Re: Re: members are invited to be lead Plaintiffs in the Qwerty class act

actually an attempt like this could backfire and cause the companies to 
pull support for Dvorak especially if the win a decisive victory.

Bob


On Sat, 29 Jan 2011, Paul Martzen wrote:

> Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 07:00:08 -0800
> From: Paul Martzen <[email protected]>
> Reply-To: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [altkeyboards] Re: members are invited to be lead Plaintiffs in the
>     Qwerty class act
> 
> I fail to see the basis of a class action suit against Microsoft or
> Apple over Dvorak.   They have made it easy to switch to Dvorak by
> including it in their operating systems.   If there was any consumer
> demand they would probably make dual label keyboards or even Dvorak
> labeled keyboards.   I think that Apple may have had a dual labeled
> keyboard option in their early years.   Apple 2, maybe?    I think to
> succeed is such a suit, you would have to prove that there was large
> demand for such keyboards, that the companies had some legal obligation
> to provide such keyboards, that they refused, and that their monopoly
> prevented consumers from obtaining such keyboards from other sources.
>
> I don't think that the operating system companies or the hardware
> companies are obligated to promote or force the use of Dvorak when the
> public is not interested.    Seems to me that the problem is the
> organizations which actively work to prevent the use of Dvorak: Schools,
> libraries, GRE and other testing services, various companies and system
> administrators.    As long as major institutions are allowed to force
> the use of Qwerty, then Dvorak will always be at a major disadvantage.
> Seems to me that Microsoft and Apple and other Operating Systems have
> done their best to make Dvorak available.   The problem is in other
> directions.
>
> I do think that legal, public, political action is warranted and could
> be successful against institutions which force the use of Qwerty and
> actively prevent the use of Dvorak.   But, a legal action should be the
> last step after all other reasonable attempts to correct the problem
> have been exhausted.    A parallel effort should be to find examples of
> such institutions which do allow the use of Dvorak.  That would set a
> standard that other institutions could be compared to.
>