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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.'"
The result of which would be the same if you just assumed that MS is a dominant force and as such, has the moral obligation to make their products interoperable with anyone else's. Just as it is reasonable to assume that _within_ MS, they have all of their formats and protocol specs documented, simply because new people get to go to work there for the first time almost every day. Just as it is reasonable to assume that no such company could ever emerge from Belgium. They may be rancunous, but they're not stupid in Brussels, and the result, as I outlined above, is just the same.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Then I guess the US govenment would do what the EU does now. Let's face it, the US govenment is very protective of US industry vs foreign (such as EU) industries. It is only right that the EU is protective about EU industries vs e.g. US industries. There is a rumor that the US govenment (probably the NSA) obtained information (through signals intelligence or similar methods) about bids from Airbus on some large airplane order. This information was quickly forwarded to Boeing, enabling them to undercut the Airbus bid. I don't know of any strict evidence that this actually happened, but my gut feeling says it's probably true.
Give me a fucking break. You're proposing that the government get their corrupt little hands in the software business and mandate that a private company develop software according to "standards" developed by their competitors and inept committees? There's no nice way to say this - you're a fucking idiot and your idea is the stupidest damn thing I've read in this anti-MS whinefest so far.
Too bad these are lies and inaccuracies. Microsoft's Kerberos implementation is working fine for many companies with Linux, Solaris, and many other clients.