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EU Prepared to Fine Microsoft $2.5 Million Per Day
Lord_Slepnir writes "The European Union is unsatisfied with Microsoft's compliance with their anti-trust compliance from 2004, and is preparing to fine them 2 million Euros ($2.5m US) per day until they comply. Under that ruling, Microsoft must open up parts of their operating system to competitors, and change how they bundle Media Player." From the article: "On Monday, Microsoft said it had begun to provide the information Brussels had demanded, but the Commission has signaled the company acted too late. In December, Brussels informed the software giant that it had failed to comply with the original ruling it issued in March 2004."
"Microsoft must open up parts of their operating system to competitors, and change how they bundle Media Player."
This is ambiguous and misleading commentary. MS has been ordered to document the APIs of the interaction between their monopoly desktop OS and their non-monopoly server OS to allow competition. This is not "opening up" any part of their OS. They have not been asked to provide any source code and in fact they offered source code as an alternative to the documentation (under terms that would have gutted the benefits of the punishment) and it was rejected as unsatisfactory. To reiterate, MS was not ordered to open up any code, only to provide documentation on the interaction of their OS's.
not really, some of the Samba guys are on those independent committees for the EU, so they know EXACTLY what they are needing as far as documentation. It's a running joke that the interface for windows printer and file sharing is so messed up the current MICROSOFT devs occasionally need to dig out the documentation from the open source [and reverse-engineered] Samba project to figure out how to do their jobs... on the REAL source code. One clarification too, the EU did NOT demand MS to open up their source code.. that would mean giving up IP... they only required an Open, freely available, no-strings-attached, documentation of how window file and print sharing [plus authentication and a few other things] work.. had it had to be usable.. both technically and legally. MS instead dumped millions of lines of source, under NDA, and a steep licensing fee.... somebody's deliberately not hearing the question.. and it's not the EU.