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Microsoft Hands Over Docs To EU
hankwang writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 M and €280 M onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."
497... no presents for Bill's kids this Xmas...
fines of E497 and E280 is off by 6 orders of magnitude. Should be E497M and E280M.
Million, Presumably
Now it truly is a Happy Thanksgiving. 8500 pages.... They seem to be hoping that it takes a year or two to read through all of that.
Rather cheap for being a fine!
/. editors: I think you forgot an "M" after those)
(note to
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
does anyone know where to actually get the specs?
They gave ".doc" documents, don't they ? ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
Is it to be made publically available or do you have to request it from the commission?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That would be "so far, the EU has imposed fines of 497 MILLION and 280 MILLION onto Microsoft". Of course, it's still spare change for Microsoft.
Well, the value of the dollar has been slipping recently compared to the euro...
According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages.
Microsoft were then fined another 5 Million Euros for photocopying and stapling charges because the EU needed more copies...
Summation 2
Competition: update on Microsoft's compliance with March 2004 Decision (23 Nov 2006)
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The question still remains...Are these documents up to date? Or if they are at the time they were handed over, will they remain up to date in a perpetual manner? Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.
*sigh*
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. The EU has judged Microsoft to be abusing a monopoly position in the global european market. That's a big no-no for the EU Commission, since the whole "European" idea is based on free circulation of goods, people and financial instruments. In other words, the EU is against monopolies and large companies locking customers in their line of products and services. Is that so hard to understand?
To counter-balance this monopoly position, the EU has asked Microsoft to supply its competitors -- including many European companies -- with the necessary documentation. That documentation was required to open Microsoft files (.WMV, for instance) and communicate with machines running Windows system (SMB protocol). Microsoft refused and was fined a lot of money. Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story.
As far as I know, havin inter-operability between Microsoft products and competitors is a Good Thing(tm). You can thank the EU for that.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
...in Office 2007 format, forcing the commission to buy a licence to read them?
:)
Oh, that'd be so funny.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I personally would stay away from that documentation unless it is in some form of open documentation licenses.
What is going to stop Microsoft coming back a year or two later and sue every competitor for patent infringement because they produced their products by reading this documentation?
Beware.
"These are not the docs we are looking for"
</stormtrooper_voice>
'This page intentionally left blank.'
Will the documents be usable outside the EU? The EU may allow Mac and Linux developers documentation, but that documentation may have the status of trade secret in the US.
So Microsoft has given documentation... Can they actually be implemented legally worldwide?
Do you Gentoo?
``fines of € 497 and € 280''
Look, I don't know what they teach kids in schools these days, but just because a lone 0 is nothing doesn't mean you can just go and leave out zeroes whenever you like.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
How is that promoting "fair competition"?
The owls are not what they seem
All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy. All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy. All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy...
It is not IP directly, it is how to make other products work with this one. This is only because Microsoft has a defacto Monopoly, the rules for competition change when you are the monopoly..
The only thing that makes me feel uneasy about this whole thing is the necessity for government intervention.
It would seem that things like this, in a free market, should take care of themselves...
Other companies can't create compatible software, thus Microsoft should somehow feel that burden and suffer somehow. I guess that hasn't happened..
But when the government has to intervene in ways like this, it reminds me a little too much of Reardon being forced to hand over the recipe for his metal alloy (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand). It seems wrong, somehow, that Microsoft should be forced to give up their secret sauce. Believe me, I am no Microsoft fan, but I would have thought that the market should take care of this kind of problem itself. It should have been, somehow, in MS's interests to allow other companies to interoperate with their own. For example, "the more people we can work with, the more we'll sell our operating system." Why has this not happened?
I guess that's what being a "monopoly" is then -- when it's no longer in your self-interests to "play nice" with others.
Does the analogy with Reardon Metal, or McDonalds Secret Sauce, end when you realize that software is inherently different than a physical substance? If so, why is that? How is it different?
So, you say, the EU wants to increase other companies' competition *against* Windows, by giving them access to Windows documentation?
That doesn't *increase* competition, it encourages people to *keep using* Windows, because more software will be available for it! So in effect this puts others like Apple or Linux, that maybe voluntarily disclosed documentation/information, at a disadvantage, because it forces MS to do the same nice things for its developers.
*Sigh*
(European ex-Windows, ex-Linux, ex-BSD, Mac user here)
Indeed. Requiring Microsoft to submit this documentation, while helpful, isn't a full solution to the root problem. The root problem is that Microsoft implements proprietary formats, protocols, and APIs in the first place, and that so many people rely on these.
IMO, it would be better to mandate the use of open standards inside the EU government. This is (1) less heavy-handed than imposing a fine, (2) ensures the details of formats, protocols and APIs used by the EU are publicly available, (3) allows anyone to implement these formats, protocols, and APIs, and (4) requires anyone who wants to sell software to the EU to support them. It also gives parties other than the government the option to use these open standards, or proprietary alternatives, as they see fit.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It depends on whether or not that company is a monopoly or not, and whether it is abusing that monopoly: it's "fair" competition, not just competition. If this were a monopoly in oil, they'd have to hand over some oil wells. As Microsoft is a company whose assets are IP that's what they have to hand over. The EU is new to this trust-busting business: the US has been doing it for 100 years.
In other words, the EU is against monopolies and large companies locking customers in their line of products and services. Is that so hard to understand?
Great. When are they going to do something about DeBeers, then?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
that would be 8450 pages of "this page is left intentionally blank"
http://chimpbox.us
Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO crowd is trying to do). Surely you'll admit that it's not Microsoft's fault that such standards aren't catching on?
Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).
Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
The owls are not what they seem
I believe the truth is that the Euro has been more worth than the U.S. Dollar for most of its existence and certainly since July 2002. At its introduction in 1999, the euro was traded at US$1.18. It declined and rose again. Over the last 365 days it has been worth an average 1.25 Dollars - never falling below 1.1697 since Dec 2005.
The rules are different when you are a monopoly.
Everyone seems to forget that they were found to be a Monopoly in both EU and US.
On the European side, they were found to be illegally abusing their monopolistic powers.
On the US side, basically a few people sued them and nothing really big came from it. (Of course this is the summary and you can go read all the archives regarding this long ordeal.)
So yes, when some raging abuse of a corporation has grown out of control... the government steps in and evens things out a little bit.
Well, there is the unenlightened summary of why monopolies can be beaten with a stick and it's alright.
(It's turkey day, I'll leave it to someone else to go into a discussion about the benefits of interoperability and monopolistic standards.)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
but it never steps in when France/Germany/Italy all promote their national tel-com/air/etc... companies and make sure that they're not bought
If you check your facts more closely, you'll see that even though those governments somehow attempted to keep their big companies, it was more about political gesticulation than effective protection (Mittal/Arcelor saga was very pathetic in this regard).
Even if it works the way you think, this is *not* about protecting a monopoly, it's about keeping control of big companies, two very distinct subjects.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Anyone have a link to the torrent?
You may be an EU citizen, but certainly are adept at repeating MS propaganda instead of the facts at hand. This is not about handing over IP - even though that's what MS makes it sound like - but documentation on how its protocols work.
Well, there's just one fatal flaw to your argument. Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly. It has also been found that Microsoft has abused its monopoly position.
Microsoft refused and was fined a lot of money. Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story.
End of the story ? Hm, they already sent thousands pages of useless documentation back in 2005, which was rejected by EU after analyzed by a group of experts. I have this strange feeling that those 8,5k pages will not correspond to what EU is looking for...
Given Microsoft's history of denial, avoidance, and outright dishonesty, stating "Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story." strikes me as a little naive.
I believe that before this story ends we will have to judge the quality and accuracy of the documentation as well as Microsoft's willingness to keep it up to date.
But it isnt microsoft that forces anyone into anything. Its the companies making software exclusively for Windows OS that do that.
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/cas es/index/by_nr_76.html#i38_381
DeBeers is a South African company!
What are the EU supposed to do about it? Invade SA?
For those of you asking how to get the documents: they're not available free of charge. Microsoft has handed over documents for checking, and has explained how it wants to license them.
The EU is going to decide three things: whether the documents satisfy their requirements, whether the price is reasonable (based on Microsoft's original contribution instead of their monopoly position), and whether the proposed license is reasonable.
If they decide this will do, then Microsoft has to make the documentation available for people wanting to buy it under those license terms for that price; if they decide against, then Microsoft still hasn't complied and will get more fines.
It never was about documentation available without strings attached, that would be too unreasonable.
See the Washington Post: The Commission's decision, it recalled, required Microsoft to "disclose and license complete and accurate interface documentation [...] and Microsoft could face further fines if the Commission finds that the price was based on Microsoft's exercise of monopoly power, rather than on the originality of its product.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
The problem is, anti-trust commission is part of legislative branch. It cannot start case from ground zero - it needs a complain from customers or competitors.
I'm sure if somebody would complain, EC would investigate. But again, monopoly of DeBeers prevents others from even thinking entering the market - so no competitors exists and nobody can complain from the side. On other - customers' side - few would risk alienating DeBeers first and second even fewer can provide quotes from rare DeBeers competitors.
Diamond market urgently needs disgruntled customer like Torwalds with its Linux or would-be competitor Novell with its DR-DOS and WordPerfect ;-)
P.S. Yeah, post is wrong. It should be "497M and 280M". Let me repeat: "497M and 280M"... A-ah. Sweet. M$ was forced to pay... Cooool. Let me repeat again: "497M and 280M". M$ has to fork out "497M and 280M"... Good. Very good. ;-)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If were going for food, this would be a more correct analogy: Say I bought some Maccaroni from Kraft, and in order to cook Maccaroni and Cheese I also had to by my milk, cheese, salt, and water from Kraft. Using ingredients from another company would cause the macaroni to shrivel up and turn hard.
It's the interoptability thing that's a problem. So that's at least one reason why there's a significant difference.
What it means is that your illusion of the free market is broken, simply. If you start out with a market with no restrictions at all, you will most likely get a few companies that are immensely powerful. These companies will use their power to keep others out, thus creating a non-free market.
Morale: The free market is at best an unstable and short-lived artifact. Besides, I don't think anybody actually want a *free* market - what most want is a *fair* marketplace; one where everybody has equal opportunities, so that if you are clever and hardworking, you can achieve financial success. But this requires some sort of regulation - ie. government intervention in most cases. Legislation is, after all, a form of government intervention.
Apart from that, the EU Commission is not a government of a country - the EU is not a state or nation in any sense. It is 'a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 independent, democratic member states' - to quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU
Explain to me again how a completely unfettered free market prevents the formation of monopolies? I think I missed that part of economics. A free market permits monopolies, but does not necessarily regard that to be a bad thing.
Also, there is no difference between software, a secret sauce or a fictional metal alloy so your analogy holds true; none are physical objects, all are IP.
Well, if the Microsoft really have been found to be a monopoly who abuses its position world wide, I'd certainly like to see a reference to that ruling.
The owls are not what they seem
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
I like interoperability, but I don't like to see it being forced like this.
The owls are not what they seem
It's not just big companies, this monopoly poroblem. I remember on my most recent trip to Europe, I tried to pay for something with fake money from a board game. I was arrested and charged with abusing my Monopoly...
My sentence was to be sent to jail, sent directly to jail, not to pass go, not to collect 200Million...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
The documents cover protocols and file formats that are necessary for other software to support for interoperability. It's not a "secret sauce" in terms of being a particularly good way of implementing things (there certainly is nothing revolutionary about Microsoft's file formats or SMB, in fact they are in many ways inferior to alternatives), it's more like using non-standard plugs for connecting devices together...
Additionally, your faith in free markets (and references to fiction - arguably bad and unrealistic fiction) seems a bit too strong.
The problem with free markets and monopolies, or even non-monopolies that are sufficiently successful, is that the more successful a company is, the more money and power they have, and the more they can use their power and established market position to establish a significant barrier of entry for potential competitors, rather than competing on merit, quality, service, aesthetics, price or other factors that should be the deciding factors in an even playinig field.
You can argue that on the very long term, this doesn't pay off, and a company with such an attitude will fail, but I'm pretty sure that in terms of product merit, a barely good enough product + an established position is sufficient to hold power for a very long time. IMHO on a level playing field, Microsoft would've fallen back when it took them until the third generation of PCs capable of such things before giving regular consumers a 32-bit, pre-emptively mulitasking operating system (it could've been done on a 386, but by the time Win95 came out, people were using Pentiums...).
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about
That funny, considering the fact that your reply had nothing to do with my post. I commented on the EU's handling of the fine process and how they've treated the information they've already been given in the past.
Your post never really discussed my post, other than to make some incorrect assessments of my position on the validity of the EU's original claims, which I never once mentioned.
You even got the events wrong.
So your string of unrelated crap gets +5 informative, and I get -1 troll.
It could be argued that the US antitrust case was over-ambitious: the EU's proposed remedy attacks the same thing (Microsoft's vertical advantage in owning OS, application and media layers) in a more sensible fashion. By enforcing interoperability they enable exactly the kind of competition the Ayn Rand weenies believe the free market should give them.
> And why should nation states and courts get involved in making other products work with
> Microsoft's?
Because Microsoft are leveraging the effective monopoly they have in the OS and office markets to make their protocols and file formats de-facto standards, then withholding documentation in order to stop competitors from being able to use these, now standard, protocols.
> Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO
> crowd is trying to do). Surely you'll admit that it's not Microsoft's fault that such
> standards aren't catching on?
Yes they are and yes it is. Courts in both the US and the EU have found Microsoft to be a monopoly. Furthermore courts in both the EU and the US have found Microsoft to be illegally using it's monopoly status to lock-out competitors by either polluting existing standards ('embrace and extend' as it's known)(HTML, Java etc) or create proprietary standards and then consistently attempt to make it difficult for other software to be compatible (.doc, SMB, WMV etc).
> Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author
> scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before
> you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).
All the more reason to document the file format properly and allow the applications to compete on merit and price then don't you think?
> Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
I didn't notice anyone say you should. But if I can't use OO because you use Office simply because Microsoft is deliberately obfuscating their file format is that fair either?
What kind of dumbass doesn't assume those numbers meant millions?
Secret sauce? That's thousand island dressing.
In fact, Microsoft succeeded in imposing on the EU DG Comp an encrypted-DVD ROM format which I understand runs only on Windows. In addition, it seems MS required a clickthrough EULA which thoroughly annoyed the Commission officers and the Monitoring Trustee. As Microsoft's game is to delay as much as possible (see EU statement at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?refe rence=MEMO/06/445&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&g uiLanguage=en ), the time spent negotiating the "security" of the pile of electronic "documents" has served them well (the fines aside) while awaiting the Court of First Instance appeal decision awaited between now and April.
Ah what bloat will do to you. At 8,500 pages it probably took up the better part of a DVD. On closer inspection, you might find that Steve Balmer accidentally attached his whole Outlook file. Lots of "fucking" and "killing" there. Hoist by their own dogfood.
Then there might also be the usual M$ inside jokes and "Easter Eggs." An example would be a movie of the whole Redmond staff mooning you if you hold down the control and shift key while mousing over the section on SAMBA. Then there's the old M$ pilot game used by people training for the WTC, which will be modified with a Brussels city scape. It's still an official part of Excel. They may or may not have cleaned up the Thesaurus entry which contained, "Unable to read a manual" for "impotent." Now it's "Needs a manual we never wrote."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Heh, I had a compulsory business economics lecture this morning -- ooh lookey, a chance to show off my mad economikz skillz.
In a normal competitive or semi-competitive market, firms try to maximise their profit by following the supply and demand curve. The cost for a firm to enter or leave a market is negligible, and consumers will always go for the best product at the lowest price (i.e. the optimal price/quality point). This is the optimal sort of market from almost everyones' point of view the best product will always win, and it turns out that this is a really good thing for the economy.
Let's assume that to start off with, the market for audio player software is a perfect competitive market. All media files are stored in an easy to implement format (e.g. MP3 or WAV) and so one audio player can easily be replaced by another.
Now, Microsoft decides to enter the market. They realise that they can get a huge install base by bundling their audio software with their operating system (which is more or less a monopoly product). This is an attempt to gain a monopoly in one market by leveraging a monopoly in another, which is illegal in some places such as the USA and EU. They then decide to reduce the contestability of the market by making their audio software default to creating files which competing firms' software cannot read without a license from Microsoft.
There are many more examles of Microsoft doing (or attempting to do) this.
All involve deliberate breakage of interoperability and backwards compatibility by either undocumented protocols/file formats or perversion of existing standards for them.
Pirate Party UK
"screw you guys, I'm going home".
I'd like to see Microsoft just stop selling any products to the EU. Then they would not be in violation.
That'd be interesting.
Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.
When you consider that it was 2004 when they were asked to present this document, you can say they have yet to even pretend to co-operate. It's possible that they will document 2003 software, which they have worked over and are about to replaced entirely.
The only way to win the M$ game is not to play.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- no single producer is powerful enough to have a decisive influence on the market (i.e. no monopoly!)
- no customer likewise
- only one product is traded in unrestricted quantities, and every producer provides the same quality at the same production cost
- every producer can enter and leave the market freely, which means: you can immediately start selling without having to invest into infrastructure etc.
- I think there was a fifth precondition but I forgot what it was, sorry...
It is generally assumed that only one product fits these rules approximately, namely petrol (or gas, if you like), but even this is debatable.If any of these preconditions is missing, you don't have a free market! Most business people forget this fact.
So, don't expect the market to take care of eventually solving all economical problems. Sometimes it does by chance, but actually there is no guarantee.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Is 8500 pages really that much? I remember that in July, when MS protested against the fines, they said that 300 employees had been working for over a year with writing the documentation. This makes 8500/(300*12)=2.4 pages per employee and month, which means that I'd really like to have that job..
_I_ won't admit that!!Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO crowd is trying to do). Surely you'll admit that it's not Microsoft's fault that such standards aren't catching on?
That is the whole issue.
Microsoft uses their OS dominance to sell OO.
They persuade computer makers to distribute _only_ their products through volume deals.
Even if you somehow think they are not a monopoly in lots of areas, you can't fail to accept that they use their marketshare to force others out of their turf.
That, combined witht he fact that they don't help with interoperability, is the main cause that other products don't use their standards, and free standards aren't "catching on".
Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).
Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
If you actually do any serious work, of course you should consider LaTeX, or at least lex.You pay the cost of learning LaTeX in the first paper you write.
About the OO equation editor... I don't know how _you_ use it, but no effort interoperability is not the only issue.
OpenOffice is free for everyone, not just for you, but the most important part is that it's much easier!!
When getting my degree, I could convert everybody in my math groups to using OpenOffice, because I showed them the speed improvement they could get at typing formulas.
In the MS equation editor, I found myself trying to draw the formulas, while the oo math editor lets you do that, but also shows you how to type them, in a very easy editor that uses very familiar abbreviations.
Its no LaTeX, but it's way better than the MS editor for beginers that need to type more than a couple equations.
Aside from that, if you are doing any serious collaboration, CVS with OpenOffice is very easy, for an XML file. With MSOffice you need to use more cumbersome and nonstandard tools, even installing additional software.
What I say is about the winwords I have used, I couldn't try the equation editor from WinWord 2002, the version I have in this machine, because it didn't appear in the menus, and afer reading the help, it told me something about getting the installation CD and all, and it was too much for me, but from what I had tried before, the math editor from OpenOffice is way better for actual use than the MS one.
Free markets aren't a magical solution to all economic problems. Ayn Rand thought they were, but such thinking is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. There are a number of logical thought experiments, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons effect that demonstrate the inefficiencies and problems inherent in free markets.
I seriously and strenuously doubt that this 8500 pages constitutes the purported documentation. Far more likely it is a masterwork of corporate techno-drivel. I expect to hear from independent qualified judges that this material is not, in fact, necessary and sufficient information to enable an expert to create a system capable of reliably interacting with M$ machines on a network. Likewise with file formats, &etc. This present waste of paper is nothing more than yet another chess move by M$. The EU will have to burn months deciphering and testing the documents, more months filing reports on how extrmely bogus it actually is. The EU bureaucracy machine will piss away many more months spinning up. M$ will whine and wail to the press about how the oppressive socialist regime is never satisfied no matter how many earnest efforts poor little M$ makes to comply with the the horrible old EU's draconian and anti-competitive rules. Neelie Kroes will impose more very impressive sounding, but ultimately trivial fines on M$. The EU will decree that M$ can not distribute software in their constituent countries. M$ will instantly appeal. An automatic injunction will take effect, nullifying the decree. The decree was, after all, nothing but hollow posturing from the get go. M$ will pay the fines -- which have been for years factored into the cost of doing business in the EU. M$ accountants will treat the whole matter as a simple, standard, albeit largish, bribe. The wheels on the bus will go round and round. Macchielvelli's rotten, grinning corpse will cum in it's shorts again. Same Old Shit. Repeat after me: M$ will NEVER give up their wire protocols, APIS, ABIs, or file formats. Ever. Not until doing so presents itself as the most profitable course of action. At present, such a disclosure would be nothing short of financially catastrophic for them. Complying with the EU's demands is quite out of the question. So forget about it. Now. Do it.
In a free market, there will never be a monopoly. Simply because in a free market, no one can force you to buy something (hence 'free'). Microsoft is not a monopoly. Of course, the govt. decided that it was a monopoly, but some govt also decided that pi=3; just because a govt says something, does not mean it is true.
Are you free to use a non-Microsoft product like I am doing right now? Are you free to use OSX, Solaris, UNIX, Linux, OOo, etc.? If so, then how is Microsoft a monopoly? People *choose* to use Microsoft's products because that gives them the maximum economic advantage. If enough people buy Red Hat, MS will have to work with them or lose sales. Most people prefer MS because it is in their best interest.
I bought a Toyota instead of Ford. If everyone does that, is Toyota a monopoly? Some people will disagree with that analogy, saying "I'm free to alter the Toyota to run on non-Toyota stereo, while MS prevents that".
Well, you are correct. How is MS able to do that? By making the govt. enforce it for them by patents, copyright and other things. A monopoly is possible only with the use of force and only govt has that power - hence a monopoly is not possible without govt. help.
If, in a free market, monopolies are inevitable (as some sibling posters have claimed), why isn't there a monopoly in cars? Washing soda? Ship building? - I'm not claiming that these have had no govt regulation (there is no such area), but I'm saying these industries did not have large scale govt. 'anti-trust' action and are free.
Show me one instance in the history of mankind where in a (relatively, since there has never been one) free market, where one entity had a monopoly that was not supported by the govt? And if someone wants to mention Standard Oil or the railways, I'll be more than happy to dispel that myth.
Well those few companies only ensure their pre-eminence by changing the rules in their favour - software patents, extending copyrights, the introduction of licences to practice or manufacture etc. that are too high cost for new players to get, etc. Essentially, the free market model can work, if it remains free. One example of how that happens is by laws which prevent monopolies from abusing their power, such as in this case.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
this is only the US ruling, you can go google for other nations rulings, I believe also they have some problems at least in japan and korea (perhaps, don't recall)
0 03342909_webmssuit03.html
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/
In the US the case still isn't over yet either, there is at least one more state going after them, Iowa, and the head cheeses have to travel and go testify in person
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2
I thought this had been beat into everyone's head for years already? Don't tell me people have forgotten that Microsoft has monopoly power??
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
Yup, pretty much.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Good idea. I'm sure Microsoft is really keen on losing on the biggest single market for its software! And everybody would have to use alternative operating systems and office productivity software, essentially killing the MS lock-in once and for all - why didn't they think of that brilliant plan! You should be running Microsoft.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Will Neelie Kroes (the lady who set this all in motion) be using OSS?
I am willing to bet a Debian CD that she doesn't even know the principal difference between OSS and OS.
Just another trick to give EU ICT firms an edge.
(I am from the EU.)
That's about 1 SAMs book on VB
Is that you Ballmer?
Parent has a very good point (aside from criticizing Ayn Rand), Please mod up.
Why not use LyX? GUI TeX without the hassle. I just finished a paper with it, and damn, it's easy to use.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You still think that the 'free market' will fix it self?
Think again.
There are cases when this is simply not true.
And if you don't believe me perhaps you will believe the findings of an Nobel laureate.
George Akerlof who got it for his paper "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism".
Read more about it on Wikipedia.
So in the case at the heart of this discussion the market has clearly tipped in Microsofts favor, so I think that everyone
will benefit if some of its dominance is taken away.
A certain level of regulation is good and needed in most cases, especially in this one.
Everything else is just anarchy.
You're exactly right. Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever to give away trade secrets to their competitors. In a perfect world though, Microsoft would likewise not be able to use laws such as the DMCA (which I'm sure Europe has the equivalent of) to strangle competition.
The problem is begins with one government law that empowers businesses to abrogate the rights of others, corporate or individual. What we see now is government futility attempting to patch-up their legislation--legislation predicated on the fallacious premise that government should intervene in the economy.
Understand also that (and it's the same with Google in China) companies MUST, even if their leaders have serious reservations about it, take every dirty advantage the government allows them, or they'll simply be trampled by the competition who will.
"The EU has judged Microsoft to be abusing a monopoly position in the global european market."
IIRC, the EC (European Commission) judged such. And the EC is not a court of law. They provide no due process, no burdens of proof, no nothing. Microsoft appealed their proclamations to the European Courts (a real court, with due process (supposedly), were evidence must actually be presented and the accused given a chance to refute), which will decide the issue. Don't be surprised to see the EC's proclamations slapped down just like Jackson's were.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
What a company has a monopoly on one area, they can use that to give them an unfair advantage on other areas. This has been strategy used for every single successful MS product launch since MS DOS.
Demanding that a company with a monopoly publish the interfaces so competitors gets equal access means that competition again becomes possible.
It is enlightened: enforcement of free market. There's no arbitrary size limit on companies, they just can't wreck the market!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Does the analogy with Reardon Metal, or McDonalds Secret Sauce, end when you realize that software is inherently different than a physical substance? If so, why is that? How is it different?
Software needs interoperability, food and metals generally don't. This is like if McDonalds Secret ingredient in their sauce reacted with any non-McDonalds burger consumed in the following week to make you violently ill. That would effectively shut out their smaller competitors, just having a secret ingredient that does not affect interoperability but still makes their burgers more popular than the competition is not a problem.
You're free not to sell your software here. While you choose to sell your software here you'll do so by our rules or not at all. It really is as simple as that. You're neither compelled nor forced to sell your software here.
The US most definitely does regulate the means by which foreign trade happens. You'll just have to get used to the EU doing likewise. The European Commission is merely doing what the DoJ didn't have the balls to do.
Excellent Idea! While you are at it, maybe you can stop shipping your shit to the rest of the world as well and close off your borders. Then you can believe all you want about the US being the only country in the world. You won't be getting any money from tourism, but the rest of the world will be selling product to you fucktards. Then the value of the dollar will slip so far it will destroy you. Then either the USians will have to choose to join the rest of the world, or stay on a proverbial sinking ship.
Thanks for that Steve, go throw a chair, you've earned it !
Free = no regulations
Perfect = perfect competition, perfect information, perfect mobility
The "free" market is just a theory, and idea, an abstraction. Governments exist to facilitate trade and if regulations facilitate trade, then regulations you shall have.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
First of all, noone got taken to court for just being big. Maybe you don't make that confusion, but a lot of (other) people seem to think that anti-trust somehow means "punished for being big" or "punished for being successful." That's not the case. Coca-Cola is still perfectly on the safe side of the law, for example. And noone orders McDonald to give the recipe to its secret sauce.
The thing sorta goes like this:
1. It must be proven that you've actually abused your might in a non-lawful way, and there was an actual harm to the consumers. (Harm to competing companies actually doesn't matter.)
If you will, it's like taking the school bully to court. He's not tried or punished for being big, he's tried for punching people in the face. There's a not-so-subtle difference there.
2. It must be proven that you were in a monopoly position, in which it was artifficially unfeasible for someone else to undo the harm you did. I.e., that in that situation, the free market just didn't work.
Basically that's the reality check to your Ayn Rand-inspired musings. If it can be proven that the free market can neutralize the harm on its own, then the company _doesn't_ get the legal equivalent of a kick in the nuts.
E.g., if two pharmacies aggree to fix prices on vitamins, it's _not_ an anti-trust case. The market can work around such minor speedbumps. People will just go buy their vitamins at the super-market, or go to the other pharmacy down the road. Or maybe someone will open their own pharmacy across the road. But when (as has at least once happened) the major pharma companies fix prices, that may well be an anti-trust case.
Look... noone is against the notion of a free market. We quite like it in Europe too. We don't go asking companies for their secrets just for the heck of it, but only when there's no other recourse left to force an aberrant situation back to being a free market.
The free market is actually a lot less robust on its own than some libertarians seem to assume. The whole notion and theory is centred around some assumptions: there are many identical/interchangeable products, the buyers are perfectly informed, it's trivial for a new competitor to enter that market, etc. _That_ situation can balance itself all right. But the whole mechanism falls apart when those pre-conditions aren't true any more. There are some actions and some kinds of damage that it can't work around, and there are people who have the financial interest to try to do just that: destroy that ideal free market.
And that's the other thing: the assumption that it's in everyone's interest to play nice, is false. It's in society's interest that they play nice, but for the individual competitors it's most often the exact opposite: you make more money if you can get in a situation where you don't have to play nice.
E.g., as a simple example, if there are two smiths in the same medieval town, sure, it's in everyone else's interest that they start acting like in a free market and undercut each other's prices. But those two smiths can make more money if, say, they make a secret aggreement to fix prices. Then they're the only supplier in town and can fleece everyone else with impunity. Or maybe one of them will decide that instead of even that, he'll hire a couple of mercenaries to beat the other up. Or whatever.
So to make a long story short: expecting the free market to always just work on its own, is a bit like expecting a city to work without a police station. Sooner or later someone will have the means and the incentive to ruin all that for everyone else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The most noble purpose of the government is to ensure the free market, something that cannot exist without government intervention. It is always more profitable to make a fixed pricing deal with your "competitors" rather than actually trying to compete with them.
Libertarians tend to be very confused about this fact, as their central dogmas of their religion is that government is bad and free market is good.
Does the analogy with Reardon Metal, or McDonalds Secret Sauce, end when you realize that software is inherently different than a physical substance? If so, why is that? How is it different?
Well, McDonalds Secret Sauce already interoperates with other hamburgers. And people don't have large numbers of stored hamburgers which can only be eaten with McDonalds Secret Sauce.
Let's create a bit of an extreme example. Word 2050 costs $1500 and encrypts all its files; it's impossible to create competing software which can open Word 2050 files*. Then Microsoft releases a 'Windows Update' which scans people's hard disks and converts all their documents into Word 2050 files. In a free market, I could pay up or lose my data (photos of my daughter's fifth birthday etc). And since Word 2050 has no export function, they could repeat the same action again and again.
Alternately, the government could step in and demand Microsoft release the key to people's files. Microsoft would comply because the government has nuclear weapons.
In this situation, I think it would be justifiable for the government to interfere with the functioning of the free market. Given that one such situation exists, it's likely other such situations exist. Maybe the current situation is one of them.
Just my $0.02.
*If you think it's impossible to encrypt things like this, look up DRM.
Are you free to use a non-Microsoft product like I am doing right now? Are you free to use OSX, Solaris, UNIX, Linux, OOo, etc.? If so, then how is Microsoft a monopoly?
Because a dominant market player aka monopolist (no, it doesn't mean 100% share) can impose conditions on all its business partners. It can make OEMs that support a competing product pay more, they can give advantages to Microsoft-exclusive stores, it can make it difficult for any alternative to work with their products (installing over the MBR, proprietary or patented interfaces and so on). The consumer could always choose something else, but a monopoly has the power to bend the market so that it isn't rational for the consumer to pick anything else. Dumping is a classic example, where you sell at below cost to drive others out of business, in order to gain monopoly afterwards.
More often than not, a monopolist has massive profits they can spend to fight newcomers. I particularly remember an upstart airliner around here - every route they flew, they had intense competition from the local monopolist. The prices of those routes were easily half or less than on comparable flights from the same monopolist. It went as it had to, those routes were lossy and they didn't have the profitable monopoly routes to live on, so they went bankrupt and the monopolist raised their prices again. Message sent: Yes, our market is profitable, but if you threaten it we will make it unprofitable for you. Your idea of choice is that you can take the train.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
(It's turkey day...)
Hmmm, perhaps a large anti-competitive turkey didn't want their head cut off today.
Not quite. If you remove copyright and patents, Microsoft's power would probably not be as immense. In fact, it could probably work. On average. Most of the time it would suck though.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
.... they have put off getting fined by the EU for a couple of months. It's a stall tactic plain and simple. Criminal defense lawyers do it all the time.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Huh? The complaint that led to this came from... Sun Microsystems. Not from some EU goon or even an european company. And can you show any bias in how the EU has given preferential treatment to european companies compared to US ones when it comes to anti-competition judgements? All lists I have seen are firmly dominated by EU companies. If you can show me any factual background I might change my mind... if not then I can only look at your statement as an Bill O'Reilly type rant.
At the time I wrote this you had been modded insightful... why any reasonable modder would do that I don't know.
Could Microsoft be sued for not offering it's products for sale in Europe? <citations please>
Heard any good sigs lately?
> If people don't like MS, just don't buy its software.
We can't, our external partners send us and expect to receive data in proprietary MS formats.
I understand that you live in your moms basement, and thus have no need to exchange data with other people, but some of us live in the real world and our only choices are 1) to use MS software, or 2) to use 100% compatible software.
Requiring MS to publish specifications is a way to ensure that #2 remain at least theoretically possible.
What EU is doing is what any government should do, to keep the market alive is the finest reason for governments.
And no, because you are unable to imagine any other reason than petty protectionism for an action does not mean it is irrational. There is another option. At least you choosed the proper subject for your message.
is a huge Word .doc
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
1. Eat
2. Rant on Slashdot
3. Check value of $FilthyLucre counter running at top left of screen, notice that value has increased by more than the fine since starting #2.
4. Cackle evilly
5. Sleep
You mean what the DoJ was told by the new administration not to do.
You know, it would be nice if all the "it's like some stupid kind of import tax" or "it's punishing US companies" people actually bothered to read the way it all went before posting crap.
First of all, MS was initially _not_ fined a single dime. They were ordered to release the docs for certain protocols needed for interoperability. (I.e., no, not to document all of Windows. Dunno what gave you _that_ idea.) It was even allowed to give a list of which independent experts are qualified to judge whether the docs are enough or not. And the commission picked one of them. Pay attention, because it's important: it was someone suggested by MS judging these docs all the time.
That's it. The original ruling had _no_ punitive aspect as such. It was aimed strictly at correcting the monopoly situation that made it possible to break the trade laws.
MS _only_ got finally fined when months after months went by, and it showed no intention to comply with the ruling. It engaged in anti-EU astroturfing wars, it tried lame threats, it did stuff that was at best mocking the court, etc. You try doing that as a private person and you'd probably get some time in jail for holding the court in contempt.
Even then the fine was (A) per day that they keep ignoring the court ruling (which is how it eventually got to be hundreds of millions), and (B) with various generous deadlines and in between, and the provision that if MS complies until the deadline, it doesn't pay a dime.
So how the heck does that support such assertions as "it's like some stupid kind of import tax"?
And if you want to talk about punishing US companies, have a look at the long list of EU-based companies which have been slapped with hundreds of millions in fines from day 1 for breaking the trade laws. If anything the EU is giving a US-based company an unfair advantage and preferential treatment there. Because, again, any EU-based company in a similar situation was _not_ given the kind of sweet deal that MS was given.
Unfortunately, MS has mis-interpreted this as weakness and tried to pretty much just defy the court. Well, it didn't quite work that way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because Microsoft are leveraging the effective monopoly they have in the OS and office markets to make their protocols and file formats de-facto standards, then withholding documentation in order to stop competitors from being able to use these, now standard, protocols.
The way I see it is that various companies in the past made a deal with the devil in order to get better pricing. And whenever you make a deal with the devil, there's always a higher payment in the end.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I am inclided tofavour the cockup theory of history on this one.
I think microsoft is prevaricating because they dont actualy have the specs!
Hard to believe, well not if youve ever debugged a program with a ActiveX/COM/OLE
component inside.
For years the MS development methodoligy of choice seems to have been wrap a new C++
class around the old C++ class and hope it works. Which is sort of OK as it gives
you the reuse promised by OO. The downside is that you end up with something like
one of those old cannons dug up from the sea bed covered in layers of corrosion,weeds and
crustations. You can sort of see its cannon shaped but you cannot see any cannon!
The main PIA comes when you serialise the object, Every enclosed class gets involved in
this, and, its very hard to work out whats going on.
As far as I have been able to work out MS never seems to formally specifiy actual file formats
whatever the C++ serialize method spits out IS the file format.
As long as you use the same class to read it back in there is no problem.
Ven some naasty judge wif a ooroopeean akzent arks you vor the vormats zen you aveing a problum.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Oh yes. By its shareholders. See, the EU is a market twice the size of the USA. Giving up on that market would send MS's shares into quite a bit of a dive.
But here's the funnier part: Not only it would make a lot of investors sell (thus speeding up the dive), but it would put quite a big dent into Bill Gates's personal fortune. See, his being such a rich guy isn't calculated just in money in the bank, but mostly in MS shares.
So between paying a couple hundred million of MS's money and losing a few _billion_ off your own worth, which would _you_ choose?
Plus, it's precisely that kind of thing that MS has worked hard to avoid. See a large part of the "secret sauce" in MS's monopoly of interlocking parts, is its products being ubiquitous. It's not just that you can't replace product X because product Y depends on it, it's also the mentality that product Y is the de-facto standard, everyone else has it, and you can't just give up on it without becoming the odd guy out of the loop.
MS has worked hard to maintain that illusion of ubiquity, world-wide. It has been known to offer massive price cuts and even prefer to overlook piracy than allow whole markets which are proof that you can jolly well live without both X and Y.
So forcing the whole of Europe standardize on something else than Windows and Office? Ooer. That would be the day when IBM', Sun' and the others' managers ejaculate in their pin-striped pants out of joy. It's not just the loss of the European market as such, but that would be the day when almost every single US corporation's executive starts hearing stuff like "sir, we can't send that document in Excel format, because they don't use Excel in Germany. No, sir, neither in France." It's the day when people start hearing that MS file formats aren't, in fact, the ubiquitous de-facto standard and can't be an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
So, heh, yeah, I'd _love_ to see MS do something _that_ stupid. Sadly it won't happen, because they're not stupid. But it would be comedy gold.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Having governments intrude into areas they have no business is a Bad Thing.
Bad for whom? We have a slightly different view of government in Europe - the government works for us and are supposed to look after our interests as citizens and consumers so if a company does something, which hurts consumers, and the EU intervenes we consider it a good thing. I'm not very familiar with consumer rights legislation in the US but it seems to me that it's fairly weak compared to what we have here and I only consider it a good thing that we have strong consumer rights legislation here - EULAs are invalid, manufacturers are obliged to replace products even if the warranty has expired if it breaks down within a period for which it is reasonable to expect it to work flawlessly (e.g. 7 years for washing machines as I found out when I got my 3-year-old with a one year warranty repaired for free), very strict rules for what claims you can make in advertising and so on... I consider all that very convenient since it means that I don't need to compare various terms by different manufacturers since I know what they have to meet anyway and only if they exceed what consumer rights authorities have defined as reasonable expectations are they permitted to advertise with it so if something is exceptionally good I find out about it anyway (a typical example is harddrives - only five year warranties are advertised since the required minimum is three years anyway). And in this case too I'm happy to see MS being obliged to disclose documentation since harder competition for companies will benefit me as a consumer and if the government must intervene to ensure that, I'm in favour of it.
Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO crowd is trying to do).
That doesn't stop Microsoft from neing a monopoly. They have such a large segment of the market that they completely control it. Froma legal point of view, that makes them a monopoly. They can use this control to bar their customers from buying competing products, and if they do so, then they are acting illegally.
Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
Microsoft Office or OO is not exactly a free and vibrant marketplace now is it? If there was freedom, then you would have a huge choice of products, many of them better, but at a price. You would both be able to choose the package that best represented your needs.
I wrote papers in university that took roughly that time in pages/month that were worth almost a whole course worth of credits...quantity doesn't equal effort, or quality.
Of course, this is Microsoft, so it's probably 8500 pages of diarrhea.
According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."
And if I know Microsoft, it's all disorganized, incomplete, unusable crap... Anything to be able to claim that they have fulfilled the EU's request without making any real progress toward interoperability. Please Microsoft, prove me wrong!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Also, ASF (.WMV, .WMA) specifications have been available for years, long before the EU's order. And speaking of things we can thank the EU for, how about that version of Windows without the media player? That's been selling real well.
No , that would be me!
/. kids discuss this, I'll jump on my private jet and fly to Sweden to pick up my new Koenigsegg which I'll be driving to Brussles were I'll drop of a check for the fine.>br>
And while you
Enjoy Thanksgiving, kids!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
No, it is too legible. Ballmer types by throwing chairs at the keyboard.
The only thing that makes me feel uneasy about this whole thing is the necessity for government intervention.
It would seem that things like this, in a free market, should take care of themselves...
Except that by definition a monopoly and a free market do not match. If you have a monopoly player, the market isn't a free market. That's why you need the government: To make sure the free market stays a free market.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And why should nation states and courts get involved in making other products work with Microsoft's?
Because if you take a little time out of your busy schedule to read up on monopolies and their effect on the economy, you'll find that they cause a net damage to the nation state's economy - the monopoly profit is less than the loss everyone else suffers. If you don't believe me, go and read up, what do I know, I just studied that stuff.
Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO crowd is trying to do).
Non sequitur. MS is a monopoly. The fact that you can create a competing product doesn't matter. Whether or not someone is a monopoly is not determined by the existence of a different product, but by the existence of at least one considerable competitor in the market place.
Again, if you don't believe me, go and read some stuff about economic science.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Damn, why don't you run MS? That would be so funny to watch. For one thing, it would teach Microsoft that copyright is a government-granted limited monopoly. Whoops. That's what you get when you confuse "intellectual" with actual property.
Oh, and did I mention that in order to "vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment (sic)", they would have use the... err.. very court system they just told to go and fuck itself?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This has been discussed before. Microsoft is a monopoly, under the legal definitions of several jurisdictions. And it makes sense. From Wikipedia:
Primary characteristics of a monopoly
http://outcampaign.org/
A foreign company gets various benefits from a country (copyright, trademarks, corporate status, access to the market, etc), and in return, is required not to screw the people in that country, or harm that country's economy. If they break the rules, they are punished. What do you expect?
http://outcampaign.org/
They're being punished for the way they're trying to remain successful. But apparently anything other than worship of Microsoft is communism to Republicans...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This is absolutely hilarious. From the title change to the lame, outdated jokes. That's why I come to Slashdot, for the high-rolling comedians. Thanks a lot.
> Well, there's just one fatal flaw to your argument.
> Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly.
> It has also been found that Microsoft has abused its monopoly position.
>
To be more precise, this was the opinion of some people in goverment who have the power to enforce their decisions. That does not mean they are right, it just means they have an opinion and the power to back it up. Of course it does not mean they are wrong either, but a statement like "Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly" really needs to be extended to say who it was that did the finding.
The "free market", like the spherical Earth, doesn't actually exist, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will. It's just an idealization that is useful for making approximate calculations about the overall behaviour of a system. Despite what a bunch of pseudo-intellectual Slashdotters will tell you, the free market is not a magical force that would make everyone happy if only the evil government would keep its greedy paws out of things.
http://outcampaign.org/
fly to Sweden to pick up my new KoenigseggWith or without the topgear wing?
Your wish may be granted.;-)
Seriously speaking, why do you Americans have this knee jerk reaction against the EU in particular or governments in general?
This is extremely silly.
EU just want to thwart competition by punishing US companies
I suggest that you take a look at certain cases in the European cosmetics industry (in which you probably haven't had much interest presumably being American and a geek) - then you'll see what the EU does when it really wants to penalize companies that break the law. Compared to those, MS has gotten a slap on the wrist.
I think you have it backwards. The concept of IP (Intellectual Property) includes copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The software would be covered under copyright, the process of creating an alloy can be patented, and the sauce would be a trade secret (and possibly patentable). Copyright only applies to information.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
And who would they sue too? The EU? Oops, they just pissed them off and found that a goverment is the one who decides what exactly copyright means.
Not that MS would ever be stupid enough to do something like that but if any cooperation wich supplied a common public need ever decided to use bully tactics against states it would find very quickly exactly how tiny any cooperation is compared to the power of even the smallest countries.
Workers have found this out for decades. Essential services are NOT allowed to strike and when they do the army can be used to either replace them, liberate essential assets or even force them back to work. Look at the strike among firemen in england from a few years back. It was getting really nasty with threaths of sending the army to get the red (modern) firetrucks by force if needed if the armies own green (obsolete) firetrucks were not going to be enough.
If a private company tried to deny an essential service, say a rail company decides to pull service because it doesn't agree with goverment policy or say a Shell decides to stop all fuel shipments because it wants to protest yet an other tax increase on fuel, the goverment would quickly step in, with force if needed.
Fortunally the real world isn't run by idiots like you so this situation almost never occurs because real business leaders don't want this kinda shit to happen.
Ah but wouldn't the US protect MS? How exactly? Start a trade war with europe. Not another one. Tradewars are hated by all sides and while they happen they are not for the sake of industry but for the sake of the voters who like their local politician to seem to be taking care of them.
If MS was stupid enough to actually follow your advice it would quickly learn that the law is what goverments decide. Not private industry, MS would find copyright totally unenforcable and it would just have lost a billion dollar market and have practically given its competitors that same billion dollar market.
Your argument is about as sensible as say the car industry pulling out of california, refusing to sell any cars there because of their high standards on enviroment regulations. "No way", ford was heard to say,"we just ain't going to do it. We won't be producing any cars for california, the EU and JP car makers can just take that market from us but we will not give into goverment pressure."
Idiot.
Both....
It has a new computer controlled wing that is retractable and is only raised when it is needed.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Legally speaking, 8500 pages isn't really that much at all. A pretty straightforward medical case can easily comprise well over 4,000 pages, and it'd be magnitudes upon magnitudes less value than this Microsoft case. I would have expected tens of thousands of pages for something like this. I suspect it's either extraordinarily well thought out and thus very concise, or intentionally glossed over to the point of being a debacle.
Hell yeah! Cutting off their single biggest market would be a fantastically good idea! The shareholders would love that.
Heck, while they're at it, why don't they cut off their second-biggest market (the US) too? In fact, why don't they stop distributing their software to anyone? That'd teach the bastards not to mess with Microsoft!
"Koenigsegg"
wth is a Koenigsegg? Did you mean Koenig's egg? Is a Koenig some type of bird? Don't even bother claiming that word can actually be pronounced.
The rules are different when you are a monopoly.
Except that it was decided MSFT was a monopoly AFTER the fact. You kick ass as a company, and one day folks look around and say "ya know, you've kicked a bit too much as the last few years...we think you have been a monopoly...and the way you've acted as a monopoly isn't good...so there's going to be some fines..."
This is akin to changing the speedlimit AFTER you have driven down a road.
This is a shake down, no more no less.
Maybe they are docs for MS Dos and Win 3.11
the preview word is Tiresome
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Why bother? You can learn the basics of LaTeX in 10 minutes. Documentation for non-trivial features are available all over, and the non-trivial features tend to use similar syntax as the easy ones anyway.
My happy LaTeX document -- it compiles and is instructive!:
\documentclass[10pt, twoside]{article}
% This is a comment. This will not appear in the typeset output.
\auhor{poopdeville}
\title{My Happy \LaTeX\ Document}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
% Note that \LaTeX\ typesets the LaTeX symbol.
% The trailing backslash is used to give the parser a clue about spacing.
This is my happy \LaTeX\ document. Sentences are separated by punctuation and any number of spaces. Paragraphs are simply separated by at least two newlines.
So this won't start a new paragraph.
But this block of text will be typeset as a new paragraph. So will the next block.
% The \verbatim command is used in the following to
% escape the \ref and \label commands. That is, to
% typeset the literal characters `\', `r', `e', `f', and so
% on. \verbatim also does some formatting changes,
% such as using a fixed-width font.
Cross references are trivial using the \verbatim{\label} and \verbatim{\ref} commands. Citations are a little more complicated, but still very easy. You basically create a text based database of citations and use the BibTeX ancillary program to compile them into files \LaTeX\ processes. It sounds hard, but it's much easier than trying to maintain a bibliography using traditional WYSIWYG tools. Especially since \LaTeX\ takes care of formatting and ordering the references. No more worrying about APA style! (Or MLA, or ACM, or Harvard, etc.)
Inserting figures can be a little tricky, but that's only if you have very particular needs. Few of my papers have required figures, so I can't be of much help. But the kind people at \verbatim{comp.text.tex} are very helpful!
\end{document}
After all, I am strangely colored.
If I write a song, I can sell it to someone else. I can stop other people from using it. I can charge for its use. That certainly looks like property to me. Moreover, the same can be said of a trademark (I can license it, sell it and stop you from using it) and most definitely of a patent. Of course they fulfill different roles, but at core is the same idea. Through intellectual effort you create a tradable asset: for convenience we'll call that property. Trade secrets are different - at least here in the UK - they are only covered by confidentiality law. I need to ensure that everyone who receives the trade secret is contracted to keep it a secret. I think the law is different in the US.
copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets are totally independent of each-other and can't be glued all together as easily as you seem to thinkOf course they are all independent: that's why they exist. However there is enough commonality to allow us to discuss them as a whole. Some works can be covered by more than one category of IP: if I create a logo it can be covered by plain copyright, design copyright and I can register it as a trademark. A computer program can be both copyright and patented.
a secret sauce isn't an ingredient but the result of a (copyrightable) recipe, the fact that it isn't published make it a trade secret but that doesn't have much of government monopoly protectionActually a recipe (considered as a set of instructions) can't be copyrighted. The words I use to describe a recipe would be copyright, but the actual steps involved in making a dish wouldn't be. That's why recipes are usually protected as trade secrets, which is a very weak form of protection, as you note.
fictional metal alloys can't be patented, just written in books and perhaps copyrighted depending on context (see Adamantium in Marvel Comics, for instanceNo of course fictional alloys can't be patented. The great-grandparent brought up (shudder) Ayn Rand and that was where that notion came from. Words in books are always copyright, by the way.
Come to think of it, don't mind me. I suppose the instructive LaTeX code is still suitable for the person who first brought LaTeX up in the thread.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Even that misses the real problem so we need to adjust it a bit. Farberware (ibm) put in lots of R&D to develop a new pasta maker, the maker is faster and easier and takes the world by storm. Kraft (microsoft) made a deal with farberware to include a couple years worth of supplies for the pasta maker (dos) free with purchase. Of course those who want a pasta maker use the free supplies.
Soon other companies figure out the principle behind the design and produce their own interoperable versions (pc clones). The obvious choice is for these clone makers to also go with free Kraft supplies, assuring the public that it is just as good as the other. This way they can replicate the look and feel of the other system.
Farberware Pasta maker and all the clone products have taken the world by storm and become a household name. The success of these products has catapulted Kraft to a monopoly position in the market, for while there lots of pasta maker manufacturers, Kraft provides the supplies for all of them.
But there is a twist, Kraft (microsoft) includes a poison (proprietary document formats) in every batch of supplies. Once you use Kraft products you will die in 30 days unless you use the products again within that time. This doesn't affect most users who eat pasta within that time frame and continue using Kraft since that is what they started with. Others discovered the problem when they wanted to try something new and found a warning when searching for other options. Kraft is confident that the free market will defend its right to protect its market position and believes its customer lock-in strategy is just good business.
Of course it doesn't stop there. The pasta maker design is such that the supplies must yield a certain consistency that can only be produced by a secret ingredient in the Kraft supplies. So those who own Farberware pasta makers (which is everyone) are unable to use any other sort of supplies than Kraft. Making it impossible to purchase one and never use the Kraft supplies and therefore avoid the poison. Although, sooner or later you are bound to eat a meal at a restaurant or friends home where the Kraft supplies are used anyway.
Despite Kraft's consistency lock, some independent groups have figured out how to make supplies that will inter-operate with the pasta machines well enough for many people. Recognizing Kraft's powerful position some of the pasta machine clone makers consider offering units with other types of supply than Kraft. Kraft quickly used its market position to force vendors to only provide Kraft with machines and further to include a bottle of Kraft sauce (Internet explorer) along with the supplies. This way Ragu has no hope of competing the market. Kraft even adjusts their pasta to absorb all the liquid in Ragu sauce and other sauces while performing perfectly with Kraft sauce.
And there you have it, the story of Microsoft piggy backing on the success of the IBM PC and PC CLONE to gain and monopoly, using proprietary products and formats to prevent customers from having the option of choosing a competing product once they put data in a Microsoft format. And of course, the method by which they use their pasta supply... err... operating system monopoly to gain additional monopolies in somewhat related areas like web browsers.
If you actually do any serious scientific writing that requires mathematical equations or formulae, then you really should make an effort to learn LaTeX. Rather than whinge about the lacking equation editors in Word and OO, just take the time to download TeX, a user friendly editor (like TeXShop for the Mac) and the manual over at Wikibooks. Once you've grasped the basic concepts (which only takes about 20 minutes of effort), then writing complex documents is easy. I learned LaTeX at university for writing technical reports in Engineering and found the whole bibliography and reference management system (BibTeX + LaTeX) an absolute lifesaver.
Is that in 1" margins, or those stupid 1.25" margins I keep having to change for my professors preference?
how are laws that control monopoly behaviour part of a free market? that's regulation by definition. of course it's a good thing, but most free market zealots are for some reason oblivious to this scenario:
- big monopoly controls its marketplace
- competitor appears
- big monopoly drops prices far below cost
- competitor bankrupted
- big monopoly raises prices again
that cycle is impossible to avoid without market intervention. economies of scale only exacerbate the problem.
Also, LyX isn't WYSIWYG, it's WYSIWYM :). That's the real beauty of it.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I'm a Linux user at home, and at work I prefer Linux and/or Unix, but sometimes use Windows. I've supported Macs and used Free BSD, Xenix, Solaris and SCO. I've read a good bit about Hurd and tried FreeDOS. I read judge Jackson's ruling in full, carefully. I dislike Microsoft as a company because of its business practices.
That said, I disagree with that ruling because I believe that the Sherman Anti-Trust laws were meant for and specifically address different types of actions. I believe that the ruling was unjust because Microsoft was not guilty of breaking the letter of those particular laws. Laws should mean what they say rather than what someone thinks they were meant to accomplish. With all due respect for judge Jackson, I disagree with the application of the law in that particular instance.
The rulings for Sun were an example of how I think the problems should have been addressed instead. I believe that what should have happened on a larger scale was instead a change in the laws that would have made the unfair practices Microsoft employed illegal in the letter of the law.
Now in the EU case, I haven't read the laws or the judgements, just related articles. I'm curious how they justify requiring a corporate entity to enable more effective competition. It seems anti-capitalist in my gut to say that it is a successful company's obligation to help less successful companies take more of their business away from them.
Can someone tell me if the EU's actions were based on law rather than on opinions? If so, what laws? Is there anyone trying to lead a movement to change the laws surrounding IP? Who can I cheer for? Is it reasonable to require companies to enable interactivity?
While I'm on my soapbox, I really want some things to change. I want every piece of software sold for profit to be required to have source code and building processes registered with the Library of Congress (or a similar entity) before it can be offered for sale. I want the copyright laws changed so that every piece of software sold for profit is to be made open source in the event of the absence of a supporting company or after 10 years, whichever comes first. I want every document standard to be required to be open sourced and documented to provide full interoperability after a period of 5 years and every data storage format to allow the same after 10 years. I believe these changes to the laws would increase innovation, company stability, competition and reliable software. If there is anybody trying to do something like this, who are they? If you think those are bad ideas, why?
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Even though I am an EU citizen, I don't quite understand this mentality that a company should be forced to hand over IP to its competitors.
How is that promoting "fair competition"?
How does a referee promote "fair play"? Microsoft headbutted several players and told the ref to f*** off. Apparently he did the same thing last week and has already threatened to beat the s*** out of Tux Ubuntu, the up-and-coming hometown favourite. Unfortunately, MS is a superstar so he can't be banned and he is virtual so he can't even be sent off much less suspended. The least you can do is take away his ladder.
LaTeX itself is WYSIWYM. Indeed, it was among the first of the semantic markup languages.
:w, :x, ESC, i) until I started using gvim. Before then, doing complicated edits was a chore. With gvim, I could go to a menu and select what I wanted to do. But if I found myself repeatedly using a function, I would learn how to do it manually. I basically used gvim as a guide to in depth knowledge. Similarly, I relied on TeXShop's tex related features at first, but now I just use it to avoid typing "pdflatex foo.tex" over and over again.
:-)
I've never used LyX. I tend to use TeXShop (probably the best OS X TeX IDE) or vim if I really have to. TeXShop has all the facilities you mentioned, but I never really use them. That's not to say I don't see their value. As a related aside, I've used vim for basic text editing for years. But I never really got "into it". I only knew the basic commands (:e,
As another aside, perhaps less related, I have a friend whose laptop is slowly dying. I suggested she get a MacBook, and although she was interested, she resisted because she was attached to MS Word and didn't want to buy another license. I suggested she use LaTeX, but she was reluctant... scared, I suppose. A few weeks ago, she was working on a paper in Word. So I cut and pasted her text into a suitable tex file (just the preamble and \begin{document}-\end{document} pair) and typeset it. There were a few quirks (footnotes, a bibliography, \emph{} instead of italicizing), but she was immediately interested. So I sorted the quirks out as a tutorial intro. She loved it and decided to use LaTeX for all her papers from now on. She became a confident LaTeX user in less than a week. She doesn't know it all, but she knows enough to get most of her work done. And she knows where to get help for any special typesetting needs. (comp.text.tex, me)
LaTeX is sweet.
After all, I am strangely colored.
No you can't charge for it's use. What you can charge for is the right to include your song in another work.
If this was anything close to property, you would only be able to sell your song *once* (how many times can you sell your house, a perfect example of property?). If this was anything close to property, you wouldn't be able to stop other people from using it after you sold it.
The rest of your logic in favour of the concept of "monopoly rights as property rights" doesn't hold up to reality, fortunately.
Maybe it's just that Friday morning feeling, but I was quite amused to mis-read the summary: "Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make inpenetrable software."
Microsoft has been convinced of abusing that monopoly to extend into other business areas.
In other words, the courts has found your "surely agrees" to be false. Are you brave enough to learn about what a monopoly is, how the economics around one work, how "network effects" work and how this lock in a monopoly, and how Microsoft has abused various forms of licensing to lock in a monopoly, which will lead to you changing your mind? Do you even dare to say "I don't know enough about this given that I say "surely agree" for something that a court has decided against. I'll be proud enough of myself to decline to have an opinion until I learn more." - or is that too hard for you, is stepping back and saying "I was wrong to form an opinon" so emotionally painful that you'll instead continue having opinions in areas where you don't know enough?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Apart from that, the EU Commission is not a government of a country - the EU is not a state or nation in any sense. It is 'a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 independent, democratic member states' - to quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU Gee... uh... isn't that how the US of A started out?
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
Nono. If a company gets to a certain arbitrary size where it distorts the market, the government is allowed to use force to stop this anti-free-market behaviour. And if the company does not comply, it gets fined.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Stop all shipments? Of course Microsoft is fully within its rights to do that. However, given the market size, MS won't do that.
But "prosecute all copyright infrigment" -- well, who gave them those limited monopoly rights on the publication of their software? Yes, the governments.
And it's not "private property"; its "copyright", and copyright is spelled "limited monopoly rights on publication and dissemination of works".
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
What a ridiculous comment. Microsoft has been found to be a Monopoly by the US Department of Justice and the European Commission. This isn't merely some guy's opinion - this is an international finding of legal fact.
Unless you are only making software in the EU then it probably doesn't matter. If you plan on selling your software outside the EU (like the US) you can't use the code.
Linux integration outside the EU jurisdiction will really make Linux corporate customers vulnerable to MS suits.
In other words, they need to be punished for being successful? Sounds like socialism if not communism to me.
They're not punished for being succesful. They're punished for not allowing anyone else but them to be succesful. EU would not be doing this is if Microsoft didn't have the vast majority of market share and they wouldn't be using that market share to try to stop everyone else from competing with them.
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? You don't understand Europe if you think that we're hidden communists that try to stop big companies from getting big. Microsoft is stoping other companies (and please, don't bother asking for "proofs", makes me laugh) from getting big
It's Microsoft who behaves like communists. Liberals support Microsoft because they think that "big enterprise = always good". But a big enterprise can use its power to stop other enterprises from competing with you, and it's not good. How different is communism from a company that owns virtually all the market and decices himself what the market must do instead of users?
This goes against the roots of liberallism. Capitalism is great but DOES NOT WORK WITHOUT CHOICES. If users can't decide what's better or worse there's not "freedom". Bush & cia don't support liberalism, they support libertinism. Governments must enforce the availability of several choices in order to make capitalism work. It's not "socialism", it's "liberalism". Just because it's a government act doesn't neccesarily means it's "socialism"
I like interoperability, but I don't like to see it being forced like this.So you're waiting that a company that does own 95% of a market helps other companies to make products that allow them to steal marketshare?
LOL
I support comercial liberalism, but why I should support comercial libertinism? Capitalism is all about consumer choosing the best alternative. With Microsoft, there're only a single choice. I can't choose a better product (Microsoft won't allow me running a different OS in my AD-powered office), so I can't make the world better by giving my money to the best company. What Microsoft is doing is pure communism. It's funny that liberals hate to see a monopolistic company be forced to help competitors to allow users have more choices, much in the same way communists didn't wanted to allow people to vote to choose a better government.
These conditions will apply to all future versions of Windows _ including the upcoming Vista operating system.
So, at the going rate, we can expect Vista documentation sometime in the next four to six years. I'd say it mostly depends on how quickly M$ comes up with a new version. I hope the EU people get fed up and fine them sooner this time. If their intention was interoperability and preventing monoply abuse, they failed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How does the Tragedy of the Commons point out a flaw in free markets? Surely it says far more about communitarian economies, where private property does not exist or is not respected? Maybe a link to wikipedia will, for once, help.
It demonstrates that in a free market, any common and finite resource will be overexploited. This problem can be mitigated by the concept of property, where an individual entity is given ultimate control over an area of land. However, not all resources are as easy to segregate in this manner. The fish stocks in the sea are a good example; it is impractical to wall areas of the sea off in the same way that one might do with an area on land, and many fish regularly cover large distances, so if one did own a part of the sea, your couldn't guarantee that 'your' fish wouldn't stray into your neighbour's property. Those individuals who overfished would be rewarded by more fish seeking to fill the hole in the ecosystem, so there would be an inevitable incentive to over-exploit the resource. Eventually, you'd wind up with no fish, and indeed this conclusion is echoed in reality, where governments have had to step in and prevent overfishing.
One could make similar arguments about air pollution (rather difficult to have each area of land surrounded by a airtight dome), and in the very long term, even about our own Sun. Secondly, there's the question of property itself, which is essentially just a government intervention. Without the government to enforce property laws, what would stop one company trying to take over another company's land? And if you're going to allow government intervention to support this law, where do you draw the line?