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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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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 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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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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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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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
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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