Microsoft Sues EU

mormop writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft is hauling the European Commission into court." The case is in response to "imposed sanctions against the software giant, including a record fine of about $621 million (497 million euro) in March 2004, in a case that also covered the bundling of Microsoft's Media Player with Windows, but the company has not entirely carried them out."

Comments

Re:monopolist sues regulatory body

[goldspider]

"what's next?"

Slashbot story submitter forsakes sensationalist rhetoric and accurately represents story with headline and summary.

I won't be holding my breath.

Re:Inflammatory summary

[hungrygrue]

Opening these protocols to FOSS projects is not likely to cause Microsoft irreparable harm. The only danger I could imagine is that opening them will expose a megaplex of holes in the protocols and we'll see a rush of exploits that make the worst Microsoft security issue in its history seem like a minor incident. Then it will harm Microsoft because it will cost them billions in sales as people migrate to non-Microsoft server software to escape the invasion of worms and other exploits poking through those holes.

It seems likely that that is very close to the argument that Microsoft will be using. They can't, on one hand, point to Linux as their primary competition in the operating systems market as proof that they don't hold a monopoly and, on the other hand, specifically try to prevent FOSS from being able to compete while allowing any and all corporate competitors access to these protocols. That just won't fly. The security argument, though, has at some legitimacy. There is a real concearn there - Their code and design has been a secret for a very long time, and they have been tacking on ever more kludges while trying to maintain as much backward compatibility as possible. The number of potential security holes is hard to immagine.

Re:Inflammatory summary

[einhverfr]

I actually don't see that as very likely. The bigger issue is that Microsoft *depends* on secrecy and lock-in to hold onto their market in the face of less expensive competition. So yes, opening up the protocols will cause them irreparable harm.

Personally I think that this is a red herring. Projects like Samba are becomming increasingly adept at reverse engineering Microsoft's proprietary protocols. And although I think that Microsoft is trying to dampen these resources with NDA's etc. I think that it will only slow things down slightly. In short, it is too little too late.

Re:Microsoft Scared of Open Source?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It's just business. Microsoft aren't alone in this sort of thing. Do you think IBM open everything of theirs to their competitors?

For the most part actually, yes they do. IBM has been pretty good about working with open standards for quite a while.

What has this got to do with anything?

It seems like a valid point to me. If MS does not want people to be able to see their protocols they must have a reason. Maybe that reason is to stop interoperability or maybe it is because they are full of security holes or even stolen code. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate as to their motives.

I can't see how it would be a good thing. Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it, regardless of how that new monopoly behaves?

You can't have a monopoly on Linux. Thats is most of the point. As open source it will never be locked to one vendor. With an MS monopoly customers are subject to the whims of MS. They pay what MS wants or go without and they are restricted to the features MS is willing to allow. With Linux if one vendor charges too much, you can go with a different vendor and prices reflect the fact that there is competition. If you want functionality added/fixed you can do it yourself or hire anyone you want to do it. You seem to have a very skewed idea of what a monopoly is.

Re:Inflammatory summary

[rgmoore]

I actually don't see that as very likely. The bigger issue is that Microsoft *depends* on secrecy and lock-in to hold onto their market in the face of less expensive competition. So yes, opening up the protocols will cause them irreparable harm.

That isn't irreprable harm, though; that's just having to face the market. Being forced to compete in an actual market is supposed to be the whole point of anti-trust law. It would be ridiculous to find that Microsoft was engaged in anticompetitive behavior but not actually force them to compete as part of the judgment.

A Lie

[John Hasler]

> ...broad licenses for the source code of
> communications protocols...

That's a lie. Publication of protocols does not require the publication of any source code whatsoever. Same goes for file formats.

Re:Bundling is bad?

[pandrijeczko]

I don't know why Microsoft is constantly under attack for its bundled applications.

There's an "argument" that says an operating system should only be a kernel, some hardware drivers & a few tools that allow you to communicate with the hardware. Everything else you install above that should be selectable by the user of the OS, not bundled in so tightly that it cannot be removed easily for an alternative third-party solution.

Should MS not be allowed to run their own dialup service?

That isn't the question. The real question is "Should Microsoft be allowed to leverage it's own dial-up service freely with it's OS when other dial-up services would need to pay a heavy fee to do the same."

Considering that Mosaic and Navigator were being given away for free to all but business users why must MS be berated for giving out a free IE with Windows?

Because IE was bundled into Windows far too tightly & was used as a mechanism to enforce Microsoft's own HTML extensions onto the users - this made other browsers deliberately incompatible.

Should MS be punished for bundling TCP/IP when this is a service that could be provided by third party applications?

No but then they are not being punished for this. TCP/IP is an entirely open suite of protocols into which MS can contribute as freely as anyone else as long as the protocols remain open. Microsoft was essentially *forced* to adopt TCP/IP because it's own NetBEUI protocols (and the IPX/SPX protocols it stole from Novell) were not suitable for Internet operation. The fact that they did adopt it is a good thing because it makes interoperation with other systems that much easier.

Then they have their insidious sub-licensed version of the Norton drive defragmenter.

It could be argued that MS provided this within Windows because their file systems are prone to suffering from fragmentation. But it is still an inferior tool to other 3rd-party defragmenting solutions.

Should we even allow MS to sell products that use NTFS since it "unfairly" obsoletes the defregmentation market?

It's better than FAT but NTFS still suffers from bad fragmentation over a period of time.

Shouldn't we force MS to sell an OS with just the kernel and drivers and no GUI so we can have fair competition in this important marketspace.

No, not at all. Without going into arguments about whether a GUI is good or bad, Windows has always meant "GUI". Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and ME were essentially GUIs running over MS-DOS anyway. Plus the fact that the desktop environment of a taskbar, icons and menus is essentially all provided by a single application, Explorer, which can be changed for third party alternatives (like Directory Opus or Lightstep) relatively simply.

Why isn't MS accused of unfairly dominating the plain text editor market by bundling notepad?

You could argue that it is unfair of them to bundle notepad with Windows on the same basis. Whilst it is simply a text editor, it does change the "accepted" format of text files by including an additional linefeed after every carriage return (UNIX and most other systems just use carriage return). However, apps like IE and WMP are more insidious because they respecively enforce MS'es proprietary HTML extensions and codecs on the user.

You need to remember that Microsoft's own marketing machine portrays Windows as an easy operating system to use for even the least computer-literate user. As such, it could be argued that the ability to choose and install alternative applications to those provided by Microsoft should also be made much easier.

I'm sure people are going to make comparisons here to Linux distributions including certain applications also. However, I would argue here that there are enough distros around for anyone to choose one that includes most of the apps they want to use - besides, RedHat and SuSE (and I suspect other distros) do include complex installation programs that allow you to specify individual apps that you do or don't want installed if you drill down deep enough.