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EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal
pallmall1 writes "According to MSNBC, The Financial Times has reported that the EU is going to drastically reduce or even eliminate Microsoft's proposed royalties on interoperability information required to be released by the EU's antitrust ruling issued three years ago. According to a confidential EU document, "Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation...". Even Neil Barrett, the expert picked by both Microsoft and the EU to oversee Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling, says a zero percent royalty would be 'better.'"
Remember, this is a court order, it's part of a penalty they get for breaking the law. The court decides the terms. Originally they were allowed to pick a reasonable fee themselves (IIRC) but if the court decides they abused that and set an unreasonable fee, well I would certainly expect them to order the info to be free.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
How does not sharing MS File/Sharing specs harm competition again?
lack of interoperability, otherwise known as the tactic "vendor lock-in".
whether we like it or not, windows is currently the standard and if someone wants to compete (which lets that whole "free market" thing work), they need to be compatible with windows and with microsoft's formats (.doc, etc.)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Think like the SAMBA guys.
They want to interoperate with windows, not integrate aspects of it into other platforms. That capability is always a plus, at least it makes a transition out of windows smooth.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Can you really be that naive?
I will give you one simple example ( even though I think you are a troll ) and let you take it from there.
MAPI ( the Mail API ) - This was a specified API to allow different programs to interact with e-mail. It was supposed to allow any program to send whatever their work prodcut was, along as an attachement to an e-mail, and to generaly interact with any e-mail system installed on the computer.
When MAPI was 1st published it had a well defined set of interfaces and API calls that were documented and reliable. This was all well and good until well the competition started writing better e-mail systems. These were all fully MAPI complient and worked very well.
As we all know by now, MicroSoft cannot handle competition. So what did Microsoft do? What they always do, they changed the API and then didn't tell anyone. So now all kinds of MAPI complient applications started breaking, well except theirs of course, since they had all the documentation and the rest of the word didn't.
This is the basic Microsoft pattern. If someone comes up with something better then they have and it relies on an API controlled by them, they simply change it and then dont tell anyone they did so, thus stopping the competitions product from looking so good or even working at all
That, by defintion, is anti-competative behaviour.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Remember one technically unnecessary but business-mandated criterion in developing MS-DOS 2:
"DOS isn't done 'till Lotus won't run"
Microsoft does not merely control its APIs, it has a history of abusing that control for anticompetitive purposes.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
MS is guilty as charged by a legally constituted court, the court's penalty is to hand over their IP. WTF has socialism got to do with it?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
So MS releases the specs for various protocols they happen to be using right now. I can easily see MS changing these protocols as part of a service pack to XP/Vista and suddenly it's two more years for the revised specs to be made available. But this would just be IMHO based on how they've 'updated' the Windows file sharing protocol over the years and how nicely they play with public standards [namely the standard with a twist].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Microsoft is not being asked to give over anything remotely considered intellectual property by the EU.
They are being asked to document their API's so that they may not use their illegal monopoly to prevent interoperability from competitors and therefore maintain their monopoly.
They can do this without giving anything of value in the legal sense and certainly can achieve this without ever showing a single line of source code, although worked examples certainly would help with understanding.
They are an illegal company performing illegal acts and as such punitive controls must be enforced to ensure a fair playing field, period.
Here is a link to the original Financial Times article.
And as Google willingly publishes a ton of API's to make it possible to interoperate and integrate their technologies, I think they are really going out of their way to play nice.
Bot Assisted Blogging
I shouldn't have to explain this to someone of reasonable intelligence but this is not about other companies being unable to build a competing OS but about MS using it's monopolist position to keep others from building software for windows that competes with MS products. So now please explain to me how you can compete with MS if you don't have the neccesary information to make your products run efficiently on their OS. By guessing? I'm sorry but you don't seem to understand the meaning of the word monopoly.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
> The iPod should publish it's interfaces so that people can make competing iPod software.
You mean usb-storage? iTunes just uploads the data via usb storage, and i believe it creates a playlist too but there are already free tools for creating those anyway...
Also, you can buy a different kind of MP3 player without being at a disadvantage. If you use something other than windows you will often find you have issues interoperating with poorly designed services.
> Sony should be forced to reveal all of the hardware interfaces in the PS/3 so that people can make their own add-on devices.
Yes they should, unfortunately that would cause games manufacturers to leave the PS3 (PS/3 is what IBM would have called it) and develop for the other more proprietary consoles.
On the other hand, you can buy a cell based machine from IBM and connect an nvidia videocard to it, and thus you have a similar machine which you can program.
> Google should be forced to publish their search engine core to prevent vendor lock-in to Google search.
Google is a service rather than a product, you can choose to use it or not, and if you choose not to you aren't at a disadvantage to others. People don't send you files that "require google". Also, google has no method to lock their customers in, if someone else creates a better search engine then google will have no choice but to improve or die. windows on the other hand, keeps customers locked in using proprietary protocols and formats, regardless of how superior any of the competitors are.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There is that little phenomena called "vendor lock-in". We (EU) have anti-trust laws against that. What Microsoft is doing is making sure that once you use a single Microsoft product (e.g. Windows XP) it becomes difficult to move away from Microsoft - we have surely all seen it. What the EU is doing is working to reduce the amount of vendor lock-in for Microsoft. It is making sure that users have more of a choice about which OS, which Office Product, which Movie Player they use.
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
So when the EU finally forces Microsoft out completely, that will count as their choice. But when American companies can't sell "Feta" or "Cheddar" cheese, in America, we have a problem.
;-)
Well, cheddar isn't a protected name - it's regarded as generic. Although seeing the artificially coloured, yellow slices of chewy pap that passes for "cheddar" in the US, you might wish it was protected so at least you'd know you'd be getting a decent piece of cheese! Similarly, in Europe when you get feta cheese or parma ham you know you're getting a decent product and not a cheap rip-off. In the US, you could get feta cheese sprayed from a can and parma ham that has never seen a pig
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
From: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/major/mtc -00029523.htm
...
For example, Kerberos is an industry standard for encryption, in which certain
fields are reserved for optional use. Microsoft, however, has used one of those
fields to produce its own proprietary version of the standard. In itself, this
is unobjectionable.
Microsoft, however, has gone one step further: it has manipulated its operating
systems and middleware so that they will use and accept only the Microsoft
version of the Kerberos standard.(16) This is diametrically contrary to the
purpose for which standards, even with optional fields, are developed. Optional
fields are included in standards to enable firms to add information to a
message. Ordinarily, if an optional field is used in creating standard messages,
those messages can still be sent and received among all products that comply
with the standard. In such cases, the information included in the optional field
may simply be ignored. Optional fields are never, however, intended to enable a
firm -- i.e., Microsoft -- to subvert the standard and preclude its widespread
usage.(17)
Thus, by polluting industry standards, such as Java and Kerberos (among others),
Microsoft can further impede the use and development of competing middleware.
Any calls encrypted with Kerberos sent by Microsoft Windows can be read only by
other Microsoft Middleware and not by Novell's middleware. Similarly, Novell's
middleware cannot send calls encrypted with Kerberos (the industry standard),
because Windows will reject them.
16. The CCIA explains that "[w]hile the Kerberos Version 5 Microsoft uses
for their security services is a standard, the way they have implemented
Kerberos is not a standard and renders it nearly inoperable with any other
implementation." CCIA White Paper, supra, at 24.
17. Not content with Microsoft's corruption of the Kerberos standard, Microsoft
has filed for a patent on its proprietary version. Consequently, not only will
Microsoft products fail to interoperate with non-Microsoft products (because of
the modification), but Microsoft will not allow anyone else to use its version
unless they purchase a license from Microsoft.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
Yeah, why don't they do that? Oh that's right, because the EU is one of the single largest markets for Microsoft. If they stopped selling their products here, their revenue would crash overnight and take their stock price with it.