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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.'"
Hold on there cowboy...
/. doesn't mean that they deserve that money.
I'm pretty sure you won't have much problem finding or getting the same information from F/OSS software!
Just because MS wants to suck the money out of every pocket they can, use monopolistic practices, mafia like business tactics and other ills often mentioned on
If MS really wanted to be nice, they could be. They don't. They *WANT* to keep sucking all the money they can from all the pockets that they can, and will use any and all tactics that they can get away with to continue to do so.
For me, that is just business. There are worse businesses in this world. It's also why I choose F/OSS now without even thinking about what I might lose by not having MS products in my household. Whatever the alternative is, I feel better knowing that I won't be fscked in a couple years to get an upgrade or patch.
Getting paid for doing something is one thing, being forced to stop monopolistic practices is another.
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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.
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?
Well one would hope that 5.95% of nothing is... :-)
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
I want Microsoft's lawyers. I could get charged with being a bank robber, then make a deal where I agree to only rob a small bit from banks, and then I'd demand compensation for loss of earnings.
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.
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.
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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!
> EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal
Now this time Bill Gates really has gone too far: King Gates III! The Brits would never buy it! On the other hand we could see increased coverage of Microsoft in the British Tabloid Press and I'd like to see Steve Balmer try to throw a throne.
I saw it on Slashdot from this guy samzenpus who said this guy pallmall1 saw on MSNBC that the Financial Times reported it. So it's gotta be true.
If said company is holding a monopoly, then yes.
Monopolies are, by their very definition, the bane of free market. Should you be able to hold a monopoly over a certain area of the market, the free market starts to crumble because it cannot employ its power.
In a truely free market someone could come along with a new and better idea and that new/better idea would sell better because the product is better. That's the theory behind it all. Competition amongst producers, with the consumer being the decider which product is best, giving the producers of "good" products their money, so they thrive while the ones with the "bad" products perish.
This does not work in the presence of a monopoly. MS can produce the worst software and they would still be the top sellers. Simply because companies have invested a large amount of money into their line of products.
If MS can hold its specs under cover, companies would be forced to keep buying from MS, even if their software is inferior, because competing software would not be compatible. Which, in turn, contradicts what free market dictates as the doctrine of the best product being the best selling one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Yes yes, we've heard it all before. Why not just set up a cronjob (Sorry, Scheduled Task) to post this inacurate and uneducated drivel? It could save a lot of time and effort: you wouldn't even need to spend time ignoring the replies that keep pointing out how wrong you are!
don't start or remain a tech company in Europe.
Phillips, Nokia, Sony Ericson, Siemans and the hundreds of other small and medium technology companies all agree with you.
P.S: Remind me, which country convicted Microsoft of abusing it's monopoly position first?
And fair enough.
The EU is protecting the EU. They could make a law banning Windows all together and it would be LAW.
They want other companies to be able to produce something that resembles competition. Ie an o/s that can run windows executables. And hey Governments can do what they want with their own laws because they have their own sovereignty. Just because you Americans allow yourselves to be bribed by every corporation you have doesn't mean every other government is.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
What intellectual property? It's not copyrights - MS is not required to give code. It's not patents and not trademarks. What EU wants is the info on how the code works, so that other software vendors could make software that properly interoperates with the products of a monopolist that Microsoft is. This is only fair.
The problem is, though, that you can have the best product in the world, if it's not compatible with existing technology it's worthless. You could create the perpetuum mobile but if the energy it produces is not compatible with the ways we have to harness and use it, it's practically useless.
This might be too strong an example, since with technology THAT superior people would go out of their way to find some way to use the energy, but I think you get my point. Compatibility is what makes or breaks a product, no matter how good the product itself is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which they should not have to, as MAPI is (supposedly) an open standard.
It's spelled "guarantee". And that would be great, if they were trying to do that -- instead of deliberately trying to break the competition in subtle ways.
They have done this before. Take msn.com, which had a ridiculous typo in its stylesheet -- in a version of the stylesheet only shown to Opera users.
Coincidence? Maybe, but consider that this never, EVER happens the other way around -- that is, msn.com never has typos that break stuff in Internet Explorer, and their own API changes never break a Microsoft product.
No, it is not. It is blatantly anticompetitive behavior. Using their complete dominance in the Operating System business to support their Email Client business -- or even their Office Suite business -- is not just unfair, it's actually illegal.
You don't have a clue about antitrust laws, then.
Maybe it's different in Britain, but here, this kind of shit is considered illegal and wrong -- except, I suppose, for those who have contributed a large amount of money to political campaigns. (Notice how the antitrust suit against MS was dropped as soon as Bush got elected -- and notice how much MS (and MS executives) contributed to the Bush 2000 campaign.)
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Mind-boggling? No, what's really mind-boggling is that we're in such a Bizarro would that people somehow think it isn't "free market!"
Here's a newsflash: so-called "intellectual property" is a government-granted monopoly. It is an artificial construct of law. It is the opposite of a "free market!"
In a truly free market, so-called "intellectual property" would not exist. Everyone would be free to make whatever widgets they wanted, without having to worry about whether some whiny ass claimed to think of the idea first. That's a "free market!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yet now everyone is demanding that MS open up, sans compensation. Just because MS is very successful?
Well, because they're a monopoly and they've been abuisng that position.
IBM ruled both the hardware and software market back then, in a way that MS today doesn't even come close. Yet no one forced them to open up their protocols (although the US government did try, and lost).
And if the US government won, then something similar would have happened. Microsoft lost for whatever different legal reasons.
Yet an upstart MS was able to dethrone IBM from both the hardware and software crowns.
No they didn't. IBM made mainframes. Microsoft made desktop operating systems. Completely different market. The current European situation seems instigated by companies unable to aggressively compete. Government regulation is hardly ever the solution to innovation.
That is the whole point! There's no way they can aggressively compete because Microsoft abuse their monopoly!
The only reason Microsoft has the position they do is that the governments of various countries have made it illegal for you to access information in certain ways. If it wasn't for government interference in the free actions of individuals, there would be no copyright laws at all. The government interferes with people's activities in this case because they contend an overall social good results.
Now, the governments have concluded that interfering with Microsoft will produce an overall social good. For Microsoft defenders to speak as if government interference is always a bad thing is ridiculous: they are complaining about the very thing that gives Microsoft any position at all.
While the interlectual property is theirs, and legally constituted court has decided that as punishment for breaking the law they have to hand it over possibly for no cost. When you break the law you don't get to decided what your punishment is, and the courts are empowered to seize your assets as part of the punishement.
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].
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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).
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> 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.
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It is established that they have a de facto monopoly on the operating systems and office package markets. Their mail client has been included on every OS they have released since windows 95. Now if they intentionally break the protocol with which the mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express and whatever it's called in Vista) interoperates with a mail server in order to leverage the market penetration of your own product (Exchange) then you have broken the law.
Remember, it's not illegal to have a monopoly but it is illegal to leverage said monopoly in other markets.
And don't give the whiny speech about how EU only does this to US companies, Microsoft or your granny. EU takes a tough stance on monopoly exploitation in European companies alike.
Microsoft OTOH developed incompatible protocols after there were perfectly good ones in use, and then forced them onto the world using illegal tactics.
Most people can see a difference here
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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$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
Very true. Of course M$ 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
What Microsoft are being ordered to open up isn't their intellectual property, but part of the usage instructions. Admittedly it's a part that only means anything to rather advanced users, but nonetheless it's information to which users of Microsoft products are entitled. If I buy a guitar amplifier, I expect to be able to plug any guitar into it -- not just that manufacturer's guitars. And in the back of the handbook, it will give me the all information someone skilled in electronics would need to know in order to present a suitable signal to this amplifier -- the input impedance and expected voltage level. And in all probability, the connector will be a 6.3 mono jack. Now all I have to do is design my guitar pickup to have that voltage output into that impedance input and present it on that connector. More to the point, according to the law of the land, the amplifier manufacturer cannot stop me. If they tried to use some bizarre proprietary connector, any luthier would be within their rights to copy that connector for the purpose of making an instrument compatible with that amplifier.
Similarly, if I buy a Microsoft server, I should be able to choose any manufacturer's client to work with that server -- and if I buy a Microsoft client, I should be able to choose any manufacturer's server to work with it. By withholding information that people have a right to know on the flimsy pretext that most people would not know what to do with it anyway, Microsoft have created a monopoly for themselves -- a monopoly which might not have existed, had third parties been in a position to supply clients interoperable with Microsoft servers and servers interoperable with Microsoft clients. Unfortunately, withholding that information in the first place was actually illegal, and Microsoft must be punished.
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What standards ? In this area of connecting server and client software Microsoft is setting a lot of the standards.
It's very hard to say that something is a standard unless you publish it... an unpublished standard is very similar to a few other of my favorites...
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"The dumbest thing I've ever heard... Today"
What it seems like to me, is that Microsoft is trying to get the following system in place (Bad Car Analogy Warning)
You buy a new SUV, and need new tires, you have to go back to the Microsoft Dealer, because your new "MS MudRover" Only take tires with a diameter of 17.428 inches and a 12 inch width... You also can't get new rims, becuase the MS MudRover uses a proprietary 19 Pin/lugnut system to attach the rum to the axel, oh yeah, and they have a patent on said 19 Pin system, as well as making 17.428Inch diameter tires with a 19 inch width... In short, Vendor Lock In, becuase nothing else works
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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.
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The EU is protecting the EU.
True - Except the EU makes tries to enforce its policies worldwide, not just within the EU.
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.
The EU just serves to further prove that all sufficiently-large organizations will abuse the power of their position (and I don't say that as though the US hasn't done the same for the last half-century).
Just another Boeing-vs-Airbus dispute, except Microsoft has no European analogue. And that pisses the EU off far, far more than anything Microsoft itself could ever do.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
Interoperability with what? I had to explain to a coworker just last week (after she made a v8-specific PDF that no one could open)... If you just tell Acrobat to always save in v4 compatible mode, everyone in the world can read it. Same goes for MS Office. Just save it Word/Excel 98 mode, and plenty of other programs can open it.
Or to put this another way, for a recent contracting job, I wrote a niche-industry software package that outputs a totally opaque closed format. I make the only program that does anything even remotely like it. Should I expect the EU to start threatening me when the first copy ships to somewhere in the EU later this month for "stifling local competition"? I do so hope so, as I have no assets there that they can threaten, and gleefully look forward to telling them to go pound sand...
Someone else already said it, but I'll repeat: EU policies send a very, very clear message - Don't set up shop in the EU.
For a lot of companies the calendar function in exchange /outlook is just as important as email. that's one of the main reasons why they stay with microsoft exchange.
Exactly. And for small and medium-sized businesses (200 employees), Exchange is very good at what it does. My problem with Exchange is that it requires an Active Directory, which means you now need to purchase another pile of machines to do DC work, fill your FSMO roles, run backups of said DCs, and so on. And, of course, if your userbase platform is not Windows, your Exchange client options are either a joke (Entourage on the Mac) or non-existent (Linux, BSD). It all adds up to a lot of money just to run an email/calendar server. Of course, if you already have 1) Windows clients, 2) an Active Directory, and 3) don't mind locking yourself in even further, then Exchange is a no-brainer. Once you're in... good luck getting out.
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.
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
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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
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
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