E.U. Commission: More Antitrust Trouble For MS

Tidal Flame writes "According to Wired news, Microsoft appears to be in hot water over antitrust issues again. The European Commission says it will require Microsoft to 'share more proprietary information with its rivals' and 'uncouple' it's Media Player audiovisual software from the Windows operating system." iCoach points to this article at The Register covering the same.

Comments

Media Player?

[Clockwurk]

I don't understand the deal with windows media player. You can use different software to play media files (the Playa, WinAMP, etc.), so what's the big deal? Most OEM PCs come with different jukebox software installed, so media player isn't mandated. This sounds like a pretty dumb thing, I would say most consumers like having a media player built in, who cares if its an MS player or not?

Re:Sheesh. what's next?

[stratjakt]

Yes. The window manager and GDI and DirectX all need to be removed too. Oh and the scheduler, and ODBC subsystem. And the filesystem - why should I be forced by evil businessmen to choose between FAT32 and NTFS?

MSFT has been dragged into court for legitimate reasons before. This reeks more of anti-american zealotry than a legitimate case.

Re:God dammit.

[stratjakt]

>> I can see how this is bad for competition

I cant. Make linux/BSD/OS2/BeOS/WhateverOS competitive, use the same techniques.

Lets see some real binary code reuse in linux, and not this crap where App A needs libfoo1.1.so and App B needs libfoo3.4.so. If I need two different versions of the library for two different apps, guess what, that ain't code reuse.

I mean sue Microsoft when they break laws. Having a better product isn't anti-competitive. It is competitive, it's just that noone else is competing.

Linux (for example) will neither gain mind nor market share in the courtroom. You cant mandate 'make your product shitty so the alternatives dont look so bad'.

Re:More to the point

[yiantsbro]

You are correct on the sack point--and you do give excellent sack ;)

If I had mod points they would belong to your post.

Trolling are we?

[GeckoX]

Why would you want that?
Oh, so you can write shit assed web pages that won't EVER display on anything other than the latest WinWhatever? (Probably also all 500+k pages just ripe full of adds and bs media crap that serves no purpose other than to trap and stun your end user)

Does nobody else around here see what he's suggesting? My god, this is /., what the f?
Modded as +5 interesting no less...cold day in hell it is I guess...

Bundling...

[TheShadow]

It's funny that Microsoft gets a lot of shit for bundling software with Windows when just about every Linux distro you find at the local Best Buy comes with 10x more user applications... everything from web browsers to graphic editing tools to compilers to word processors... etc... etc...

So, why is it wrong for MS... but alright for Red Hat, Mandrake, etc?

Re:Bundling...

[stratjakt]

Because none of the Red Hat, Mandrake stuff works all that well, and none of it is integrated into the system, but big ass monolithic userland apps that hog memory and system resources.

It's a frigging joke (look an article down) that it took until kernel 2.5 to finally get a beta patch that will fix the multitasking to allow you to play an mp3 without skipping on a P4 2ghz+ machine.