Letter to DOJ 05_16_04

05/16/2004 Attorney General Ashcroft US Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20530-0001 Dear Mr Ashcroft: As you may recall from my previous communication dated 4/02/04 (Registered item #7004 0750 0000 3497 7517) signed for on 4/08/04 by Mr. Ernest H Paibes (?) I am still interested in questions surrounding Microsoft's status as a Monopoly. I wrote that letter in frustration, because I have programming ideas that I cannot use for the profit motive that drives our economy, and I cannot personally compete. Examples of these include $ a large number manipulator that will add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers on the order of 2^1024-5 (showing all digits of each, not rounding to scientific notation.) $ A GUI interface for Java (it does not support multiple inheritance, differing from Visual C++ in that aspect.) The major reason that I feel the need to approach the Dept Of Justice, rather than practice that tried and true cliche of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," is that I cannot countenance their business practices. From the first day that Mr Gates discerned that an O/S for the PC market would be of value, he has shown that he is the businessman's businessman, but not honorable otherwise. His previous wrongs should not, in the end become some kind of defense for his future behavior. A litany of my complaint would be $ He did not write DOS, he bought CP/M,(sic - should read _SCP_) and sold it re-labeled as his own. $ When 32 bit processors were in their infancy, Atari had a GUI (not a full O/S, but still graphical in nature,) called TOS (Tramiel Operating System.) Apple and M'soft participated in the pillage of Xerox's X/Y co-ordinate indicator, that later became our familiar mouse. $ When Lotus broke ground with the concept of a Spread Sheet, when all that had gone before were Word Processors, they stole the "Look and Feel" and set a precedent for later offences. $ Then, when Apple used a proprietary h/w system to make their O/S stable, driving up cost, he backwards engineered their GUI OS. $ Then when Netscape broke ground with the Internet Browser, M'soft once again competed unfairly, this time getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The legal term for what they did was "dumping," if I am correct. $ At that point, the Attorney General's office changed direction, and they were not penalized unduly. Their response to this was to make their API's (Application Programmer Interfaces) available to the Chinese Government. This was a de-facto force choosing to make the Chinese programmer have an unfair advantage over the American programmer. The effect it had was to make Chinese programmers able to develop applications that generated demand for the Windows OS over the Linux/Unix OS that the Chinese Government had chosen back then for cost reasons. $ Then came Real Player, and the Anti-trust suit that was brought against Media Player in Belgium, for despair against having any real success in The US. $ Following that, there was a change in legal cases, because Criminal charges were brought in Germany. It is a shame and an embarrassment that our legal system is going to be surpassed in Justice overseas. Back at the time, I remember that the Attorney General had made a very public comment that the Federal judge over the case had been biased, by being angry. My thought on that would be, that if the offence was so egregious, and so lacking in remorse that a Federal judge could not maintain his composure, perhaps this particular offence should be given more careful consideration. As to the question of whether the process of automating the search for buffer overrun errors is even possible, I would like to bring to your attention that back before Windows 95 was brought to fruition, Bill Gates made a public comment that it was impossible to multi-task in less than 2MB of RAM. As it turned out, I was employed at the time working as a Mainframe Computer Operator, on a DOS/VSE machine that had over four partitions in 1024kb (1MB) of RAM. Mr Gates is not reliable source of what things are impossible. If it becomes necessary to prove this, I would ask him if he truly had any confidence that Linus Torvald could not, given the source code. Again I would like to stress that I am ready to offer a solution that should benefit all concerned, if M'soft can once more required to participate, rather than proceed un-rebuked. If they are so vital to our economy that we cannot get along without them, then we should take thought how to protect them militarily, if China was to bomb them off the Pacific coast. Yours Sincerely, Robert B Johnson next letter