Caldera's lawsuit against Microsoft expands

Lost in all of the legal turmoil surrounding Microsoft these days is a long-outstanding lawsuit from Caldera that will go to court in November. Atissue is Microsoft's alleged attempts to push DR DOS out of the market backin the DOS/Windows 3.1 days. Caldera picked up the rights to DR DOS--alongwith the Microsoft--lawsuit from Novell a few years ago. Caldera is bestknown as the seller of a commercial version of Linux, a UNIX-like operatingsystem that is popular with college students and the Amish (well, OK, notthe Amish).

While the Caldera lawsuit hasn't gotten a lot of press lately, there aresome interesting new developments. Originally, the antitrust lawsuit waslimited to alleged wrongdoing regarding DOS and Windows 3.1. Yesterday, afederal magistrate judge allowed Caldera to amend the lawsuit to includeWindows 95.

"Until the court allowed us to include Windows 95 in our lawsuit, the casewe've had has been very historical in nature," said Lyle Ball, a Caldera spokesperson. "Now it includes current behavior, so we get to use evidence we've gathered post-1995 to also prove our allegations against Microsoft." Microsoft will attempt to postpone the trial at a hearing set for tomorrow