Slashdot Mirror
EU Gives Microsoft 8 Days Until Fines
kaysan writes "European Commissioner Neelie Kroes has presented Microsoft with an ultimatum: Before Thursday next week, Microsoft must hand over all secret information on Windows protocols to its competition. Should the company choose to ignore this demand, it will be severely fined. Microsoft's history with EU fines so far amounts to approximately Euro777.5 million. Both linked websites are Dutch, but then again, so is EU commissioner Neelie Kroes."
If it's easily distributed than it's not of value.
... isn't it?
Scary thought
The value isn't the bits, it's the process.
In the ideal world, people would invest in a software product, then the product would be free to download and use. The release would be dependent on achieving some level of investment. Then each revision follows it, e.g. Product version 2 will wait until another $X dollars are invested.
That's the REAL way to do it. Not by selling copies of bits that are of NO VALUE.
As for the anti-trust issue, it's because MSFT is doing things that are AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE CUSTOMERS all in a guise to raise their vendor lockin (through no valid technical need) to raise profits. Prosecuting anti-trust violators is about giving the customers freedom of choice, so they can decide how to invest their money. e,g, sure I'll run Windows, but I'd rather use Lotus, not Excel, etc, etc....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Slashdot continues its editorial nosedive towards irrelevance as they now ignore their own FAQ!. I wasn't aware that there is a significant portion of the American Slashdot reading public that could understand Dutch. Interesting.
Microsoft could give away 1/2 of its total capital and still have enough money to run people out of their companies. Microsoft is a company that expoilts everything and everyone. It's the second most evil company behind Walmart. Microsoft hinders innovation by stomping out new ideas. Apple has fought throught it and now the EU is too. The fines are a slap on the wrist at best. I hope the EU does more then America did to MS.
" I think that freedom is Americas biggest export. Atleast untill China can stamp it out for 20 cents a unit."
Face it -- the fines aren't even petty cash. MS expects the Court of First Instance to rule in a few months, and it would be stupid to turn over information that can't be recalled before then.
At absolute worst, the fines are worth less than the ability to hold off competition for the same period; it's just part of the cost of doing business.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Think about it - if Microsoft doesn't market Windows et. al. in the EU, the EU has no standing to impose fines on Microsoft. European customers will be obliged to purchase Microsoft products in the USA and to find a way to get their shiny new copies of Vista home (as I've never heard of a way to force a company to do business in a given geographic region). The EU will be forced be economic pressure to either 1) cave in to Microsoft, or 2) subsidize the vast number of businesses in Europe which will have to endure the nightmare of migrating their enterprises off of Windows onto some other solution. Even if the EU were more economically powerful than it is, I doubt that it could afford option #2, especially once the US government catches wind of things and slaps an export tax on it (which you know they would).
Of course, they could start running their businesses using OLPC laptops! That'd show those bullies at Redmond who's boss!
Time for Microsoft to apply for patents on anything and everything described by these protocols...Otherwise, they're up a creek.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The last time the EU demanded that Microsoft produce usable documentation (as in, sufficient specs to program at least a working prototype implementation of the relevant network protocols), they kept insisting that the EU had demanded that they hand over all their source code. And of course large chunks of the press believed them.
I wonder what story they'll try to feed us this time around.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
Does anyone else see this as an incredible boost to projects like Wine and ReactOS? Given that up until now they've had to use Chinese Walls and so forth to figure these things out, it seems to me that this court order is going to save them a *lot* of effort.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
There is no such thing as Intellectual Property. Europe does not recognize software patents, and as for copyright: it has a very narrowly defined (and abused) goal in law: to provide incentive. MS blocks that effort by monopolizing.
A few things would and wouldn't happen: first of all, existing installed Microsoft products wouldn't stop working. MS hasn't got a global off switch. Second: MS would still have to pay. If they would refuse to pay, they'd get all their assets seized in Europe. Third: Copyright treaties and law allows the government to free something from copyright if it's something of a national security interest. They declare MS's copyright void in the EU. That'd alone kill MS.
Even if that wouldn't happen, Europe would have an accelerated migration OFF Windows, which, as the biggest union in the world in terms of GDP and having the Euro as a better alternative to the dollar, would cause a cascading effect in all businesses reducing the demand/marketshare for Microsoft products worldwide.
This would be nothing short of complete suicide on behalf of Microsoft. They are not that stupid.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Will these docs help out the Wine project?
If I can improve your property even more than you can, should I be able to take it from you? Or maybe more accurately, should the State be able to take it from you and give it to me, since it was the State that gave it to you in the first place?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Data formats are NOT trade secrets.
If anything, the Microsoft corporate officers should be jailed for misapprpriateing the private data of it's end users. That is effectively what it does when it choses to encode that data without being willing to document the manner of that decoding. They're holding everyone hostage. It's just that people have finally wised up after being duped for years on end.
So the task of telling Microsoft what to go do with itself is not as simple as it should be.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Most governments give some agency the power to enforce judgements by ordering the seizure of property that is within their jurisdiction in order to satisfy the judgement: while that obviously applies to things like bank accounts held in banks subject to the government in question, and real estate, it also can extend to tangible personal property and to intangible personal property like, say, intellectual property.
If for purposes of EU law, the the EU itself was the copyright owner of all previously-published Microsoft software, or that Microsoft software was in the public domain, that would be a pretty serious penalty for Microsoft.
Alright, I'm not going to argue about MS being a monopoly or not, to be honest, I don't care. I don't care because one company setting the standards and everyone complying with it creates an environment of stability in computers. Most crashes, problems, and issues I have to diagnose and repair are most often caused by thrid party vendors that wrote software without bothering to read the existing Whitepapers on the subject...which is why this is POINTLESS. Even if MS complies have the people out there won't bother to read the information unless they are trying to take clients away from MS products. I know that's the point right? They're using legal action to ensure that people can play on a level playing feild. It's sounds liek a good idea, but it's a recipe for chaos in the long term. All you end up with is the establishment of new proprietary information from competitors of MS that eventually wil have to be sued to hand the information over as well, and the person who sues them, will use this ruling as the basis for their law suits.
Making MS hand over documentation on protocols is pointless, there are white papers that describe eveything important to a real programer, with a single exception, file formats for Office products (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Visio, etc) The formats used in Office 2007 are completely different....making this a pointless ruling. They've already changed the very protocols they've been told to hand over, and since 2007 isn't out of BETA yet, it technically isn't covered by the ruling. Smooth move.. this is what happens when courts are allowed to make rulings on technical systems they arn't qualified to rule on. They missed it big time if they really want to level the feild.
Personally I don't think making them turn over anything beyond a table of file format struture is fair to MS or the consumer. LEts say they force MS to turn over documentation about security in Windows (crippled as it already is) you've just given evey hacker a road map! That's about as stupid as a CNN reporter asking, "Can you give me the exact location of the troops?" while the enemy is watching CNN. Please, they want an API to turn off secuirty center, they got it. They want to re-write parts of the OS, screw em. It's not their OS, it's not their right to create more issues for the end user. Symantec and McAfee in particular are the worst abusers of the OS to date (at least in the US), and are ten times worse than MS about their anti-competition practices. At least with an OS you know what you're getting, you can expect it to infest every part of your comptuer, but half the people out their don't get that the copy of Security Center or Internet security that came with their new PC, is so deeply embeded in the OS that half the time the uninstall fails leaving your systems crippled forcing you to reinstall the software or risk having to reinstall windows.
Anyway, rant over. This ruling is pointless, it accomplishes nothing except having MS turn over file format informaiton to help Belgium's conversion to open office and doesn't do crap for the consumer the court is suppose to be protecting.
Huh? There are plenty of EU-based companies which got harsher sentences than MS right from the start. MS initially got no fine, and was just ordered to document the protocol. MS got fined only after it ignored the ruling and the deadline. MS's fine only got so big by ignoring the daily fine for 2.5 years. (It's basically like ignoring a parking fine for 2.5 years straight, and continuing to park in front of a garage every day. Of course it gets to be big money after a long time.) _And_ it's been given a sweet deal in that if it finally releases those docs until the final deadline (in 8 days now), it gets to pay no fine at all.
EU-based corporations and cartels typically got slapped hundreds of millions of Euro fines right from the start.
I.e., whatever xenophobia might exist in the EU (and it exists), this judgment was the exact opposite. MS was given a much better deal than any European company that broke the anti-trust laws. I.e., if any discrimination is at work here, effectively the EU then discriminates against its own citizens and companies by giving MS a much better deal.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The eu doesnt need microsoft to co-operate if it truely wanted their trade secrets. they could sieze them without all this fuss.
Microsoft can threaten all it wants but no corporation currently is more powerful then a state.
They'll simply be slaughtered both by the EU, and by their shareholders if they continue to refuse to comply with the court order.
step 2 above seems to assume that everyone would return their copy to microsoft, just because they asked.
Chances are they wouldnt, and all the EU needs to do is revoke all copyrights, patents , etc granted to microsoft and all businesses can continue to use it, legally while they migrate people over to other operating systems at their own pace.
you may say that microsoft wouldnt let them access the updates, and you're probably right - however there are sites which package windows updates into one big installer. Those could be used and indeed patched should there be anything to ensure that only those outside the eu can install them.
Furthermore, Microsoft needs the EU more then the EU needs Microsoft.
the EU is a huge market for microsoft, larger then the US is and their shareholders would certainly take action if the executives cut off such a large market through their arrogance and stubbornness.