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

I think there is a significant danger, in the unlikely event that this 
harebrained action goes ahead — and inevitably crashes and burns — that 
the Dvorak ’brand’ could find itself contaminated, or an object of 
ridicule, or both. Companies who have given Dvorak the degree of support 
the market demands — even a little more — will lift their hand from it. 
I hope this piece of silliness is quickly forgotten.

Kim Bastin

On 30/01/2011 02:32, [email protected] wrote:
>
> 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.
>>
>
>
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