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Hungary Officials Raid Microsoft Office
Steve writes "Hungarian government officers raided the offices of a Microsoft subsidiary this week, as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. From the article: 'According to the statement, Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as loyalty discounts - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products. Such behavior could lead to the exclusion of competitive products from the market and violate European Union rules, according to the authority known as the GVH.'"
Doing their best to eliminate all competition with their monopolistic practices.
It's no different than their blood deals with SuSe and such. Tie everyone up with obligations to not use other products or make them pay royalties with Microsoft's threats of lawsuits for crap patents.
I bought my last Microsoft product years ago. No way in hell will I support a company like them.
And for those that talk about Microsoft's "innovation", I'd like to counter with their outright thefts of code (Stacker), their sabotaging other company's products when they detect them running in Windows (Word Perfect), their screwing customers so they could pretend that IE was a critical component of the OS (Win98), and all the other dirty tricks they constantly pull.
Doesn't Bill Gates have enough money? When will they actually produce a quality product instead of pushing junk on people? When will they let the market actually support innovation?
Yeah, yeah - I know I am no Microsoft fan boy and this may get labelled as flame bait or a troll, but seriously - this is just another example of Microsoft's dirty tricks and using their weight to screw everyone else - including their very own fan boys.
Not directly related, but Hungary is very much into open source. Also, according to google analytics for my open source project, I get quite a few hits from Hungary. And remember European Firefox usage from a few weeks ago? Hungary is one of the leading adopters of Firefox in the world. I wonder if this kind of IT culture has any bearing on how hard they will go after M$.
I was wondering something similar, but almost opposite. In this case, a relatively small office was closed down for investigation. What if the Hungarians declared that they felt that the evidence was also stored on the "main" network, which was connected by intranet. How would MS (or any large company) handle a demand that full access be granted to the entire intranet for investigation. What if the demand included suspending all activity, or introducing all details found into (public) evidence.
Would a large company like MSFT be willing to absolutely refuse demands from a policing body, be it American, the E.U., or Hungary? Reversing that question, how small of a policing body could make such a demand before MSFT would comply?
Yes, because government raids are the cornerstone of freedom and democracy.
Seriously, I think the EU should start charging companies like Real, Sun, etc for the service they provide in helping them to succeed in business without really trying.
I feel for you. Have you tried sending the BSA a bill?
We recently had an unknown tipster (possibly the ex-employees who started a competing company using our code base that we are suing for copyright infringement, being the only ex-employees) turn our company into the BSA. We have four employees, 20 machines 10 of which run Linux or BSD, 2 run Novell, leaving 8 windows/macs with a grand total of 20 BSA member programs running on them (including Acroread, and MS Word Viewer), of which 10 were non-free and we had licenses for all of them. But we spent 80 hours preparing our response to the BSA who demanding we inventory everything, that's 80 hours we couldn't be doing actual business (only 4 employees, and one is a receptionist, and another does accounts). I want to send them a bill so badly, but I presume that will precipitate a visit, and like a cop who "finds drugs in your car," I am sure some copies of Office will suddenly appear on our systems.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains. - Evilest Doe
No, Hungarian Notation was invented by Charles Simonyi when he worked at PARC. When he took a job at Microsoft and tried to introduce it there, it was completely misunderstood, and that bastardized version is what most untrained programmers came to know (no thanks to Microsoft's developer training). Since they seemingly couldn't even be bothered to pronounce his name, it became known as Hungarian Notation.
The real thing is incredibly useful, and I encourage all unfamiliar with it to read through Joel's article.
Lies about crimes
...except MS DID do something illegal. Only if you can prove it in court. What's the going rate for Hungary judges, a nice pastrami on rye?Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
6 of our 10 BSA member products (id est: the non-free ones) were Windows (XP Pro and 2000). I cannot find any terms in the EULA (Note: this is the terms for Genuine Advantage, but most MS EULAs are essentially the same) where I agree to perform inventorying on the system at my own cost and expense to be made available at their request. I cannot locate a Mac OS X EULA, but I don't remember that in there either. The other two were an ancient (1996) VB compiler (Which is still MS and is probably an even more primitive version of linked one), and Delphi EULA (pdf) which states they have the right to terminate the license if we breach any of the conditions, but does not say that we at our own expense must perform the work necessary to prove we aren't in violation of these terms.
I frequently do read license agreements (exclusions are GPL, LGPL, BSD, Apache, or others that I am quite sure what the terms are as I have already read them). I have never agreed to pay to be somebody's lackey.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains. - Evilest Doe