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EC Reviews New Complaints Against Microsoft
Rob tells us that while Microsoft may still be fighting against existing antitrust sanctions the European Commission is already reviewing new complaints made against the software giant. From the article: "European Commission spokesperson, Jonathan Todd, confirmed that the competition commission is considering the complaints but said that no decision has been taken on a course of action, adding that the commission does not have to wait for formal complaints to take action against a company it suspects of anti-competitive behavior."
if the EC did force M$ to embrace interoperability. it would be a boon for open source, and other software companies wanting to not get stomped on with each new rev of OS/application suite.
After reading through the article, I didn't find much in the way of information. What specifically was the problem here? Microsoft still bundling? What are they being accused of bundling this time?
True, but it's innovating. They're finding new ways to upset people.
Defecation occurs.
In a truly competitive market that would be the case. The desktop and office suite markets are very far from that though. Intel have survived having to share their IP with AMD, why can't Microsoft do the same with their competitors instead of erecting artificial barriers in order to soak their customers and prevent any effective competition from emerging.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I found this particular paragraph interesting:
"Ms Kroes has declared herself "determined" that open source developers should have access to the information, and Microsoft appealed to the Court of First Instance recently to get a legal decision on whether it should be required to share communications source code with open source software vendors."
Since when does anyone give a crap about MS source code... I thought they just wanted the specifications for these protocols published in a free (beer and speech) manner?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
correct, we do not want the source code, just properly documented APIs that aren't encumbered with ridiculous licensing agreements...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
..just slap them on the hand and force them to seed 2 billion dollars into a market they don't dominate...that'll teach em!
I know you are trolling but this is so often repeated that it deserves an answer.
IANAL, but I have followed a number of antitrust cases. Courts are very hesitant to forceably break up a company and rightly so. In general, the emphasis is on long-term corrections rather than creating instability as a result of such a breakup.
Such a strategy takes time to have an effect, but it is often, I think, more effective than merely breaking up companies. The stifling restrictions that AT&T lived under for decades eventually lead to their divestiture (this was largely voluntary), and the restrictions that IBM lived under cost them their market power. But it doesn't happen immediately.
The slap on the wrist along with a court finding is actually one of the worst things you can do in an antitrust suit to a company. The reason is something called "collateral estoppel" which basically holds that absent a change in fact, facts which were necessarily decided as part of one case cannot be relitigated in another. So leaving the company intact while finding them to be guilty of Sherman Act violations lowers the bar to everyone else. Ralph Nader point out that it would take an army or lawyers to enforce such action against Microsoft, but he fails to note that in this case, Microsoft is now facing hundreds of antitrust suits, each of which is now far more dangerous simply because of the portions of the finding of fact that were not overturned by the appeals court. So Microsoft is heavily stifled by this judgement. Had they been broken up, they could rightly argue that facts had changed, but now they are in big trouble.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
.....move the chairs out of Ballmer's office.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Well, it can still be "better" in itself, as in having more features, better features and be more stable. And it will all be irrelevant if it isn't near 100% compatible with the monopolist. This is the reason OpenOffice has to spend time and effort chasing Microsoft all the time.
If Microsoft could again make a super-proprietary format that only they could read, and not having regulation in one form or another stopping them, it would probably make sense, economically. And this is the reason it is important to preserve free competition in the market, to regulate the monopolists. If you can't do that, someone could end up "owning" the market without anyone being able to realistically make a dent in their market.
That's not really free competition either.
In Europe Microsoft has different contracts with businesses preventing them from using other software.
For instance: to become some kind a MS-partner you have to have at least 30% of your staff and 50% of your sales people have some kind of MS Certification. The total share of your servers/clients that has to be Windows 70%. Next to that, if a MCS... can convince management to replace a Linux server by a Windows server they can get a bonus from MS up to 1000 Euro/server.
IF you can or will not comply your company will have to pay all licenses in full until 2 years back
To the people that don't believe me: I worked in such a company with such a contract. I told one of the customers that Microsoft wasn't his best choice for the technical needs he had (big customer, lots of servers) and I almost got fired because some big shot from Microsoft got to hear about it and demanded my release or they would revoke the license advantages. If you complain to the authorities same Bad Things(tm) will happen
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Microsoft is not known for having complete and accurate documentation of any of its APIs or file formats. If you want the absolute truth, you go to the source code. Think about it: if there were a discrepancy between what the documentation says, and what the code does, which one do you think will be considered "in error" in most cases?
It's rare that "specifications" are considered authoritative over "implementation" -- more common that "specifications" are written retroactively based on the implementation when people realise that the source code is an unreadable mess, but they still need to know what it does at a glance.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.