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

Not Free

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA:
Of course, the licenses are not free. And, to a large extent, Microsoft is bowing to the European Commission, which decreed the company must make the interfaces public so rivals can compete on what they claim will be a more level playing field.

It appears that this wont make its way into the Open Source community; however, it does open up the market to competition. More competition is better than zero competition.

Binary protocol translation modules

[Mathinker]

What is the state of the parallel open protocols? If their functionality is well-developed, an altruist with deep enough pockets might be able to release binary-only plugin modules which translate between protocols. Or perhaps a binary-only proxy server application which does that.

Unfortunately, I would guess that Microsoft's license tries to deal with this problem. Probably in a way analogous to Numerical Recipes' clause:

(ii) our software is bound into the programs in such a manner that it cannot be accessed as individual routines and cannot practicably be unbound and used in other programs. Specifically, under this license, your program user must not be able to use our programs as part of a program library or ``mix-and-match'' workbench.

Too bad the EU couldn't force them to go totally open.

Microsoft Gives In To the EU?

[ChameleonDave]

The multinational corporation Microsoft has complied with the law, and this is reported as "Microsoft Gives In To the EU". I wonder whether the headline would have read "Microsoft Gives In To the US" if the laws in question has been American.