told anything about the settlement and had to find this reference. It was during this Lindows versus Microsoft dispute that I was fired from TechTV (owned then by Microsoft shareholder Paul Allen) incidentally. Would that be tampering? Or was it just good business! Hm. Never thought of it until now. Maybe this will come up again. Personally I don’t think Paul ever watched this network or knew I was working there. I can tell you this much, the Lindows folks told me they could get nobody to help them as everyone was afraid of Microsoft. So I did my part and even refused to take an expert witness fee. I thought the suit was ridiculous. My job was to say that the term Windows was a generic reference back in 1983 or so. I also said that nobody confused Lindows with Microsoft as if it were a Microsoft product. That’s about it.

Since the case settled I still wonder why Microsoft cared to sue these guys who were hardly a threat. I’m now convinced that Microsoft wants to keep its options open to doing a Linux initiative and they might want to call it Lindows. It’s the only rationale I can imagine.

The irony is that I never thought Lindows was a very good name anyway. Kind of gimmicky. So they got paid a bunch of money to improve the name!