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Microsoft Accepts Most EU Demands, But Not Over Source
JoeGi writes "Microsoft sent a letter to EU regulators Monday accepting 20 out of the Commission's 26 demands. According to BetaNews, 'The remaining stumbling block to full compliance is source code licensing' as Microsoft is refusing access to open source projects. Microsoft officials told BetaNews they are trying 'to find a way that companies can implement these technologies in code that would get distributed with open source products, but the source code wouldn't be published itself.'"
RTFA. The dispute has to do with licensing Microsoft's proprietary code, and whether or not they were locking open-source projects out of the licensing agreements. MS probably was, out of fear that if their code was incorporated into an open-source project, it would be open-sourced. The EU is not requiring MS to open-source their code.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
forcing MS to license any of their software under the GPL seems grossly anti-capitalistic.
No country in the world has a straight capitalism. The reason is that in an unmanaged capitalism, eventually all the money gravitates to one place. One monopoly is leveraged into another then another and eventually there is only one company. Monopolies break all the advantages offered by capitalism. They remove all incentive for innovation, supply an demand, and for making the customer happy.
Allowing MS to leverage one monopoly into multiple monopolies breaks capitalism, which is why monopolies have to follow special rules. Get it?
This has more information than the BetaNews article - full AP Text.
Microsoft says it will meet most EU demands
By ALLISON LINN
AP BUSINESS WRITER
Microsoft Corp. says it will meet most demands by European Union regulators on making software blueprints available to competitors, including lowering licensing fees, but is seeking further talks on some issues.
Microsoft said it delivered a letter to EU regulators on Monday detailing its intentions.
The EU last month threatened new fines if Microsoft doesn't make it easier and cheaper for competitors to see the blueprints, known as source code.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said the Redmond, Wash.-based company told the European Union it isn't opposed to licensing the code to open-source developers as long as it's assured that its intellectual property will be safeguarded.
Open-source programs led by the Linux operating system pose perhaps the most serious threat to Microsoft because their code is freely shared, while Microsoft closely guards its source code.
Click Here
Smith said Microsoft also wants clarification on whether concerns that view its source code can develop and distribute software outside of Europe.
EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said Monday afternoon that he could not yet confirm that the Commission received Microsoft's latest letter, but said "We have received a letter in response" to our questions that Microsoft sent before Easter.
He said the EU was "studying it carefully." He gave no further comment on the content of Microsoft's letter or on Monday's announcement
The EU compelled Microsoft, in a March 2004 antitrust ruling in which it fined the company 497 million euros ($640 million dollars), to share the source code with competitors who make server software so their products can better communicate with Windows-powered computers.
European regulators also ordered Microsoft to produce a Windows version minus its multimedia player to provide a more level playing field for competitors such as RealNetworks Inc.
Microsoft has complied with that order but says it will only make the software available in Europe. Dow Jones Newswires reported last week that Dell Inc., a leading computer maker, would not offer the stripped-down Windows version as an option.
Company officials would not provide The Associated Press with a copy of the letter they submitted to the EU on Monday.
But they listed these changes that they said they had accepted in the server source code reviewing procedure:
-Microsoft will customize licenses for developers who want to pick and choose from source code rather than buying a preset package.
-The company will give competitors a price break on reviewing source code and more time to decide whether they want to license it - charging 500 euros ($645) a day for up to eight days instead of allowing a maximum of two days at 3,850 euros ($4,965) for the first day or 5,390 euros ($6,950) for two days.
Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said the company was working on a new set of prices for licenses to address the commission's concerns that previously proposed fees of $100 to $600 (77 euros to 465 euros) per server were too high.
Desler would not elaborate on any details of the new royalty fee structure.
Andy Gavil, a Howard University law professor who is co-writing a book on Microsoft's antitrust battles, says the company has good reason to try to elongate the process, especially given its plans to appeal the March 2004 order.
Microsoft has been ordered to comply with the ruling even as it seeks an appeal.
Gavil said Microsoft is concerned about losing the freedom to build new features into its operating systems and that sharing too much with competitors will weaken its business.
"In a sense, they're trying to define a software philosophy and a business strategy," Gavil said.
Smith emphatically denied that the company has any interest in slowing down the proces
If the board of directors all went insane and did not fire him the EU would direct MS Europe to split from their parent company and comply with the orders.
I don't think you've thought this through. If MS Europe split from their parent company, they wouldn't have a product. It's only the fact that Microsoft is their parent company that gives them the legal right to produce copies of Microsoft software for sale.
SuSE was bought by Novell FYI.
Actually, after re-reading the article, I have to concede that, in some respects, it is THE ARTICLE which is confused.
From an earlier, more accurate, article:
It ordered Microsoft to share data protocols with competitors, including open source software companies.
PROTOCOLS. NOT SOURCE CODE.
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
It's true that pre-implementation specs are often way off, but it is certainly not impossible to do a reasonable job of writing up them up. I've used systems to which I didn't have source that worked very much as the manuals said they did. I wrote a good bit of code on HP Bobcats using the man pages for HP-UX, Starbase graphics, and whatever their window system (the interrupt-based one, not X) was called. I don't recall ever encountering a discrepancy. And software was hardly HP's strength.
The only real stickler is the amount of actual collaboration that'd have to go into making sure all of the EU went along with this plan
That part wouldn't be a problem. Trade and Competition policy are EC competencies. IOW, the Commission has already been given the authority to act and doesn't need permission from the member states.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
There have been entire magazines whose editorial policy was to publish articles describing how the various MS implemenations of APIs and protocols deviated from the official external MS documentation. Perhaps MS has cleaned up their internal situation over the past few years, but various insiders have been quoted in the past saying things that suggest that even MS considers the source code the only reliable documentation for how some of the protocols "work". IIRC, there was a recent case where an insider admitted that the Samba team's documentation of some aspects of the SMB protocol was more accurate than anything MS had internally.
I honestly believe they'd pull out before opening their source
I agree, but no one is asking them to open their source, only to allow open-source projects to use their API's fairly.
If that was all there was to it, then the commission would have already abandoned demands for the ability to create open source software because "available for licensing [...] if you pay the license fee" is incompatible with open source. Since the debate is still on-going, obviously, that can't be all there is to it.
This is not just the will of government bureaucrats, this is also the will of the people that they represent
Hmm, bollocks. I dont recall any government bureaucrat bothering to ask me my opinion on the matter.
And, who the hell is 'the independent MSEU'?
It is 'stealing' their intellectual property. The only problem is that IP is an artificial construct that can be taken away. IP is just a social contract: Society enforces Pantents and Copyrights as far as your use of your rights helps better society in some way. If at any point you break the social contract by abusing your rights, all that the government has to do is stop enforcing IP laws as far as a certain company's IP is concerned. Just like in most european countries the government can expropiate land for a bargain price to build a highway, your IP can be taken away. The difference is you can still use your network standards after you've lost your property, so AFAIK, the government won't pay you a dime.
Did you ever wonder why Brazil has ignored pharmaceutical patents for the last 20 years? What about Chinese and Japanese cloning of American products on the 80s? Governments do it because they can.
If Microsoft was banned, a lot of people would lose their jobs, people who rely on Microsoft products for their own product-range/services.
I call bulls***. The companies that use those products and services would still have the same needs. Suppose, for example, the NHS decides (or is forced) not to use the dubious MS solution they've been offered. Does this mean that all the hospitals in the UK will have to close? It seems more likely that the hospitals will remain open and that they will simply use a different IT solution. With a great deal of luck, that IT solution might even be one developed and supported in Europe.
I live in a province where the "Jobs" card gets played a lot. Generally what ends up happening is the government gives an American company enough money to pay the employee's wages outright for 10 years. Just enough of that money is trickled back to the community to prevent the economy from diversifying which, in turn, allows the company to play the card again in 3 years. (google "skeena bc").
It was also pre-emptive not co-operative and more stable than windows 95 when it first came out. Sigh to bad IBM dropped the ball in it's advertizing, I still remember the one with the couple dancing around and the logo appearing OS2 and that was it. Like what huh how is anybody going to know what the heck OS2 is from that.
Subsequent adds were just as bad then came windows 95 and everybody bought that like it was the second comming. I tried it and found it suffered from the same flaws(Corupting registry among others) OS2 2.0 had and fixed in warp 4 years before 95 even came out, Flaws MS partialy fixed in OSR2 and you could get if you bought a new pc or bought with a major hardware upgrade IE hard drive, mobo etc.
Oh and about the dos based statement Reinout is right OS2 wasn't dos based anymore than NT,2000,XP is dos based it could run on fat 32 or HPFS just like (not sure here but i belive nt only ran fat 16 and fat 32 came out with 2000 but i could be wrong as i didn't mess with NT) NT based OS's indeed OS2 and Windows NT are based off the same foundation OS2 was a colabrative work of IBM and MS (hence the reason IBM had the rights to put the windows code up to 3.1 into OS2 windows was supposed to be a gui shell for people to play with and get used to the gui before 2.0 came out) before windows took off (allbeit IBM's programers were the ones actually writting OS2 2.0) while MS was supposed to be working on 3.0 then windows started flying off the shelves and MS decided it didn't need IBM who they wern't getting along with anyway so they shelved their OS2 3.0 code and told IBM to stick it.
Then IBM came out with 2.0 when MS only had windows 3.0 out and MS dusted off it's 3.0 code and started writing NT but then that was to complicated for average end users because of the buisness server code and wouldn't run most dos programs because of the security that it needed for buisnesses so MS started writing what it called NT lite at first then windows 92,93,9x x for the year after the constant delays and finally 95 for when it came out four years after OS2 and at a higher cost i might add.
SO OS2 and NT were the same kind of OS both could run on fat or another file system HPFS/NTFS but OS2 included and was able to use dos without impacting security unlike NT which couldn't and was part of what prompted the 9x flavors.