Microsoft Finally Bows to EU Antitrust Measures 365
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."
Microsoft should have payed the fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Took long enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the saddest thing here is that it seems to take us three years to enforce a judgement against a major corporation, and even then the reporting in the media is all written as if Microsoft have kindly agreed to co-operate and not as though they've been forced to accept the judgement of a court that found they had done wrong and ordered them punished for it. If legal systems are this slow, it's no wonder people get concerned about the power of megacorps and that we see everyone from Big Software to Big Media taking some pretty major liberties with things like antitrust law.
not good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
So still refusing to comply (Score:5, Insightful)
This is no different to when they paid the last fine and announced they'd finally given in to the EU demands and offered the documentation at 50k with restrictive license.
So they drop the price a little, and the restrictions a little, but so what? It's the same game. The EU needs to force compliance here. Or they'll play this game forever.
Re:Microsoft should have payed the fine (Score:3, Insightful)
Whence the chipper tone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Balls. They've just taking the fight to the next level, that's all. The expression "cold, dead hands", comes to mind, when contemplating any usable spec belonging to MS.
Re:This is Great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft still wins (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, there may be workarounds: people can write small binary-only Microsoft compatibility plug-ins which plug into larger open source applications that eventually can replace Microsoft's applications.
Re:Paid for the dinner (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't understand .... (Score:5, Insightful)
What restrictions come with the specification that we pay 10,000 Euros for? If there are restrictions on what we can do with the knowledge gained, then we can't use it. M$ could argue that publishing code written using their spec is the same as publishing their spec and so everyone who reads the code has to pay 10k Euros.
Until this is explained in full: we need to hold back on popping the champagne corks.
How good will the spec be? If it is anything like the OOXML one then there will still be huge holes. M$ is smart enough to only publish in the spec the bits that have been reverse engineered: this allows it to claim that it has revealed a lot without adding anything to what is known by the rest of us.
Re:Microsoft still wins (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Took long enough... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft still wins (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, no. E.g. You have to pay a fee for most public documents (say, court records), but you're free to redistribute them. If they're copyrighted, you can still write your own documentation/description of the information and distribute that. (Remember folks, copyright only covers the expression, not the idea itself) Take the Linux kernel and POSIX for example. Linus originally said his OS wouldn't be POSIX-compliant because he couldn't afford to pay for the spec. Today Linux is pretty much entirely POSIX-compliant, despite noone (except Linux-FT?) having ponied up the cash. This is because POSIX has been re-documented in plenty of other places.
So the pertinent question isn't really whether there's a fee or not, or even whether there's a copyright on the docs or not. The most important question in my mind, is whether the info will be available under an NDA or not.
NDA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only 10,000 euros! (Score:4, Insightful)
So after years of illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive others out of business and drive up the price of software and goods, their "punishment" is to charge people even more. This "justice" things sounds great, wish I could get some of that!
Rich.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:2, Insightful)
It is analogous to making and selling the only car most people use, but refusing to tell anyone else how to make the best petrol for it, so no-one buys petrol from the competition, or if they do its not as good. Sooner or later someone is going to start complaining of monopoly.
No-one is asking Microsoft to hand over all their secrets, and no-one is asking that they do so for no money. All that is required is that they not abuse their dominant position.
Re:not good enough (Score:2, Insightful)
It's called the source code.
If Microsoft were to simply post their source code up on their website, nobody would be asking them to write this "burdensome" documentation.
Re:I heard oink-oink outside of my window... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:right. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Took long enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are in the US, then this is damn hilarious. The US, where toture has become accepted practice to obtain secrets.
Microsoft can keep there secrets, but it is going to cost them. They are free to get up and leave Europe, I am sure we will do fine. The simple fact is, that if they did that, then a huge amount of effort would be put into getting Linux as a perfect replacement. This would weaken Micrsofts stronghold on the rest of the world as well.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:not good enough (Score:1, Insightful)
All open source applications already do that - it's called the source code.
Code is not interface documentation (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Source software generally comes along with the interface document, the code itself.
I'm both surprised and disappointed that within a few minutes of my post, three people have all challenged it on this basis.
Just dumping the whole code base is in no way an acceptable substitute for providing good interface documentation. Sure, code should be self-documenting by using appropriate names in interfaces. Sure, designs should be clean and easy to understand. But the goal of this ruling is to facilitate interoperability in the spirit of the law. It is unreasonable to require people to scan through all the implementation code for something just to find out how the interface works and use it. That's not documenting the interface to aid interoperability, it's obfuscating it to make the effort required for compatibility prohibitive. So if the replies I'm getting are anything to go by, it sounds like a lot of work would be required for your average OSS project to comply with this ruling. If it's unfair to expect it of them, why is it fair to expect it of a business?
I'm no big fan of Microsoft in this case — read my first post to the discussion if you're in any doubt about that — but I do think that any penalty awarded by the courts has to be reasonable. You can't use a requirement that a monopoly allow interoperability as an excuse to get access to all their source code and trade secrets. That isn't fair, even on Microsoft, and it certainly wouldn't be fair on the many smaller companies in niche markets who might be subject to the same ruling once the precedent is set.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:2, Insightful)
If I have a secret, I don't care what the antitrust european court says, it's my secret, they shoudln't take that nor my money away for me.
Except that there is no justifiable reason for keeping it a secret since pretty much all of their "secrets" were proprietary extensions based on already known protocols. In fact, some of those protocols were items Microsoft pushed onto the standards track themselves so they have no excuse really.
Re:any takers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:2 questions (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, what is a "Windows work group server"? Would that be a PDC, or a simple server on a given workgroup with no domain control features whatsoever?
And finally...
> 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
"For evaluation purposes only"? Uh, does it imply that these documentations provided do no even need give enough information for a _functional_ implementation, or am I too cynical?
IMHO, the wording is far too imprecise, and certainly not worth the 10k asked by Microsoft.
Bah, I guess a fund collect could be raised and the specs handed out to the Samba team. At least, they would be able to tell us whether the 10k are actually worth it, since they already know a lot about these protocols.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We told you so (Score:4, Insightful)
Nelly Kroes from the EU just declared Victory to retreat faster. Please read and link the EU press release, there (English only): http://www.europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/1567&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
- Any decisions as to wether Microsoft complies will be made by an English court, some day, with a rule probably but which one nobody knows. But - by Jove ! - those rules have just changed... More delays, more legal battles, more defeats for the good guys.
- They have not settled about the fees... Or has Reuters more information? Or more disinformation?
- The press release if filled with patent-talk (with consequences) even while software patents are still not recognised in the EU. In this respect, this IS a full blown victory for the huge patent troll that is MSFT, because the commission plays by US-UK rule.
Conclusion: the US corps rule the EU through proxies. It's as simple as that.
Next: more GM food, getting rid of all those bees, enforcing all those patents on living things created long ago. "Someone patented a one-click, so I patented a gene. And _I_ earn money with it! Waaaaa!!!"
Re:Took long enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrast this to say, Dell... If you buy all your computers from Dell, and suddenly they pull out of your market... You can start buying new computers from HP instead with very little disruption to your operations.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope that clears it up. There are some prisons that I would consider torturous, and others that aren't. The key is the intent to cause suffering.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. You think Microsoft could tell a sovereign nation what they are "allowed" to do within their borders?
Re:Microsoft should have payed the fine (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only one taker (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft WON this case by wearing down the court, the EU didn't effect a punishment that will actually hurt M$ and the ruling will be twisted in M$ favor for years to come. The EU LOST the case!!!
Re:Took long enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. ~10 years ago the US determined that, under US law, it was illegally using it's monopoly in one section of a market to dominate another. The fact your government did nothing about it is not our fault. Look closer to home first before complaining.
2. The Vichy government was put in place under threat of arms - you have absolutely no understanding of history; the Vichy government did everything it could to resist, just in other ways. You really think the Normandy landings would have been half so succesful without the intelligence gained by la resistance?
3. Stop being a troll - MS knowingly and repeatedly broke laws, and not due to any morality issue. They did it to continue what has been a succesful model for them, using their monopoly position to extend their hold into other markets, and thought they'd get away with it - after all, the US never enforced a judgement, so they thought they could carry on as usual.
Now, stop before you look even more stupid, please
Re:Took long enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's just the first day. Soon it will become obvious that international companies with branches in the EU need to migrate away from MS as well if they want to keep their software homogeneous in their enterprise, subsequently forcing, in time, US national companies that are working with these internationals away from MS. In a year it would be over for MS.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even the judge of the Court of First Instance was on to Microsoft trying to paint it that way, and he's a judge not a programmer. All involved parties, with the notable exception of Microsoft itself, have repeatedly publicly stated that they DO NOT WISH to see Microsoft's preciousss source code, because that is not required for interoperability.
Re:Took long enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Back during the 2000 US election, it was widely reported that Microsoft had become the largest single campaign contributor to both major parties. This is generally understood as the explanation for why the Justice Dept's case was terminated on terms very friendly to Microsoft shortly after George Bush took office.
As far as I can determine, Microsoft hasn't become nearly as important a campaign contributor in the EU as it is now in the US. Maybe they'll learn from this, and we'll soon see them bribing European politicians at the appropriate level.
Give them time; they're still going through the pangs of learning how business is really done at the top levels.
(Are there web sites listing politicians' contributors in the EU, similar to what you can find in the US? I've seen a few partial lists for single countries, but nothing for the EU as a whole.)
Straw man. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody's asking Microsoft to give up their secret recipe. They're asking Microsoft to document how you eat their chicken.
This isn't information you would use to duplicate Microsoft's software, this is information yu need to make your products work WITH Microsoft's software.
Netscape tried to sue Microsoft because they felt their browser was unfairly marketed since it came with the system.
Not only did it come with the system, but Microsoft refused to let computer makers even include Netscape with the system if they wanted to, AFTER they had already agreed not to. On top of that, to try and make an end run around their original deal with the DoJ, they combined the browser and the desktop in an inherently insecure manner that has cost the industry billions of man-hours to the resulting flood of viruses.
Don't try and whitewash Microsoft's actions in the '90s or pretend that this deal (which is still outrageous) is trying to get hold of information that Microsoft needs to keep secret.
stop selling MS software in Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
couldn't microsoft essentially say that their software was no longer allowed to be purchased or used by any country in the EU?
Heck, MS can't stop it's software from being sold in Cuba how in the world can they stop it n Europe?
Falcon