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EU's Mind 'made up' on Microsoft
Alain Williams writes "The BBC reports that Microsoft could soon be facing multi-billion euro fines and other sanctions for breaking European competition law.
The European Commission has finished drafting its decision in the case it brought against the software giant." Let's just hope that the EU can fine them cash and not accept Microsoft coupons like the US does. Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible.
I hope the EU goes through with the proposal to force MS to unbundle Media Player. It will be so great to watch them squirm if this happens: there's no technical reason why not (XP Embedded) and it will force their hand over the bundling of IE (again). A large fine will barely dent their $50b cash reserves :-/
The EU has some real teeth when it comes to noncompetitive practices. The maximum is something like 10% of annual earnings (could be profit). Ouch.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
England wants to knight him. Europe wants to hate him. Strange.
I want audio and video software as part of my OS, nicely bundled and integrated.
I don't want to a half-baked OS that requires a lot more decisions to get a useful modern OS.
Maybe with MS have been "forcing suppliers to include its own media software", but have MS been preventing suppliers from also supplying other media software? The BBC article does not make clear.
It will be nice though if MS do "reveal more information to its competitors about how its operating system interacts with others and with software applications"
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Meanwhile, Sir William was polishing his diamond swords. They will be distributed among his army of 10,000 lawyers, for nobody shall be permitted to defeat the knight of computer software.
Do you like German cars?
Activate "Operation European Freedom" immediately.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No other DRM system actually lets you choose your player. iTunes only talks to iPod, at least w/o burning and re-ripping. You want to talk product tying -- MS doesn't even sell an MP3 player, let alone force you to use theirs.
But heh. Don't listen to me. I'm just a hardcore Linux user w/ a half terabyte RAID-5 FreeBSD box with fond memories of his old Apple IIgs days.
Not to mention I think this round of DRM won't end up any differently than it did for DAT/Minidisc/Dataplay -- eventual marginalization vs. products that actually want to work.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
...do what exactly? With US 52.8 billion dollars in the bank, even they take half that, they still have 26+ billion dollars. With profit margins of 25%, and revenue of 32 billion a quarter, those would have to be some hefty cash fines to even make the smallest dent in how MS does business.
Not to mention that Bill Gates could sell some of his stock if he wanted to, and put that money back in the company.
libertarianswag.com
With the Euro on the rise compared to USD, its going to eat a little more of that 50Billion USD pile that M$ is sitting on. Ouch.
Free XBox, PS2
. . .and may demand that it stops forcing suppliers to include its own media software at the expense of competitors such as Real Networks and Apple.
I'm not a great fan of Media Player, though it does it's job pretty well, but doesn't the modern definition of a desktop OS contain a media player?
From what I can tell, the options Microsoft will have would be to either have no media player whatsoever, or a vast myraid of them. I would be willing to guess that MS will take the former option, with a recomended update through Windows update being Media Player.
So, by removing some functionality of the OS, how will this help consumers in general? Indeed will they be more likely to use another media player simply because there isn't one currently available, or will they simply get the recommended one from Microsoft?
Yes, it would be just great if the pc manufacturers preloaded RealONE onto my pc instead. Oh dream of dreams, joy of joys.
Simple, microsoft pays the fine or doesn't trade in the EU anymore.
So long as a company does business in the European Union, they can fine them. It doesn't matter where your headquarters are based. Microsoft could ignore the ruling, but they would have to stop doing business in the EU altogether.
Microsoft is a legal entity in many EU countries. They have a large presence in Ireland (research & production) and local sales & translation offices almost everywhere.
Rubbish.
The EU isn't afraid of fining European Companies. You just have to look in to Car manufacturers, i.e., BMW, Volkwagan etc.
Plenty of these firms have been fined *heavily* for anti competitive practices and price fixing.
If MS was a European Company, it wouldn't be let off the hook, as it would be seen to be crushing other EU software companies as well...
Microsoft has done much worse things like preventing the sale of naked PCs (do that, and your OEM licence discounts miraculously shrink), embracing and extending everything from Java to HTML and, of course, spreading FUD left right and centre about anything that might threaten Bill's plans for world domination. These are the issues the EU should be focusing on, not whether they bundle a Windows app that plays MP3s.
Oh yeah, and Bill gives loads of money to charity, but there are more tax-efficient ways of giving to charity than overpaying for mediocre software.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Gates is getting a knighthood for contributions to international business while at the same time the EU (therefore by extension the UK) is fining microsoft for anti-competitive practices. Don't you just love irony?
Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible.
They're giving it away for free. Free is good, right? Or all of the sudden when it's Microsoft, free is bribery, isn't it?
This does mean that the school is urged to use Windows, because it would not be polite to not use it. For a school, however, Windows does come with many benefits, primarily ease-of-use. It is a much easier operating system to learn, for sure. I can't imagine middle schoolers using linux.... faaar too stupid.
webpage
That's because essentially all Windows players that support DRM utilize the MS supplied directshow API (and whatever codecs) to decode the content.
It's not too dissimilar to how applications that embed IE are using mshtml.dll. iexplore.exe (and explorer.exe) itself is nothing more than a thin wrapper application that loads mshtml.dll.
As an EU residing, mostly Linux & reluctant Windows user, I'm not sure that I see much in this story...
I can fully appreciate that Microsoft's general monopolistic attitude needs to be curtailed, no doubting that.
I can also see that had the US/EU laws against monopolistic practices been brought down five or six years ago, then IE might not have been the dominant browser and we might now be accessing web sites that are far less browser dependant.
I can appreciate that restricting the bundling of WMP with Windows might mean that Microsoft's DRM methods will not be dominant technology in the whole rights management argument.
But, to me, DRM is *STILL* a technology that restricts my rights to do what I like with music and media that I legitimately own and whether Microsoft's or A. N. Other's DRM technology is used is neither here nor there. Surely it's DRM that is at the centre of this argument, not WMP?
Where an application forces changes in an open standard (like HTML), then there is a good case to limit the impact of that application but there are enough multimedia formats that I can download or buy any number of non-Microsoft media players to play what I like on whatever OS I like without resorting to WMP.
And although I might not like the impact DRM has or will have with Open Source software, I'll simply take the stance of not buying DRM'ed hardware & media that curtails my rights as a user.
Am I missing something here?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"'Tis but a scratch. I've had worse. Running away, eh? Come back you yellow bastard! I'll bite your legs off!"
Well, I can dream, can't I?
KFG
Why do none of the remedys require microsoft to release all APIs? This would solve the problems, would not destroy their business but would reduce their ability to harm consumers more than any other action.
.. will ensure many years before it comes to court, by when either MS will be gone.. or they will have encompassed everything....
Have a nice day!
The funny thing is that if Microsoft was a company based in the EU they would be getting government money and protection from the EU
What is funny is that EVERY TIME an article about EU/MS pops up, someone says this. They then tend to get modded to +5 insightful whereupon the following thread turns into a US vs EU flamefest. And speaking of which:
A shining example of this is Airbus who clearly benefits from government subsidies, etc.
Agh, and you just had to bring up the Airbus/Boeing conflict too? This ought to be a subset of Godwin's law.
For the record, I think both Airbus and Boeing use government subsidies to prevent fair competition, and it sucks. However, in the EU/MS case, could it not be possible that somewhere in the EU beaurocracy there are some people who are actually trying to do the right thing?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
This is just a ploy by the EU to try and influence global commerce beyond their reach. They want to matter.
Hhhmmmm...
Poor little us, not being big enough to matter to global commerce! Methinks you need to look at some statistics comparing the GDP of the USA with the EU.
And you've been modded as "insightful". I think there should be a new category of mods. "Insightful (American)"
Kids' minds are like sponges. Give them the chance and they can learn a lot, especially when you make the learning fun. This has been shown many times in foreign language education; the eariler a kid starts learning another language, the higher the chance of that kid learning the language and learning it well. The reason why foreign language education still doesn't start at an early age for most children is due to adults' prejudices. They think it's too difficult to learn another language, so therefore it is way too difficult for the kiddies.
It's the same way with computer stuff. Computer-phobe adults are the ones who end up instilling a "fear" of computers in children. You know the drill. "I don't understand computers." "It's too hard to figure out." Because adults think Linux is too difficult (often without trying it first), they think kids can never learn it.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
A half-baked OS designed by baked designers for consumers in all degrees of...
Kevin Bacon.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Maersk and SAS (the air carrier, not the statistics package or the military unit) was given huge fines by EU for having non-competition agreements. EU is very active on that, in Denmark many age-old trusts have been stopped by the EU.
Airbus is not a monopoly, it is an European attempt to break Boeings monopoly on air planes.
Microsoft is a European company too, having subsidaries in many EU countries. Obviously, it should not be excempt from EU law, just because its headquarter is located elsewhere. Everyone who does business in EU must perform that business according to EU law. I can't see why that could be a surprise to anyone.
And yes, EU based companies has to obey US laws as well, when doing business in the the US. I don't know if anyone of them are dominating enough in the US market to come in conflict with US anti-trust law, but if so, no the EU would not be silly enough to claim that the US does not have the power to enforce US law on US ground. (The US have the power to enforce US law everywhere on the planet and close space, but on US ground, they also have the legal and moral right to do so).
If the punishments for breaking antitrust law in EU are so harsh, Microsoft should just comply and design a windows update that will uninstall what falls into the category of "bundled software", beginning with all the outlook patches and Windows Media Player. Someone above mentioned 10% of earnings, which sounds right, considering ALL the managers of recent Italian food giant Parmalat are sitting in jail, since the revelation of a $23bn hole in their balance sheet.
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You know I find it interesting that any post that is even slightly anti-*nix and pro-windows gets modded down within a few seconds of posting. People like Windows. If they didn't, they wouldn't buy it. People want a computer to do things for them and not have to do things for their computer. Microsoft provided the masses a way to do this, albeit for a high cost (cash and security).
Win4Lin runs a complete copy of Window98 inside a Linux OS. For $60/copy It re-uses the Windows98 licenses the district already paid for. It runs Office, and photoshop, and AutoCad, and all the stuff they ALREADY PAID FOR.
And what's more, it will run exactly the same way it used to run. No compadibility layer. AND it doesn't run DirectX games.
It's a perfect fix for a lab environment. All of what you need to run. Nothing that you don't need.
Win4Lin also runs will in a X-terminal environment. All those old PC's can be re-cycled as terminals. I use it personally on my Gentoo laptop for all the goofy network tools that haven't been ported to Linux yet. It's hilarious to see a WindowsME desktop right next to a KDE menu.
BTW, I'll be happy to be a reference as a place where Linux runs successfully. I am the Senior Network Engineer at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. I switched our network to Linux before Linux was cool.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
"Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible."
You know, I remember all through school (k-12) we were forced to use Apple products of varying models. Since then, I have never used an Apple, and all the forced Apple knowledge was wasted.
Beware, the Blue Knight of Death approacheth!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yes, but as a consumer, I can go buy a take-away burger in Macdonalds or Burger King and go eat it with a bottle of Coke or Pepsi...
If I have a garage at home, as a consumer, I can go buy a Mercedes, BMW, Ford, etc. to park in it...
Sure, Microsoft has competition from Linux and Apple (to some degree) but does Joe Public get to *choose* alternatives to Microsoft? No, because Microsoft insist that when you buy a new pre-assembled PC, you have to buy Windows also...
Imagine buying your car and being told you could only fill it with petrol/gas from Esso/Exxon stations?
Same difference...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The obvious long-term solution in this "war on IT terror" is for the EU and other nations to rebuild their IT infrastructures cooperatively and relatively inexpensively upon open source foundation. By removing the bottleneck that is at Microsoft Way One, Redmond, countries (incl. the US of A) can launch a renaissaince of innovation and information sharing between countries and individuals while nurturing a more balanced distribution of local employment across the world.
Governments are fundamentally responsible for establishing the basic infrastructure upon which the people can build their lives and business without artificial impediments. Imagine what the life would be like today if printing presses, typewriters and even the lowly sheets of paper had been incredulously controlled by some mediaval robber baron!? Why should one provenly immoral corporation be allowed to "own" the formats in which data (incl. writing itself!) is excanged, recorded and backed up!? It's insane.
The EU is fully capable of first introducing a set of recommendations and later (after the OSS-based support and development structures have been established) requirements for publically-owned and open IT systems that can also be easily adopted by other countries across the globe. Microsoft is fully welcome to participate in this "New Deal" but they must remove their foot from the oxygen tubes or risk becoming totally irrelevant.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
No, not even that.
AAC is an audio compression format. No more, no less. It's the audio layer from MPEG-4, in fact, and is just as open as MP3. You can rip/convert to and from AAC with no restrictions. (It's not Apple's format: they didn't create it and don't control it -- anyone can license the format and build it into any player; Apple are just another user.)
In particular, AAC itself is unencrypted. No DRM.
What the iTunes Music Store sells are .m4p files: AAC files that have been wrapped in a FairPlay encryption layer. It's FairPlay that stops you playing on other machines &c.
To summarise:
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Europe isn't a borg collective. There are people who have difference opinions. Believe me, more people than not don't like Gates in England. Just because the Queen has given away a KBE doesn't mean that everyone's falling over themselves to grovel at his feet.
As I recall, the US government wasn't particularly harsh on Microsoft. Does that mean all USians adore their products?
I'm with the cash grab people on this one.
Reading the article I found it interesting to note that in the penalties section a heavy fine was expected but the media player issue was preceded by "may". In other words, pay us a bunch of money and we will let the whole media player issue slide.
Also, not sure if anyone noticed this, but in the first section they threw in the word "servers" as one of the embedded systems that has broken the cometition laws. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention the last time I rebuilt my 2000 or XP boxes, but I could have sworn all the servers were optional installs, I mean if they weren't why would Apache have more installs than IIS...?
And on the IE issue, I still remember hacking the CSS file for windows explorer several years ago to put a little lemming in the top left of my windows explorer pages...Sure they could just not include the IE icon in the system, but removing all things IE from the system would require a rewrite of a lot of the GUI which is currently based on CSS and HTML, something that I think is actually a nifty idea, no matter who is doing it.
And last, and more specifically, Media Player. Those of you who have problems with it grabbing file associations and popping up on it's own and such, err, to bad. I have no pity for you. I haven't seen Windows media player since I last reinstalled me windows boxes. I did nothing special that I am aware of, I'm by no means a Systems expert, I just associated the files to other programs. Took a couple minutes. Oh the pain. Maybe your confusing Windows Media Player with Real Player, the spyware posing as media crap.
Whee signature.
See the movie, The Corporation,
The purpose of a corporation is to make money for its investors. That is all. A corporation is amoral. Viewed as a "person" a corporation is psychotic. This is the nature of corporations.
Outside influences to get corporations to "behave" can only have limited control due to the structure of our society.
Good Summary
With RedHat, Suse, *BSD you can easily strip the application software and leave the kernel bare if so you wish. You have freedom of choice in how your hardware and software resources should work.
Try to uninstall some of the applications from XP. Good luck.
I hope that explains fully the meaning of "bundling" in this context.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Could this be the start of an open source Windows version?"
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
That would actually be worse than the current situation. As things are now, reverse engineered MS formats can be used for GPL projects. If Microsoft releases the file formats but charges a license, even $1, for usage of these formats, it will be incompatable with the GPL and we will be unable to use their formats AT ALL. In fact this seems to be what they are doing with the FAT file system.
Sure they will publish them - then patent them so you still have to license them, and they loose no control. Nothing that has occurred or been proposed as a punishment for anti-completive behavior has made any difference except breaking them up. The MS culture is what drives this, and no directive will change that.
If someone wants to fix it, it would be simple, but MS wouldn't like it at all.
1. Allow MS to bundle and integrate anything they want into the operating system.
2. Require each and every exported function from any DLL, EXE, COM object or anything similar that can be called from outside of that compiled module to be publicly documented as part of the specification.
3. Create one or more third party (non-ms controlled) entities who control the Windows compatible logo certification program, basing their certification on the published API specs from MS.
4. Require MS to be, say, 98% or better compatible on any Windows O/S or product before it ships and allow any other company to certify with no MS input. If an MS product doesn't certify - it doesn't ship. This includes service packs.
5. Require MS to support their O/S even if third party components are installed in place of MS components provided the third party components are certified.
6. Treat failures to interoperate with certified third party products as MS compatibility certification failure - i.e. fix quickly, or stop ship until fixed.
The heights of genius are only measurable by the depths of stupidity
Notethe part: It will also be necessary to take account of the effective economic capacity of offenders to cause significant damage to other operators - in particular consumers - and to set the fine at a level which ensures that it has a sufficiently deterrent effect.
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The shear fact is that the EU is totaly anti-american, be it Bush jr, or MS.
Anti-Bush != Anti-American
Anti-MS != Anti-American
Outside of the USA, there are very few people who like Bush. But that does not mean we are anti-American. That's just the kind of limited thinking that Bush seems to promote. You're either with him, or against him, and if you're against him, then you're Unamerican.
According to Bush:
Anti-Bush == Unamerican where person == American
Anti-Bush == Anti-American where person != American
Oh well, that's a realistic option for them then isn't it?
Uh, hello? Is anyone home? That was the whole point. Someone asked how the EU can force MS to pay a fine. They can't, directly. However, they can force MS to either pay their fine or not trade in the EU. Which do you think MS will choose?
You know what I would like to see ... is that Microsoft just pull all copies out of all of Europe and then let Europe experience the horror of trying to use Linux. Sure Linux is good for us nerds, but lets see how much of an uprise there is when the internet market in Europe takes a dive because the mom and pop shops can no longer use the ineternet to place orders and mom and dad can no longer buy their goods off line because they can't figure out how to launch the internet browser.
Creating a good OS isn't hard. Look at BeOS. If Microsoft did pull out all it's copies from Europe, then there'd be a race to see who could fill the gap in the market. Capitalism, you see, when not abused by monopolies, responds well to situations like that. People could use OSX, or a few billion could be thrown toward Linux, and the problem would be solved. The only difficulty is lock-in. If you remove that, Microsoft wouldn't stand too much of a chance. Look at IE compared to Firebird. Clearly the latter is superior, but the former is more widely used. Why? Because Microsoft bundles it in.
You guys all have Microsoft to thanks for the advancement of the internet on the masses and if you think anything else you are crazy and blind. The internet would still be something that is used in the back of corporations down in the basement if it wasn't for Microsoft giving everybody a PC that they could easily use.
This is the same Microsoft that missed the whole start of the home internet revolution? If Microsoft wasn't around, that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be easy-to-use PCs. Hell, there's always Macs, even if you can't accept the possibility that other companies and individuals can design OSes much better than Microsoft can.
There is a fundamental difference being having a competitive advantage (which is a GOOD thing) and anti-comptetitive behavior. Having a monopoly isn't even illegal. Using an existing monopoly (such as Windows) as leverage to acquite another monoppoly (such as browsers or media players) is however illegal.
The heights of genius are only measurable by the depths of stupidity
Let's repeat one more time...
People don't buy Windows. They buy computers that happen to have Windows installed.
Only now in the US are we starting to see places offer PC's with Linux pre-installed. I don't know of ANY big stores that do that in Europe (admittedly, my knowledge is restricted to Spain and Italy).
Oh, wouldn't that be terrible. Kind of like that Simpsons halloween episode - "Give us the baby or we will kill all your leaders in Washington".
already in the works... or at least an open source win NT compatable environment for device drivers and applications ReactOS
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers made up their minds about Microsoft years ago.
The problem is, the EU only does the "right thing" when it applies to foreign companies, foreign agriculture (especially 3rd world agriculture), etc.
Cows in the EU get a subsidy equivilent to $250 per year from the EU. There are a billion people in the world that subsist on less than $200 a year.
Pressure from the EU on Zimbabwe was the major reason why American GM corn was turned back at the ports in the midst of a famine. Can't feed the starving people in Zimbabwe franken food, because it might jeapoardize future EU contracts. This is exactly what was threatened.
Oh yeah, the EU, making a habit of doing the right thing.
Giving away free copies of MS products to schools helps the monopoly, it doesn't help competition! It shuts down the possibility of competing products in those schools! Having M$ give part of that fine money to fund open source or to a sw foundation to help growing sw companies are the things that might help competition?
Because Media Player and IE themselves are just frontends. They are just wrappers that make calls to system services. In Media Player's case, it's DirectShow, in IE's it's the MSHTML engine. Well ripping these out of the OS is a bad idea since many things depend on them. To remove DirectShow is to break all pro A/V software, alternative media players that use it (such as Media Player Classic), many games, and so on.
Remember: Windows isn't Linux and 99.9% of users don't want it to be. Linux is defined as nothing but a kernel, what you put from there is up to you. So you can have Linux systems with totally different UI's libraries and so on. This is fine for geeks, but frustrating for normal users since you have no gaurentee that you have the dependencies you need (and have to go track them down and download).
Windows (and MacOS, and Solaris, and many others) are defined as not just the kernel, but other associated services and such. It is expected that Windows will have it's GUI, it's HTML rendering and such. It's all part of the OS. While this may be frustrating to geeks, it's precisely what normal users want. They don't want to have a program say "sorry, but I can't run until you download X and Y and Z libraries and get them running on your system". They just want it to run.
You need to quite blowing smoke out your but. WM9 is a tremendously advanced and well designed codec.
You just have to know what your doing as the default encoding is 64kbps or 96kbps for music - you can always push it to 192k and get cd quality +.
WM9 is the only codec to reliably handle HDTV (1080P yes Progressive scan 1080 signal (thats 1920x1080 resolution). That is freely distributeable and easily licensed for commercial applications.
If you want proprietary get a Mac and Quicktime.
Erm, why do you think this is just the "Linux vs Windows" argument all over again??
If anything, this issue *doesn't* affect us Linux users at all because we get plenty of *choice* for media players.
The issue is that as a Windows user, you are forced to used Windows Media Player because that's what's bundled with Windows - unless you have the ability to install / configure something else.
That may be fine for the moment and you may be happy using WMP. But what happens when DRM comes in and you find you can't listen to music or watch movies in the way you were previously able to? Oh, and I'm talking about music and movies you *legitimately* own so don't try to turn this into a piracy argument, please...
This issue affects the Windows community first until such time that MS get their way and *everybody* has to use proprietary media standards rather than more open ones.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Cows in the EU get a subsidy equivilent to $250 per year from the EU. There are a billion people in the world that subsist on less than $200 a year.
Except the EU has been cutting farming subsidies, while the US has been raising them. And even more poignantly:
FARM SUBSIDY PER COW
EU: $803
USA: $1,057
JAPAN: $2,555
The EU's no angel, but then none of the post-industrial nations are.
Simple; the US didn't enforce anything on MS because MS contributed a lot of money to Bush, and he instructed Ashcroft to ignore MS. See how US politics works now?
The cap is indeed for the turnover over one year and not over the time of infringement. It is a hard cap presumably designed to prevent companies going bust. However, a fine will generally be much lower than this. Usually, the amount of the fine will be determined by the type of infringement, the severity of infringement, the length of infringement and the willingness to co-operate with the European Commission.
Maybe because everyone seems to use monopoly when they should be saying monopolistic.
Microsoft's practices were ruled monopolistic in the U.S. They used their market dominance to restrain trade and limit competition.
If the whole point of the legal actions against Microsoft is to break up its monopoly in some way then where is the money going to go to?
Consider if the money - which I would argue - will come close to $1 billion were spent to help fund open source projects: eg Mozilla, Open Office, Freedesktop.org, KDE and GNOME projects.
All are in legitimate need of funding and are crucial to giving consumers a choice for OS and application use. I'm not implying that funding will equate with better quality product, but I'm sure that some of these project could at the very least get some added resources: more computers, internet connections, etc.
The parent isn't informative, it's wrong. The nomination was by Gordon Brown.
It doesn't take a lot to do just a little research you know.
As part of the settlement or reparations, the EU should force Microsoft to pay for extensive ad campaigns and re-education initiatives targeted at providing users alternatives to Microsoft's own products (Linux, Mozilla, Real, etc.) -- that way, you not only get them to hand over cash (short-term pain), you also actually start fixing the whole monopoly problem to begin with.
MS could easily release an installation program to just install the WMA / WMV codecs and DirectShow and whatever, but they don't. They deliberly force you to install the latest Media player. There is no technical reason for this interdependancy.
And what will happen (hopefully) is the EU will simply force them to provide seperate installtion of the backend dlls, and the front end apps.
The Microsoft antitrust case in the USA also looked promising at the beginning.
The people of the USA had a real advocate in Thomas Penfield Jackson who also made up his mind that Microsoft was an illegal monopoly and something substantial needed to be done about it.
Microsoft bought some time with appeals and then bought the USDOJ with their secret cash/spyware deal. Note Microsoft has been one of the biggest cash contributors on Capitol Hill since the sweetheart zero-consequences deal they made. It's no surprise, no one in government has shown any interest in doing anything substantive about the Microsoft monopoly. Why give up your Microsoft Money monthly payment?
I would expect that the EU will get some cash and a better data feed from the Microsoft Spy Network.
And then Greedy Bill can get back to stealing IP from others and screwing the world.
Remember Microsoft's new slogan --
"Your ideas. Our profits."
Imagine what the life would be like today if printing presses, typewriters and even the lowly sheets of paper had been incredulously controlled by some mediaval robber baron!?
Yes, instead we should be looking towards the GOVERNMENT to establish standards that all printing presses, typewriters, and sheets of paper must conform to!
That type of governmental oversight may be popular in the nations of the European Union, but it's anathema to a long-standing tradition of United States laissez-faire industrial policy.
Regardless of where you work, you are of course absolutly right. The EU abhors US domination anywhere. Whether it be in economics or international policy. French president Chirac said him self that he sees France's role as a "counterweight to US policy" (his words), regardless of what it is. The EU is going after MS because there is an opportunity. If there was an opportunity to go after IBM, it would do that do. There is nothing more that they would like than to hobble any dominate US corporation. Americans who support the EU's attempts to dismantle MS are naive and have no sense of context. The previous poster has been called names and I am sure I will too, but it is symtomatic of the real issue where people are acting from a sense of loyality to Linux by bashing MS. What they are really doing is siding with our economic rivals and encouraging the destruction of the single largest US corporation. Absolute foolishness.
What about the Russian and US space programs, which came out of Germany.
What about all the best cars.
What about the nuclear weapons of mass destruction, which the US loves to own and deny others.
There are a many every day items, a number of which still cannot be found in the US, although the US companies are eventually good at copying.
All the best kitchen appliances.
A huge number of electronics items (from Philips and many others).
How about an easy-to-use version of Linux, which Mandrake had long before Red Hat, in my opinion having used the major releases of both.
If you think Europeans are in need of overpriced American knock-offs, you are mistaken. Successful International companies use European designs when in Europe.
Credible alternative medicine.
The market is subject to incredible manipulation by corporate powers. Do you suppose that when you go into a German store that the things available on the shelf are the same things which captured the American market?
People need Windows because the Microsoft establishment tells them they need it. Where they are told something else is better, they use it. In Japan, they use cell phones to replace online services and clumsy PCs.
Isn't it revolting to taste the chocolate that is sold in America because it is considered good enough by many who live there, and even recent introductions of American alternatives leave a huge amount to be desired?
As long as Americans do not value their computing enough to care about the stagnating and prohibitive effects of the Microsoft stranglehold, they will continue to use Microsoft software, but that does not necessarily make it in anyone else's interest to do so.
Depending who you believe, it is still not safe to write to a NTFS partition from Linux, funnily enough this sort of thing ONLY happens with Bill's trash. Almost every other OS can read every other OS's files reliably, and that is how it should be. After all, we have interchangeable media (Zip, Jazz, etc) and even interchangeadle hard drives. Some of us need this.
Bill's trash of course has no capability to read foreign file systems, his OS in all its guises is about as backward as they come.
MS will just raise their prices to pay for the fine so they still remain profitable.
They did this with MS Office during the first DOJ investigation in the 90's.
Every one of us and are employers will pay the fine instead of them as ussual.
http://saveie6.com/
The fine is irrelevant to MS. They have a big pile o cash and Ballmer is sensibly using it to buy his way out of legal problems. This is a major cultural shift at MS and should be applauded (at least by MS shareholders).
The opening of APIs and such is a pain for MS, but unlikely to actually do much short-term damage. It might even be good in the long-run because it will make them compete more on the basis of quality and value. Better MS products spawn better open source products and everyone is better off.
What is significant is the potential unbundling of Media Player. At the beginning of this process, MP was a fairly insignificant element of Windows. Now, however, it is central to MS DRM and NGSC (or whatever they are calling Palladium this week). With control over the media front-end, MS can deal directly with content owners and muscle themselves a new monopoly. Media Player is the critical component in a strategy to end-run the hardware companies. Fuck you Sony, HP, Apple, we Ownz u. Without that control they are just another computer company. And one Hollywood would rather do without because of security problems.
Without a shred of evidence, I believe the recent push on Xbox2 is related to the EU problems. If Media Player is hobbled, no hardware end-run is possible. The Japanese electronics firms won't play ball with an MS Windows DRM standard. Oh they'll do this and that, but they don't want another Sony to send cheques to every quarter. That makes the Xbox really important again. That IMO, is why Ed Fries left. He wanted to build a gaming box. Gates needs a media center. Forcing Gates' hand on this issue may be the real penalty the EU is effectively handing MS.
This may sound funny at first, but let me explain. Most males I know surf for pr0n. Most of those also use IE to surf for pr0n. They don't have filters in place. They get hundreds of popups. They get spyware loaded onto their computers thanks to crappy ActiveX controls and hundreds of IE bugs. They have to browse one page at a time. In short, browsing for pr0n with IE sucks.
So here's the hook - you tell all your male friends (and any females you know who surf for it as well) that there's this cool new browser that makes surfing for pr0n more efficient. You don't have to elaborate until they ask why (and they will, trust me!). Then you explain to them that they won't get those nasty popups anymore, they won't get dodgy pr0n spyware installed, they can block out all those crappy flashing penis enlargement ads, and they can use cool extensions (such as Magpie and X to name two) to mass download a whole gallery in a few mouse clicks and erase their tracks afterwards.
Result - you'll have 90% browser domination in about one month.
You read it here first.
Visceral Psyche Films