Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Finally Bows to EU Antitrust Measures
Rogue Pat writes "Microsoft ended three years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission. Competitors will be able to buy interface protocols for 10.000 Euro to make their software work better with Windows. Moreover, Microsoft won't appeal the 500 million Euro fine any further."
If they had started paying it initially, with the decrease of the dollar and increase of the euro, it would have saved them a lot of money.
I think the saddest thing here is that it seems to take us three years to enforce a judgement against a major corporation, and even then the reporting in the media is all written as if Microsoft have kindly agreed to co-operate and not as though they've been forced to accept the judgement of a court that found they had done wrong and ordered them punished for it. If legal systems are this slow, it's no wonder people get concerned about the power of megacorps and that we see everyone from Big Software to Big Media taking some pretty major liberties with things like antitrust law.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's simple : we need the complete interface specifications for free, when you buy the operation system to use on your desktop.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
So yet again they're still refusing to comply, they've just dropped the price and announced they're now complying when they're patently not?
This is no different to when they paid the last fine and announced they'd finally given in to the EU demands and offered the documentation at 50k with restrictive license.
So they drop the price a little, and the restrictions a little, but so what? It's the same game. The EU needs to force compliance here. Or they'll play this game forever.
$10k is peanuts for commercial companies. It even is peanuts for open source companies. But the fact that there is any fee at all means that the information is not public, and this will likely exclude open source competitors, which is what Microsoft wants most of all.
Fortunately, there may be workarounds: people can write small binary-only Microsoft compatibility plug-ins which plug into larger open source applications that eventually can replace Microsoft's applications.
No, it's most probably because Microsoft paying for the meal could be interpreted as bribery.
What restrictions come with the specification that we pay 10,000 Euros for? If there are restrictions on what we can do with the knowledge gained, then we can't use it. M$ could argue that publishing code written using their spec is the same as publishing their spec and so everyone who reads the code has to pay 10k Euros.
Until this is explained in full: we need to hold back on popping the champagne corks.
How good will the spec be? If it is anything like the OOXML one then there will still be huge holes. M$ is smart enough to only publish in the spec the bits that have been reverse engineered: this allows it to claim that it has revealed a lot without adding anything to what is known by the rest of us.