Microsoft Finally Bows to EU Antitrust Measures

Rogue Pat writes "Microsoft ended three years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission. Competitors will be able to buy interface protocols for 10.000 Euro to make their software work better with Windows. Moreover, Microsoft won't appeal the 500 million Euro fine any further."

That's it?

[rsantmann]

Microsoft makes about 50 billion USD per year.[1] That is only 1% of Microsoft's one year revenue. Anyone who thinks this is going to deter Microsoft from anti-competitive practices is badly mistaken.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001926 [computerworld.com]

Re:Microsoft should have payed the fine

[hankwang]

If they had started paying it initially, with the decrease of the dollar and increase of the euro, it would have saved them a lot of money.

They already paid directly after the EC decision three years ago. The money was placed on a special bank account where neither the EU nor MS could touch it until the decision by the European Court.

Re:2 questions

[hankwang]

1.What exactly does this cover? Which network protocols? Which data formats?

See the EC ruling [europa.eu] (PDF), especially article 999 on page 277:

(999) Microsoft should be ordered to disclose complete and accurate specifications for the protocols used by Windows work group servers in order to provide file, print and group and user administration services to Windows work group networks. This includes both direct interconnection and interaction between a Windows work group server and a Windows client PC, as well as interconnection and interaction between a Windows work group server and a Windows client PC that is indirect and passes through another Windows work group server. The use of the term specifications makes clear that Microsoft should not be required to disclose its own implementation of these specifications, that is to say, its own source code. The term protocol relates to the rules of interconnection and interaction between instances of the Windows client PC operating system and the Windows work group server operating system.

Also interesting:

(1008) The requirement for the terms imposed by Microsoft to be reasonable and non- discriminatory applies in particular: [...] there is a need to ensure that potential beneficiaries will have the opportunity to review, themselves or through third parties designated by them, the specifications to be disclosed; Microsoft should be able to impose reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions to ensure that this access to the disclosed specifications is granted for evaluation purposes only;
[...] to any remuneration that Microsoft might charge for supply; such a remuneration should not reflect the strategic value stemming from Microsoft s market power in the client PC operating system market or in the work group server operating system market;

The decision does not seem to give a hard number for how much MS may charge for disclosure of the specs.

We told you so

[zoobab]

Microsoft will trump EU competition ruling with patents Brussels, 17 September 2007 -- The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) says that Microsoft was expecting the 17 September verdict of the EU's anti-trust case, and will exploit software patents to keep its monopoly grip on the global IT market. FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, "The decision seems positive but it is five years out of date. During that time, Microsoft has lobbied for software patents in Europe and bought patents on many trivial concepts. It has claimed patent violations against Linux, put patent timebombs into its formats and interfaces, and turned fear of patents into a core part of its business strategy. It will now open its formats, because that lets it extend its software patent franchise even further." Microsoft recently published its MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program) patent licence which requires competitors to pay royalties for each copy of software distributed. For example, a free software project making a print server would have to pay USD$8 to Microsoft for each copy downloaded. "The largest monopolist in history has faced down the largest economy in history," says Benjamin Henrion of the FFII's Brussels Office. "Microsoft will appeal, and the fines if ever paid are just a month or two of profits. Meanwhile Microsoft now has the time to crush its only real competition, the free and open source economy. We regret that the EU Commission and ECJ are blind to the real threat of software patents, while Microsoft cleverly exploits Europe's own patent system against EU businesses. This is a defeat for Europe's anti-trust, a defeat for the global economy, and I'm sure they're popping the champagne in Redmond." Background information In the proceedings of the EU antitrust trial, Microsoft states that its communication protocols are covered by at least 3 European patents or patent applications (namely patents 'EP 0661652', 'EP 0438571' and 'EP 0669020'). In addition, another 20 patent applications are pending in the United States, as are 2 in Europe (in its reply, Microsoft states that one of its two applications has since been granted, namely patent 'EP 1004193'). Moreover, Microsoft is planning to apply for 'some 130 European patents relating to Windows server operating systems'. Jeremy Allison, leader of SAMBA, the open source project file and print services for Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients, mentioned recently in LinuxWorld that the MCPP patent licences will make impossible for open source to use them: "We read the license, it's impossible to release open source implementations of the product. You have to keep it secret. This defeats the whole idea of open source."

Re:This is Great!

[jabuzz]

Er, WebDAV access to Exchange is deemphasized in Exchange 2007, and is replaced with Exchange Web Services and MAPI remains the primary method for access data stores on Exchange servers.

Thing is that curtesy of the Openchange project which is building on top of the IDL stuff from Samba the Exchange MAPI protocols are being fairly rapidly reverse engineered. At which point the prescence or absence of any documentation from Microsoft will be irrelevant. In fact the OpenChange documentation is probably useful in that it won't cost 10,000 Euro and come with strings attached.

Re:Tax Euros put to work?

[darthflo]

As if. According to TFA, there are royalties on whatever product is built using those specs and MSFT's patents, so quite probably redistribution of the spec itself won't be covered by the nominal one-off payment of 10'000. If the EU had actually required those specs to be made available for free, they would've included that in their ruling. They didn't and they aren't going to break laws just to make some OSS developers happy.

Re:not good enough

[polar red]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baloney [wikipedia.org]

Re:This is Great!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

All newer Microsoft clients are aiming to switch from this original RPC driven protocol to WebDAV through OWA.

This doesn't help. Most open source people are looking to replace Exchange, not Outlook. The truly enlightened will replace both sides, but realistically we need to fully support Outlook as a "legacy client" until then. Outlook does not use the WebDAV based protocol. It uses the crufty old RPC protocol. This means that any server project that wants to speak to Outlook in its native protocol has to figure out how to get the RPC stuff running.

Interoperability between Outlook and non-Exchange servers typically happens with client-side connectors that attach to MAPI (which is not a protocol; it's the API that Outlook uses to talk to stores and transports). Bynari has a pretty good one that uses their IMAP server, but it still saves calendar and address book data in Microsoft's proprietary TNEF format on the server. The good news is that an improved version is currently in late beta that will work with servers like Citadel [citadel.org] storing calendars in iCalendar format and address books in vCard format.

Re:Took long enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or am I just being stupid?

Frankly, yes. Unless the costs of doing business in the EU (fines, disclosure of interfaces etc.) were of a similar order to the profits being made throughoutthe EU(which they are not in any way) the MS shareholders could sue the pants off the MS board if they withdrew from the EU for breach of their fiduciary duties. Ulitumately, MS must comply with EU law to operate in the EU, and it must continue to operate in the EU to fulfill its duty to the shareholders. That's all there is to it.

Re:"work group" server

[nschubach]

Reading on:

(1003) The objective of this Decision is to ensure that Microsoft's competitors can develop
products that interoperate with the Windows domain architecture natively supported
in the dominant Windows client PC operating system and hence viably compete with
Microsoft's work group server operating system. Microsoft should thus allow the
use of the disclosed specifications for implementation in work group server operating
system products. The order to supply is therefore not limited to disclosing
specifications but also encompasses authorising the implementation of such
specifications in work group server operating system products.

It appears to include Domain communication, but I wonder if this includes Active Directory.

Brought up on Engadget: "i wonder also, is if the new DX10 falls under this as well..."

I don't think this includes "local" protocols like DirectX or Office interoperability. Only network bound "computer to computer" specs.

Re:Took long enough...

[Arrawa]

Party financing is quite different here in Europe. Not all countries accept commercial sponsors or accept only a limited amount. And many European countries are ruled by coalition. So buying a law by donating to the party of to a politician is quite difficult.