FSFE Supports Microsoft Antitrust Investigation

An anonymous reader sends us to LinuxElectrons.com for an announcement from the Free Software Foundation Europe, in the form of a letter (PDF) sent to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. FSFE offers to support a possible EU antitrust investigation of Microsoft, declaring that "Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards." Opera Software issued a complaint to the Competition Commissioner based on anti-competitive behavior in the web browser market. FSFE president Georg Greve writes in the letter, "Although Opera Software does not produce Free Software, we largely share their assessment and concerns regarding the present situation in the Internet browser market."

Comments

Merry Christmas

[c3ph45]

Microsoft anti-trust investigation... it's the type of thing that makes you feel warm inside on a cheery Christmas day. Merry Christmas Slashdot!

Re:CSS today ODF + PDF tomorrow

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Regarding PDF, Microsoft had support for PDF in Office 2k7, but Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft in the EC (fearing that it would threaten Adobe's own monopoly in Office to PDF conversion tools), which forced Microsoft to remove PDF support. How's that for irony? An "open" format (PDF) that Microsoft is forbidden to support in its products.

As for ODF, Microsoft is sponsoring an open source ODF plugin for Office, so they already do that.

Oh, and OOXML is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard (see Brian Jones' latest blog entry on the progress ECMA is making to address the objections raised to the OOXML submission). When that happens, I fully expect you to make a post saying that all parties should be forced to support OOXML, since it'll be an open ISO standard.