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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.'"
I am not a native English speaker and I read the subject as if Microsoft proposed some kind of royal title to EU bureaucrats or something and they refused.
As for royalty payments, yes, Microsoft is disclosing interoperability protocols and other who want to used should pay, but... Microsoft's protocols are not stat-of-art technology, it is an implementation of ideas that are commonly used in IT industry. NFS is in essence the same thing as CIFS but with different protocol convention.
Thus, Microsoft's hiding interface details is not protection of intellectual property but prevention for other vendors to come along and intercommunicate.
Think of post office. Street addresses are open. Pen, paper and envelops are freely available from different vendors. What if US Post Office would demand a royalty from private currier services and taxi drivers for using of Street naming and house numbering system?
Seriously, who in their right mind would want to integrate aspects of Windows? Sure it's a platform that millions are using, but with their continued mistakes, they won't have a foothold for much longer.
You have answered your own question. The people that integrate aspects of Windows are the people who need to inter operate with the Windows users. Those Windows users occupy 98% of the universe. Personally; I would like to use Thunderbird ( on Linux, Solaris, *BSD or Windows) at work but it doesn't play nice with all the (proprietary) toys that come with Exchange. What about being part of a Windows Domain natively? Let's extend this just a little farther: How about being able to choose your word processor or spreadsheet tool of choice and not having to be concerned about file formats.
Now, with open protocols and open standards; everyone can compete on a level playing field. Let the companies create true value to the products (IE: like management features, better interface, etc) instead of playing games by changing the protocol / formats and making forced upgrades for the users.
It is evident that the money is not the real issue for M$ here. If it was they would have complied with the EU order a long time ago rather than pay 2 million Euros per day. The real issue is preventing the competition from competing fairly - in particular Open Source.
Note that M$ gets the benefits of using other protocols for free, eg: the Open System protocols (described in POSIX); the Internet protocols (described in RFCs); Open Source implemented stuff (just read the code)[**].
It could get quite interesting if the Antigua spat with the USA over gambling gets worse [[The WTO order has been ignored by the USA]]. The result will be that Antigua will be allowed to take retaliation - which means ignoring protection on USA goods. If Antigua was to get a copy of the M$ protocols specification it could release it free to use by everyone - legally.
[**] Yes it is quite legal for M$ to read Open Source code, deduce the protocols and write closed source software - just as long as they don't copy the code. This is as it should be.
"The government interferes with people's activities in this case because they contend an overall social good results."
Of course, that's very much a "European" view of the role of law--and I don't mean "European" in the sense of "of the EU" here. Here law is a "directing" activity--something Napoleonic. And let's hope that a court knows what is "overall social good results".
The Anglo-American view, which has its roots in the English Common Law is different. In this view law is fundamentally about conflict resolution. The striking success of this model of law--you find wealthy, flourishing, relatively free, and generally law-abiding societies--everywhere where people have been influenced by this model ought to recommend this view to people more often.
Actually, I suppose this ruling may have originally arisen out of conflict--in other words, in response to irresolvable disagreements between Microsoft and other vendors. I don't know how it arose. Did some other vendors take Microsoft to Court? If so, a judgment in favour of the other vendors seems a reasonable resolution to the conflict and in accordance with the requirements of justice. AFAICT, Microsoft was acting unjustly in damaging their business by deliberately sabotaging interoperability.
Very true. Of course M$ learned from the (old) IBM that one of the best ways to protect your market was to ignore standards, or undermine them, whilst publicly supporting them. Not too sure about the 'extend and publish' part - that's one way that M$ undermines existing standards - by 'extending' them, (making everything else incompatible). http://www.consortiuminfo.org/ has lots of info on this
And wouldnt even be necessary if they had complied with standards in the first place.
The EU should force microsoft to comply with published standards, or if necessary extend and publish the extensions to those standards (and propose the standard be updated accordingly).
Ok, this sounds like MS has been really bad, but it comes down to some simple slight of hand on the part of both the EU and MS.
I have a couple of friends that work in Brussels within the EU and the main reason MS is pushed around is that they are an American company that has a lot of control in Europe. This is a no no in the world of the EU if they are going to circumvent the US's power in the market, especially the technical markets.
So the EU is going to claim MS hasn't done what they wanted no matter what MS does if they can use it as leverage to keep American company interests from having control in any area of technology inside the emerging EU market.
If MS was 'from' Belgium, there would never have been a issue with anything they did in the first place.
So as much as everyone likes to jump on MS, this is more of a political movement than having anything to do with MS not jumping fast enough or high enough when the EU wants.
This just keeps getting better.
I might be falling in love with the EU. If they could do something about the RIAA I'd be in nirvana.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Yes, I agree. IT is more pervasive and it is more mature. It is becoming a commodity. Commodities are generally defined, regulated, and graded by standards. There are strict definitions for the size of shrimp you buy in bulk, or the quality/type of crude oil. I assume that when nuts and bolts were first invented and used, different manufactures used different thread sizes and counts on their bolts. Different sizes and number of sides to their nuts. You had buy from the same manufacturer to ensure compatibility. Now we have standards, and life is better. In the beginning every computer hardware company made it's own software and protocols. They had to. Now were are making standards and life is getting better.
Funny you should mention that...
IBM actually WAS forced to open up protocols and specifications. I have actually held in my own hands the "360 OEM Channel Specification" once upon a time. It was the very document that allowed 3rd parties to connect their peripherals to IBM mainframes, and I believe that it was one of a range of similar documents that IBM was required to divulge.
It's all well and good to be feisty and innovative as a company. But once you've become "the Standard of the industry" things become different. Because you're now "the Standard" everyone has to interoperate with you, or they're out of business. In that position it's easy to abuse the Standard and keep yourself on top for as long as that industry continues. In a worse context, it allows you to "manage" the pace of change of the industry, so you can remain on top. But in this same context, the industry dominator remains on top to the detriment of that industry, simply because innovation has been slowed and channeled.
The "documentation remedy" was good for IBM and the industry then, and I would argue that it's good for Microsoft and the industry now. Furthermore, it wasn't the "documentation remedy" that brought IBM down, it was a sea-change in the industry. If anything, the "documentation remedy" has helped the mainframe industry survive better into the PC era.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.