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EU Fines for Microsoft Approved, Off the Record
mattaw writes "The Register is carrying a report that all 25 member states of the EU have found Microsoft guilty of non-compliance, off the record. Microsoft is in line for a fine of $2.51 million per day backdated to December 15th 2004 for failing to meet the terms of the EU commission's ruling."
That's exactly the point. The EU told Microsoft to do so two years ago, and Microsoft failed to comply. What else should the EU do other than fine Microsoft ? Hold a gun to Bill's head until he's finished writing the documentation ? Put the company executives in jail ?
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Some years ago a large swedish company was fined for anti-competitive practises and price dumping on the italian market.
that is a big no-no and they were fined the standard 10% of the annual global revenue.
10% global annual revenue hurts big time if you are a multinational company.
many other european companies have been fined in the same way.
It's called milliard. At least in most of Europe.
num - US - UK
10^3 - thousand - thousand
10^6 - million - million
10^9 - billion - milliard
10^12 - trillion - billion
10^15 - quadrillion - trillion
10^18 - quintyllion - quadrillion
You need to specify Europe or US when speaking bignum, or you may end up 3 orders of magnitude away from desired goal.
In Poland we say "Microsoft placi 1.4 miliarda dolarow" and nobody mentions billions of dollars that easily.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
You have got to be kidding. Microsoft is the only one _you_ see on the news probably. The EU is very strict on this sort of things. Have a look at the EU vs Alitalia or the EU vs Olympic Airlines, or the EU vs BMW and GM. The EU even goes against its own country members if they fail to comply with EU law. No matter how people want to see it, microsoft is not the innocent victim here...
[Offtopic]Congrats to Italy for Barrying Germany 'Squadra Azzurra' Style! I hope you guys lift the cup in the end![/offtopic]
That's as far as I can tell, anyway - admittedly my knowledge on internation politics isn't crash hot.
No, it's more like Microsoft HASN'T gathered its employees to clearly document interfaces in compliance with the EU ruling.
I believe the EU (and Microsoft competitors) already responded to that. The documentation isn't clear enough, and conveniently leaves out many hidden details that continue to provide Microsoft with a competitive advantage.
And if you read the pages behind the link you provided, you'll see very clearly that the program has ROYALTIES attached to it. It would be acceptable to charge a reasonable one-time fee for technical documentation, but ROYALTIES??
Not really true. The "judge and jury" has only become part of the dispute because Microsoft has failed to comply with their previous judgement.
Have you considered that Microsoft is, as usual, trying to get away with the appearance of compliance while at the same time continuing to milk their own cash cow?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
It's completely reasonable not to document the full capabilities of a framework or software component.
They have explicitly been ordered by court to document the full capabilities of certain frameworks and protocols. There have been long arguments about it and the judges found that in this case it is completely unreasonable for Microsoft to keep those secret for a huge variety of reasons mostly relating to Microsofts market position and behavior. Had they been reasonable themselves in past times, this would not have happened.
It is completely reasonable to expect a company to comply with the law and court rulings in a territory where they want to do business
Publishing an interface is a big deal, since a published interface is set in stone for eternity.
And if they don't document them properly how are their own products going to work? Oh, and changes can be dealt with by updates to the documentation (silly concept eh?)... Oh, those don't exist? back to square one, how is your own software supposed to implement them..
It's simply good design practice to expose as little information as possible about how to exploit/abuse the internals of a component.
1. Hiding your implementation details is not a design decision, it at best a way to hide the idiocy of your design decisions
2. Keeping interfaces obscure is not helping the non exploitability of Windows at all. Not only is this argument well known to be false (security through obscurity), Microsoft's products also show how consistently it fails in the real world.
So.. the only argument you have there is that it is in itself reasonable for them to want to hide certain information. Too bad that due to their own misbehavior in the past, they are not allowed to hide some information that they'd like to keep hidden. Since they didn't comply, they got fined.
Even with this fine, Europe is still an incredible, unbelievable source of profit to Microsoft. Collectively, the second largest economy in the world
e an_Union
Actually it's the largest economy in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Europ
The European Union has the world's largest economy, slightly larger than that of the United States of America with a 2005 GDP of 12,865,602 million vs. 11,734,300 million (USD figures) (using nominal US Dollar GDP) according to the International Monetary Fund.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
"Yeah, because offering a peek at the goddamned source code didn't go far enough, right?"
l
No, because the source code is NOT what was ASKED FOR. How can people not understand this? Go read the halloween papers. You will see why MS went as far as to try giving source instead of actual API documentation, because that is how badly they DON'T WANT to do that, not because they can't, or it's too hard as they say.
Here, feel free to read up on what is actually going on right here...
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.htm
then maybe you'll see how much of a bully MS actually is. Anything that would put a stop to that has my full approval.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?