Novell Offered Microsoft Help in Antitrust Case
Posted by Toxicfume on 29 March 2002 - 07:58 · 20 comments & 216 views
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A Novell Inc. executive told a federal court on Thursday he once offered to help Microsoft Corp. fend off the government's antitrust case if Microsoft would help Novell's networking software work better with the Windows operating system.
Novell chief technology officer Carl Ledbetter, under questioning by a Microsoft attorney, said he told a Microsoft official in February 2000 that Novell would "make sure that it was well-known" to government officials that Microsoft had reformed if Microsoft would help fix Novell's interoperability problems with Windows.
"We were hopeful we could induce Microsoft to become aware that having better interoperability with us could help them with their legal problems," Ledbetter said.
Ledbetter was one of two witnesses to take the stand against Microsoft at the end of a second week of hearings into what antitrust sanctions should be imposed on the software company for illegally maintaining its Windows monopoly.
An executive from No. 1 handheld computer maker Palm Inc. told the judge Microsoft moved to share a key programming tool with Palm only after learning that Palm was participating in the antitrust case.
According to Google spokesman Nate Tyler, the company is merely trying to prevent other search crawlers from hurting the performance of its site.
"We have blocked other spiders from fully crawling our site because it would require too many server resources on our end to support that," said Tyler, who noted that Google takes great care when indexing other sites so as not to overload them.
According to a database maintained by The Web Robots Pages, there are 284 robots that actively crawl the Web under names including Googlebot, Inktomi Slurp, and AltaVista Scooter.
Most crawlers honor the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which specifies that robots should check a site for a file named robots.txt for a list of "disallowed" directories and adhere to it when indexing the site.
A comparison today by Newsbytes of robots files at other major Web destinations revealed sharp contrasts in the sites' attitude toward Web crawlers.
Some leading portals, such as those operated by Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Amazon and Lycos, have no robots file at all and apparently give search spiders free reign to index all of their pages.
Others, including AltaVista, only disallow bots from crawling in directories that contain program files.
Some big sites, however, attempt to block search crawlers completely. The robots file for the New York Times site, for example, appears to disallow search bots from accessing any of its archived content.
Ebay, which successfully sued a specialized search site that was trawling its online auction listings, uses a prohibitive robots file that begins with a simple comment: "Go away."
Similarly, CNN.com's file shoos away search spiders with a comment that states, "Robots, scram."
According to Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, Google may be attempting to prevent other search sites from "harvesting" its proprietary newsgroup archives and other content.
"Having a robots file doesn't just protect your resources. It can also protect your intellectual property," said Sullivan, who added that a site's failure to restrict access to proprietary content through a robots file could limit its legal position in copyright infringement cases.
Sullivan noted, however, that respecting a site's robots file is entirely voluntary, and that "rogue" search bots are likely to ignore it altogether. For that reason, some sites may eschew robots files and instead block certain Internet protocol addresses that are associated with "impolite" spiders, he said.
In fact, some experts have argued that robots files provide snoops with clear instructions on how to find the most sensitive areas of a Web site.
Bertrand Meyer, a software expert who developed a computer language called Eiffel, observed in a 1998 message to the RISKS mailing list that itemizing disallowed directories in a robots file is akin to telling someone, "Here is what I am not telling you."
"I think there are some basic flaws in this mechanism. If I'm a bad guy, the robots file is the first place I'm going to start looking," Meyer said in an interview Wednesday.
A link to Meyer's posting is tucked into the beginning of the robots file at Sun Microsystem's site. The comments section of the file at Sun.com explains in considerable detail the company's justification for disallowing bots in seven directories.
According to Sun's file, which begins with the words, "A note to those who'd bother to look at this file," the company is not trying to hide proprietary content. Instead, the purpose of its robots file is to prevent users from downloading the pages without first registering with Sun, the file stated.