Slashdot Mirror
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."
I never really understood the whole browser inclusion with the antitrust aspect. Of all things Microsoft does, not including a free alternative, or alternative at all, to a internet browser seems petty. I just recently had to format this computer, and recently built another and I promptly downloaded Fire Fox. I think Opera's problem is they just aren't making it like FF and IE are...
That's not to say that MS is innocent, but they're not blatantly stopping any installation of alternative browsers, or office suites.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I seem to remember that they'd allow you to ship a modern OS with an alternative browser.
And besides, the only reason that sounds insane is that we've been doing things that way for awhile. How insane is it that MS still ships an OS without antivirus? Especially when their Control Center will nag you to install some third-party antivirus?
No, that's exactly what anti-trust laws are for. Read that again until you get it, because I cannot make it any simpler. Anti-trust laws were created to restrict monopolies. Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is not. Therefore, Microsoft gets restricted, and Apple does not. If Apple had 90% of the market and Microsoft had 10%, we might be seeing the same thing in reverse...
Oh, one more thing: I strongly suspect that at least half this argument has nothing to do with unbundling IE, and is really about forcing IE to comply with the web standards they've been shitting on all these years. And this provides a neat counterpoint to above -- if Apple had 90% and MS had 10%, Apple still wouldn't be under as much fire, because Webkit actually follows standards. Wasn't it the first to pass ACID2?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It has been a LONG LONG time since you've checked then!
Fact is, 5.2.3 is the last version of MSIE released for MacOSX... and well, it doesn't work particularly well.
The lock-in argument works perfectly. Now, if you want to experience the web the way the majority of users do, you have to run Windows and MSIE 6 or 7. If you want to do business with the likes of ADP and several banks and others, you have to run Windows, MSIE and enable ActiveX! (Huge security problem if you didn't already know) Microsoft has enabled and encouraged developers to use their MSIE API as if it were the Win32 API which extends any vulnerability that MSIE has into any program that uses it. (This is where some, but certainly not all of the vendor lock-in comes from.)
Microsoft's intentional modification of web standards (you think they don't have the expertise in-house to follow standards?) has managed to twist the internet's primary uses into an almost exclusively Microsoft-centric experience. (If you didn't guess, I mean the WWW and Email as the primary uses of the internet.) Microsoft's dominance in the OS and Office arenas have been unfairly exploited to serve their interests in the expansion of their monopoly to the public internet. This serves to create problems for competitors past, present and future in the arena of the public internet. It serves to damage the standards and standards bodies that were created to ensure that competition exists while innovative and technological progress moves forward. It serves to unfairly discourage users from choosing alternative operating systems (by that I mean MacOS and Linux) when doing business or recreational activities. (And is it relevant to suggest that the existence of a Microsoft-monoculture has made possible the exploitation of the entire internet infrastructure as spammers and other assholes create botnets in global proportions... millions and BILLIONS of computers are compromised to serve their interests because the majority of machines are running identical software with identical weaknesses. With every famous worm and every bit of spyware and every bit of email-distributed attack software floating, evolving and plaguing the public internet, there is another clear indication of the mess that Microsoft's monopoly has created.)
The matter of this antitrust action being limited to the browser addresses only a part of the problem I describe above, but it is a very central part of the problem.
Ahh yes I love when people write revisionist history.
>It's not "free", because it's tied to an OS -- but it is bundled with that OS. That basically killed any chance Netscape had of selling a browser, because Microsoft uses their OS monopoly to effectively make IE "free", even though it isn't.
What killed Netscape is arrogance! I was in the business world, and my company (which happened to be a very very big bank) was shunned by Netscape. I am not kidding here. The bank wanted to license Netscape Navigator in 1996, and Netscape decided that the bank was not a big enough client (they only wanted to buy 4,000 licenses). Thus we were left hanging in the wind and mighty annoyed.
Next Netscape actually was the first company to support ActiveX in the form of Active Documents. I used it to illustrate how stocks could traded in 1996. Yes it was an undocumented feature, but it worked. I then asked the head honchos on when they would be extending this, and their reply was, "it is not going to be extended because it is Microsoft technology." Notice though how XPCOM is very much like COM?
Standards? I find it ironic that the EFF is going after Microsoft. Netscape in its heyday was notorious for ignoring the standards and creating their own. They would constantly add features and do-dads that would only work in the Netscape browser. I remember when frames and tables were added. It sent browsers like Mosaic into a tailspin.
So to rewrite history and say that IE won because Microsoft was a big bad monopoly is a pile horse hooy... Microsoft was massively behind and they won because Netscape blundered!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I always thought that MS being a monopoly made it a legal difference as well.
That's why Apple may do some things, while if MS did the same, that would be anti-competitive.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Microsoft is a part of the W3C.
That means they first make the standards, then when everybody else implements them, they decide not to comply.
Ignore this signature. By order.