From Groklaw: Right after the Court of First Instance announced its verdict Monday upholding the EU Commission's finding that Microsoft abused its monopoly, our own Sean Daly did an interview with the following: Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case. It's a delight. Here's the audio [Ogg and MP3], and we have a transcript too, thanks to the tireless Ciaran O'Riordan, who did three-quarters of it, and Sean, who did the rest.

This is living history. I wanted you and your children and your grandchildren to know some of those they can thank, because when almost all the vendors were signing peace pacts with Microsoft, taking settlement money and slinking away from the case, they stayed to fight to the end. Their role was essentially to speak for FOSS and to make sure the court and the EU Commission understood the technology and the needs of Linux and Samba and all those trying to compete with Microsoft from the Free Software/Open Source community. Unbelievably, they won.

I think you will enjoy hearing Allison describe the courtroom, and his take on what lawyers do, viewing it from a programmer's perspective.

Here's a YouTube video for you to see what the robes look like that the lawyers there wear that Jeremy talks about. They seem to take off the wigs before they speak to the media, but here's an example of one and you get a brief look at one in the video at the very beginning. Here's another look at the robes, and the video includes a clip of Microsoft attorney Brad Smith using Novell and Sun for PR purposes.

Sometimes folks try to characterize, or mischaracterize, the FOSS community. If you want to know what that community is like, it's like this, this interview, these four men who dared to try the impossible, with weapons of intellect and skill and integrity rather than money, men who couldn't be bought, who never gave up, and who happily lived to tell us the story with humor and pleasantness. Ladies and gentlemen, please may I have Sean introduce you to them now?

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