@ Miffy

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....and this is of relevance to AmigaWorld.net because?

Maybe you are right with regard to creating an editorial instead, as not everybody may know Be Inc's history and roots. But I did not want to emphasize my personal opinions on how this outcome could effect Amigas and similar products and if I think this outcome is positive or not.

But since you asked:

Sadly this finally marks the end of Be Inc, a company which originally produced a multimedia orientated PPC based desktop computer similar to the current Amiga desktop effort (Most of the people who bought a BeBox at the time had Amiga roots). Eventually the company decided to concentrate on the mainstream x86 PC market instead, but potential partnerships were hindered by Microsoft. (AmigaOS is also expected to go multi-platform in the long run).

And finally due to the lack of results with regard to BeOS, Be Inc decided to focus on BeIA instead. Which was to be an operating system targeted mainly at embedded devices/internet appliances. (A market also targeted by Amiga with AmigaDE technology and possibly with AmigaOS in the future also). The many similarities are IMO quite striking and therefor I believe quite newsworthy for AmigaWorld.net to report on.

With regard to the actual outcome of the settlement I believe the amount of money is pretty fair to the current shareholders. However with regard to fairness for the sake of competition (alternatives vs monopolists) I believe this is a clear victory for Microsoft. Now with a sum of money which is roughly worth 1 day of Microsoft's operations (1 day net profit), the company has been able to finally fully loose a potential commercial competitor (once worth over one billion dollar at the stock market).

@MikeB

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I am looking
for "context" to be provided in the editorial, not necessarily personal opinions.

I, for one at least, was happy to see the story. I don't read much tech news and M$ is such a big player its actions affect so much of the industry.

Another example:
I've heard IBM will be pushing it's version of Linux as a direct competitor to M$ during this Fall's sports season on TV. AOS4 runs Linux ...therefore..............etc.

Perhaps when AOS4 is released there will so much to read and deal with we won't have much time for "other"......I hope!

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make them make the APIs available to people, to remove the interconnectivity of IE to the OS (which still hasn't been 100% achieved anyway), and to make it easier for compnents to be replaced by 3rd party ones like browsers, mail programs etc.

I'm not sure about all the APIs, or the reliance of the OS on IE, but if browsers, mail clients, calendar apps etc register themselves properly with the OS, they can completely replace IE and OE - except for things like WindowsUpdate that require the intimacy with the OS that IE has.

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It's ok for people, especially lawyers, to be loose with the meanings of words. Yep, contrary to popular belief lawyers are very loose with definitions, not strict with them.

They can say Microsoft admits to no wrongdoing, but in fact Microsoft just admitted to 23 million dollars of wrong doing. If a lawyer can stretch the meaning of words to near their breaking point, we are all, certainly free to use words in a common sense type of way.

After all, if Microsoft is just giving money away to people whom they did no wrong at all, I'll take my 23 million right now, please.

whether this story is relevant to an Amiga type website....I don't believe it really relates either, and
every time an amiga website waters down its content with clearly non-amiga stuff,
it makes it less interesting, I can find a generalized news source somewhere else.

However, given that we can cover BeOS, than an even more closely derived hardware platform,
pegasos can be covered too, and that will make a lot of people happy.

The community really isn't entirely focused on Amiga, Inc. anymore and generally this community
is interested in stuff going on at other companies like Apple.
It's a grey area for sure.

I must admit, sometimes I've been updated by goings on in the ppc world, by this site, that
I would have missed on my readings of general computer industry sites.

@ RobertDupuy

We cover anything *major* from other platforms if we think the story is of interest to Amiga supporters and this this may also include the Pegasos (like we recently covered an OSNews review).

With regard to this story, if something similar would have happened to the company producing the Pegasos product, I am sure we would have covered such a story as well.

@ Kay

You hit the nail right on the head with that one.

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Quote:

You hit the nail right on the head with that one.

Yep, big time.