Microsoft Gives In To the EU

An anonymous reader writes with word that Redmond Developer News is reporting that Microsoft has given in to EU threats of further fines. The company has opened up a whole host of protocols, including the Exchange protocol, under a license, the terms of which are not known. No other news outlet has picked up this story so far.

Comments

Is IMAP open enough for ya?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Exchange Server has supported IMAP for years.

If an organization really, honestly, truly wants to not use Outlook... NOBODY is forcing them to. But it's so much easier to whine and moan.

Exchange is the best product of it's kind out there. Ever try using Notes? Yech... what a train wreck. How about Openview? Disaster. Oh wait!! Let's use Fetchmail!

The article is wrong!

[jkrise]

From TFA: Microsoft is making key communications protocols available for license , so that third parties, including competitors, can link into the company's newest enterprise products...

The key communications protocols are the ones where Microsoft has a monopoly position... namely,

The protocols by which a Windows 95 / 98 / NT / 2000 PC joins and authenticates with the Domain Controller.
NTFS, Active Drirectory, SMB etc. would be some other protocls of interest.

To my knowledge, Exchange Server, Share Point etc. are not areas of monopoly for Microsoft.

The article is plain WRONG. It might be some more PR spin by MS as usual, though. You want us to open up our protocols? Okay... here's how Dynamics CRM talks to SharePoint Portal! One thinks the EU inspectors will not be susceptible to such tricks.

Re:The article is wrong!

[Tim C]

The key communications protocols are the ones where Microsoft has a monopoly position...

To my knowledge, Exchange Server, Share Point etc. are not areas of monopoly for Microsoft.

From TFA:

The list of available protocols, XML schemas and application programming interfaces (APIs) include transport protocols for communications between Office Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. (Emphasis added)

Seriously, it was in the very next paragraph to the one you quoted. Of all the products produced by MS, the only ones I care about being replaced with serious, 100% interoperable alternatives (any alternatives, not just open ones) are Exchange and Outlook. I'm effectively forced to use Outlook at work because of the calendaring, and I hate almost every second I have to use that sorry excuse for an email client. It was bad enough when I had to put up with people around me using it, breaking email threads, but having to use it myself is almost too much. (Come on MS, email threading was in the versions of mutt and pine I used back in the mid 90s!)

Re:The article is wrong!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

To my knowledge, Exchange Server, Share Point etc. are not areas of monopoly for Microsoft.

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of monopoly abuse. The law does not forbid MS from having a monopoly, it forbids them from tying monopolized products to products in other markets. In this case MS does not have a monopoly on some protocol. They have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Any protocols that secretly communicate between MS's desktop operating system and some other product offering in a different market (Windows server) mean that people in the market for a server OS are more likely to choose Windows server only because MS has tied it to their existing desktop monopoly. A lot of companies bought a Windows based exchange server instead of a Linux based server because exchange was built into their Windows desktops and they needed something to talk to them and the Linux server could not do so because the protocol was being kept secret. In this way the market for server OS's was subverted and more consumers ended up buying an inferior, more expensive product only because of the artificially introduced problem that Linux servers would not integrate as well with Windows desktops.

The article is plain WRONG.

The spin on the article certainly seems a bit off. My understanding was that the EU had previously rejected MS's proposal to license protocols instead of providing open documentation because the program the USDoJ approved has not worked and both MS and the US government admit that the licensing is not working and the offerings from MS in this regard are so out of date as to be unusable.

Re:I am sure that this term will be in the license

[mrchaotica]

leaked into the public domain

You can't "leak" something to the Public Domain; only the copyright holder can release it (by explicitly stating so). Even if a third party publishes it, it's still copyrighted.