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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.'"
The article says "accepts", as if they have a choice? This is the law, is it not?
Microsoft's got the same problem Sun has with the JRE. They might be able to use Sun as an excuse.
Because not being allowed to distribute code is totally opensource.
Really, wtf are these people on?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
I would tell them to meet all 26 or hit the road.
Eu doesn't need microsoft - microsoft needs them so I would tell them to fsck off if they don't comply with everything. after all you are their customers and being Microsoft they should be wanting to meet the customers demands - isn't this the reason they implement their crap - you know like put out the next IE7 - cause their customers asked them for it.
Government agency tells Microsoft "You've been bad. Here is your punishment." Microsoft tells government agency "Your punishment is bad, yes. But we do not accept your punishment. Instead, here is what we'd rather the punishment be." Government agency tells Microsoft "No, you will comply." Microsoft gives some money to the government agency. Government agency says "Aaah. We've reconsidered. Microsoft has actually chosen a very reasonable punishment for itself."
fifth sigma, inc.
I know, Microsoft is evil and Linux rules, but I can see their point of biew for reasons other than trying to strangle Linux. Microsoft probably does not want their software licensed in a GPL-like format. If these protocols can be implemented in Linux without forcing MS's software to be opened under the GPL, they should be forced to do that. If there's no way to integrate Microsoft's software with Linux without it being licensed under the GPL, then I think Linux is out of luck. It could still be used with a BSD-style license. But forcing MS to license any of their software under the GPL seems grossly anti-capitalistic.
Of course, MS is evil, so this whole thing might just be because they see Linux as a threat and want to hurt it any way they can. It could go either way.
Sorry about the pun, but it seems like accountability is easily trumped by bank account ability.
I'd give anything to see the EU tell Microsoft to follow all 26 or face a continent-wide ban. Can you imagine any single one of us, after being found guilty of something, picking and choosing our punishments in a court of law?
I don't see why Microsoft should have to turn over their source code without any kind of compensation. They did develop the product, and it seems to me that they should be able to profit from it. In my opinion the demands of the EU are in this case unreasonable.
Microsoft can not allow the EU to go non-MS. That would create a market large enough to support true competitors.
Once/if OS competition comes to a large enough market, it will come to the entire world. The EU is large enough.
And with all the good will they've built up over the years, MS will go the way of all buggy whip manufacturers once they lose the competitive advantage of their desktop monopoly.
And their loss of that monopoly is inevitable. Look at the history of large-scale, money-making products. They almost always get displaced by smaller, cheaper, products from "upstart" companies or countries. And the MS OS is going to be displaced eventually by a free, open-source OS, if only because an OS is a commodity, and the price of a commodity product approaches the marginal cost to produce another copy. Which, in the case of software, is zero.
There's so many wrong things in your post... I don't have time to correct them all. Suffice it to say:
:)
1) BSD is open source.
2) Anything released under BSD can be forked and re-released under GPL.
3) It's absolutely possible to "integrate" software in Linux without it being GPL.
Probably missed some things... no doubt others will pick them up
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yeah... open up the specs to their drm formats. Like the RIAA/MPAA would really ever allow that to happen. You honestly think they don't believe in security through obscurity?
Except this is not the RIAA or MPAA, this is Microsoft and the EU. Nothing has taken place in America hence the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have no say in what goes on.
This isn't about microsoft's license on their code. This is about them demanding that you don't open source your own implementation after you have read their documentation.
Don't forget for a second that there is a good deal of anti-Americanism pushing the EU to crap on MS.
Not that MS doesn't deserve to get crapped on, but that sentiment will quite usefully prevent the EU from letting MS get away at all in this case.
For craps sake. If the government takes me to court and slaps the shit out of me, I do my god damned punishment or the police stick their boots up my ass. I didn't realize these things were open for negotiation. Lets all just get it out in the open: Big companies own us... pretty much literally.
Or MS can say "The fines for noncompliance will be lower than the cost of damage to our business if we do comply. So we're going to eat the fines." Even if that were true, eventually the EU would either crank up the fines or simply bar MS from selling Windows as-is, in which case we're back to option 1.
Open source != Linux. There's more involved here than a few nasty proprietary protocols people want to port to Linux.
For instance:
- On the Windows platform itself, there's a number of open source apps which can't do everything MS apps can because the MS apps are using undocumented API's.
- non-Windows media players can't make use of extensions to AVI/WMA and DRM because of closed MS specifications.
It would be a big win for open source if MS just released full documentation of all of their API's - it would certainly level the playing field somewhat.
A "sponsor program" to allow patents or core algorithms to be used in a royalty-free fashion would be another big win, but I doubt that would ever happen.
Both Microsoft and the European Community government are new entities. Neither has the limits of their powers defined or tested.
Many people besides the programming community and the politicians are watching this fight as it will define how the other major oligopalistic corporations will deal with the EU bureaucrats in the future.
Microsoft needs the EU enforcement apparatice to maintain its monopoly and the European Union bureaucracy runs on Microsoft's software.
This whole showdown is a 'tempest in a teacup' or 'tussles in Brussels' and will die down to an endless Eurocratic paper shuffle that will never be fully resolved. It's the kind of money-making machine for upper-class European lawyers that Brussels is becoming world-famous for. It will become just one more of the million and one things that makes Europe less attractive to do business in. It will be 'resolved' in the same matter that all European Community business issues get resolved; with local flavor. In Italy by bribe, in Germany by rigorous preparation of ten thousand pages of chickenshit regulations, and in France by a nod and wink that enables the enarcs to get their customary payoffs and the rest of the people to bask in the 'gloire de la republic'; that is, series of substance-less but emotionally-charged gestures.
What's more important is that Microsoft would release all APIs and specifications for protocols and file formats royalty free to the open source community. While source might help, APIs and specifications are more important.
IANAL etc. etc. but
[ They can take their ball and go home. ]
Yes, but they still would not be complying with the court order and would be subject to severe penalties. They could sell 4 copies of the new product and then go but then the cat would be out of the bag already.
[ MS would threaten it, ]
How to really offend a European court. They are not in the US, they have to respect the court or they will suffer. They do not have political clout behind them anymore. In fact if they threaten to do something like that it could easily be seen as contempt.
[ "The fines for noncompliance will be lower than the cost of damage to our business if we do comply. So we're going to eat the fines." ]
This would constitute contempt and could result in a lot more than just a higher fine. The person that makes the decision not to comply can be taken to court and can be sent to prison. I think that no high paid executive wants to do that. The fine for non-compliance is a fine for dragging your feet, now they are no longer dragging their feet, they have decided to not comply they enter a whole new game. I do not know exactly what has been said but if they said 'no' they are incredibly stupid and liable to real penalties. They should say 'we are going to, but we are having real difficulty and need more time. Maybe if the court could possibly help us by changing things a little we would be able to sort this out sooner'. Any refusal is bad but to ask for help is good.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
As is often the case, the press is completely misreporting the issue. The EU never demanded that Microsoft release their own source code. What MSFT is required to do is license their network protocols and provide sufficient documentation to licensees so they can create their own implementations. A similar condition was part of the US antitrust case.
The license that MSFT offered is (1) expensive, and (2) specifically prevents licensees from releasing the source code to their own implementations. The EU is mostly upset about the cost, and is therefore completely missing the point. The only effective remedy would be to require that MSFT publish the protocol specs and allow anybody (e.g. the SAMBA team) to implement them.
Some would say that such a compulsory license amounts to the EU stealing MSFT's intellectual property. Bullshit! Do you believe that making them pay a fine is stealing their money? You can oppose the whole concept of antitrust regulation on Libertarian grounds, but that battle was fought and lost, the argument is over, and antitrust is settled law. The EU has the right to set antitrust rules and punish the violators.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Not if they have to pass a compliance suite they won't.
opening the source would be admitting that they are infringing a number of patents
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
So let them pick what option they want to do, being expensive if not really a concern of the EU. Remember this is not because they are nice guys but imposed because they broke the law in EU.
Help fight continental drift.
The banks in Switzerland that hold their money? Officers of the company for non-compliance as they travel the world?
You can't violate a country's laws, get caught, and decide to go home instead of facing the penalties. Even US courts would recognize that. It's not a question of whether or not they want to make this deal. It's a question of how hard can the international court system come down on them if they try to hide from justice. Considering how difficult it would be fore MS to actually hide, they're far better off trying to derail the court proceedings.
The ______ Agenda
"We are working with the Commission to try 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 so that the confidentiality of our information is preserved," the spokesperson added.
It sounds like Microsoft is not even talking about access to their source code, they are talking about whether open source projects are permitted to distribute their own code necessary for interoperating with Microsoft code in open source form.
In different words, Microsoft is trying to keep "confidential" exactly what the commission is requiring them to make public.
Furthermore, since the only group of people they are trying to impose restrictions on is open source (since binary-only vendors have full access under the agreement already), this is a direct attack by Microsoft on open source.
Well, it's good to see that Microsoft is validating open source through their action. Let's hope that the EU doesn't let them get away with this.
MS would threaten it, maybe stop selling Windows in Europe for a few weeks, then both sides would panic and split the difference.
Another possibility is that MS could stop selling Windows in Europe and Europe could respond by nationalizing the copyright on all Microsoft, Inc properties and releasing them into the public domain. Meaning they wouldn't need Microsoft to sell windows. Hey, look at that trade surplus with the U.S. abruptly swell.
Might be a bit difficult to pull off technically, but at some point the EU is going to do something if it wants to be considered a group of sovereign countries with their own laws, as opposed to just a funny kind of U.S. territory to which the constitutional protections on human rights don't apply. Cave on this and they'll be walked all over for the rest of their existence.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The governments represented by the EU cannot pass any law they like; they must respect the treaties they've signed, including those on copyrights and patents. These treaties do not permit confiscation of the copyrights or patents of a US-based company, and the U.S. could pursue trade sanctions if the EU attempted this.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem for MS is that:
1. "EU government" really means something fundamentally different than "USA government". No, I'm not gonna bash the USA or anything. The EU just isn't one country. The U stands for UNION, and it's a union of independent nations.
What passes for "EU government" or "EU agency" is just a shifty diplomatic treaty between countries that follow their own interests and have their own population to impress. If you bribe, say, a German bureaucrat in an EU agency, you'll have all the other EU countries screaming bloody murder, if only to push their own bureaucrat in his/her place.
(Which also answers the usual "bet the EU wouldn't do that to their own companies" moans: there isn't such a thing as an EU company. If the EU failed to punish, say, a German monopoly, it would have France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, etc, screaming bloody murder.)
So there isn't just one government to bribe. By the time you went through all the governments to bribe, one of them would have the next election.
2. Speaking of elections, most EU countries have more interesting politics. They don't have two parties, both cattering to the corporations, for a start. Your average European's country's election is "won" by an unstable alliance of parties, neither of which usually has a majority on its own.
It's a system which works precisely _because_ politicians are, well, politicians. (Said in all possible contempt.) It's a system where, in fact, they make populism and demagogy work.
The "winner" doesn't get 4 years in which they can just rake in bribes and catter to the higher bidder with impunity, and the opposition doesn't just wait for their turn to rake in the bribes with impunity. There isn't any such thing as having an almost guaranteed turn at it: lose enough popularity and you can turn from an alliance leader to a minor member of someone else's alliance in the next elections. And even if you "won", the more other parties you need in a coalition for a majority, the more concessions you'll have to make to get them to support you, so better not end up too low.
And more importantly, even if you won, alliances can be formed the other way around at any moment, if that is perceived as the more populist thing to do for those small parties in your coalition. If the "winning" party has, say, 41% of the places in the parliament, they might at any moment find themselves switched from leading a majority coalition of parties, to being the opposition because everyone else made a 59% coalition against them. The small members of a coalition really have nothing to lose from switching sides like that: they'll end up members of the majority coalition either way, so they might as well just pick the side that looks more popular.
Bribery does exist in Europe's politics, but it's usually a lot more subtle than that, and offers more subtle benefits. You won't see a politician just openly being bought by a cartel and lobbying full time for them, or a party just openly forcing the DOJ to bend over for a corporation. That's the kind of thing that's plain political suicide down here, one way or the other: if you don't get kicked out by your party to save face, that party becomes the opposition very quickly as alliances form the other way around.
So basically short of bribing every single political party in Europe, it's not easy for MS to just "give some money to the government" and get a free ride out. And bribing every single political party would be a pretty costly exercise even for MS.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While I do not deny that it is possible for an entity to make a 25 billion dollar profit per year while retaining value and integrity, I can not think of a single real-life example.
It seems to me that in order to acquire such massive profits while retaining "value and integrity" one would have to have a very good product, "value and integrity," and the desire to profit.
In an area like desktop computing, I don't see how there could be such a giant gap between the profits of competing companies in what is supposed to be an open market, without the companty on the good end of the gap not really caring about keeping the market open.
I mean what do you use a computer for? Is there any service that microsoft provides that is not equally providable through another company (barring proprietary file formats)?
Apple, Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX, etc. All of these are just wrappers that enable you to interact with your computers hardware. That's it. They vary in the degree of interaction required, and the amount of interaction you are capable of.
They are all pretty much equally capable of preforming the same tasks, they can all access the internet, they can all do word processing, etc etc everything your average person needs to do.
A major part of the reason that windows is so huge is that microsoft got it to be the default install on just about any pre-built computer.
Really want to make a free market for desktop computing? Require that hardware and operating systems are sold seperately, or that the end user at least has a choice of what to have installed on a pre-built computer.
Force the user to make a choice. And require documentation on what you can do and how you can do it with the operating system freely available.
There you go, free market for desktops influenced only by people's preference, (this is assuming a group of people entirely new to the concept of desktop computing, not the set of people we have now who are ingrained in windows) willingness to learn, and affordability of the OS.
Note that I am not arguing with you, your comment is just what started my typing, I've been rambling without much aim ever since.
kaens.blogspot.com
They aren't. They are expected to publish honest and accurate descriptions of their APIs in such a way that open source can use them.
They are twisting the words to get the support of the terminally ignorant.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Microsoft currently has 2 choices:
- Comply and nothing painful happens.
- Don't comply and be in for a world of pain.
There are *no* alternatives to these options.
There is *no* negociation possible.
This is the EU, not the US.
EU: We find that you (MS) are breaking competition laws, and we order you to take these here 26 measures to allow other companies to enter into fair competition. You either take all these steps unconditionally, pay a fine per unit of time of non-compliance, or ultimately could be denied access to the EU market.
MS: Of course we respect your decision and intend to comply fully. Well, almost fully. You see, some of the measures you have ordered would tend to interfere with our monopoly and our capacity to abuse it. We are in a position to negotiate the terms of your punishment, because.. Well, because all your base are belong to us! EU customers are so completely locked in our proprietary formats that they will revolt if you deny them our products!
This is like Don Corleone telling the court: yes, your honour, it's true, I am a mafia don. And I accept your punishment, except if it is too severe I will naturally have to use my position as criminal mastermind and have you whacked.
What am I missing?
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Oh, yes, just throw aside Berne and TRIPS. That'll do the Europeans software companies hurt by Microsoft's monopolistic tactics. After all, who cares if you throw aside GATT and launch a global trade war, if you get to swing your big dick?
Countries have geographically limited soverignty. It's a fact of life. The U.S. couldn't get DeBeers, because it wasn't in the U.S.; India couldn't get everybody it wanted from Union Carbide, because they weren't all in India; the EU can only hit Microsoft in Europe, and Microsoft can avoid that to the extent it ceases to do buisness in Europe.
You propose, what? That MS bribes every single political party in every single country in Europe?
You may find that "Europe" is not a single state, like the USA. It's a helluva lot of states in what's just slightly more than a diplomatic treaty. So who are you proposing to bribe? _All_ of them?
You may also find that the political landscape in Europe is a _lot_ different than in the USA. Politicians here actually have to fight for their votes, rather than just sell themselves openly to the highest bidder. The result is a system which is _far_ less inclined to bend over to a corporation and shaft their voters. Au contraire, if in doubt they'll shaft the corporations for extra votes.
Political majority means a fragile alliance of parties, neither of which has the majority, and all of which are trying to exploit their allies mistakes for their own benefit. Any one party who'd publicly bend over to a monopoly, would quickly find themselves switched from leader of the majority coalition to being _the_ opposition, because all their former allies did the populist thing and formed a coalition without them.
More importantly, that wouldn't even buy a whole term for MS. If the political alliances form the other way around, who's the current leader can change right in the middle of a term.
So what do you propose? That MS bribes every single political party, in every single country in Europe? I'm sure you can see how that's impractical.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
MS was simply asked to license their APIs and protocols fairly to everyone, without discrimination. (E.g., no pulling a stunt like "nope, we won't license them to Mozilla because we still want to kill that threat to our monopoly.")
That's all its about. APIs and protocol specs. No MS source code has to be involved, other than a few _header_ files. Or not even those, in the case of protocols.
So MS thinks it's smart and comes up with a scheme that says "sure, you can get our specs if you sign this license saying that you can't open source _your_ code that implements those specs."
Basically a way to say "grr, ok, you can see our specs but only as long as you're not one of those OSS commies. Then screw you, you can't interface with our products."
"If these protocols can be implemented in Linux without forcing MS's software to be opened under the GPL, they should be forced to do that."
Which is exactly what the EU asked. That's what this fight is all about.
Noone asked MS to provide implementation code of its own, nor to GPL any of its implementation code. It's just basically saying "let others interface with your code." Including, yes, Linux programs, MacOS programs, or whoever else wants to use those protocols.
And MS is basically saying "Nope, no OSS guys will talk to _our_ servers."
That's what this is all about. MS is trying to kill OSS via a license that discriminates against OSS developpers. The EU says "sorry, you can't do that. We said non-discriminating and we meant it."
But again, that never was about GPL-in any of _Microsoft's_ code. It just has to do with whether MS is allowed to say you can't GPL _your_ code (that incidentally calls their APIs or talks to one of their servers via a proprietary MS protocol.)
And frankly, much as I'm not even pro-OSS, I don't think MS should be allowed to decide that. They (think they) make a good OS. Fine. But they shouldn't be in a position to dictate whose programs are allowed to run on it.
Because allowing that is the shortest way to a monopoly.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Another possibility is that MS could stop selling Windows in Europe and Europe could respond by nationalizing the copyright on all Microsoft, Inc properties and releasing them into the public domain."
I love how this "solution" is bandied about. Is this really the precedent you want to set? IE, a European country suddenly is doing "too well" in the US, so they just nationalized? Europeans love to talk tough about how their software industry is just going to _pulverize_ the US's, but if everyone just keeps ignoring the other guy's copright, there won't be much industry left.
_Real people_ own Microsoft. It's not like it's just some shadowy group of owners plotting evil against the world. If you're an American with _any_ money in the stock market (which includes such things as 401k's, mutual funds, IRAs, etc), you most likely own some Microsoft stock. The political repercussions of hitting Microsoft like this are FAR greater than most Europeans on here apparently imagine. Five rich guys don't amount to much. Fify million middle-class Joes are a rather substantial voting bloc, and the last thing you want for them to start voting is "SCREW THE EU!"
The least of such sanctions would be from the WTO. Are you just going to ignore those, proving, in reality, you don't give a fig about keeping your word than Microsoft? That all this talk of "international rules" is really just doublespeak for organized mob rule?
In fact, it could lead to a full out economic embargo - you can't just take what you want when it becomes convienient in the civilized world, because people will simply stop giving. If the EU does indeed have a trade surplus, you just shot your own foot making some sort of idiotic statement about the EU.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.