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

Re:Confused..

[calebt3]

but they're not blatantly stopping any installation of alternative browsers Not at the consumer level, no. Although their EULA is worded in such a way that I am sure that they would be legally capable of making that decision if they wanted to. Also, (IIRC) MS punished Dell for trying to install Firefox on their machines.

Re:No surprise here

[SanityInAnarchy]

The difference is that if you don't like Safari in Mac OS X, you drag it to the trash. If you don't like Internet Explorer in Windows... well, tough.

I'm curious... Does removing Safari also remove Webkit? And if so, does it break other OS X apps?

If removing Safari does not remove Webkit, then they're really not much better than MS in that respect. If you don't like IE on Windows, you can, in fact, prevent it from being used for just about anything except as an HTML engine for other things -- and even that can be replaced with Gecko, though people generally only bother to do it under Wine.

The issue here isn't that Microsoft has a monopoly, it's that they abuse that monopoly by strong-arming hardware manufacturers into bundling Windows (and IE) on every PC sold.

I realize it's different because MS is a monopoly, but Apple does exactly the same thing -- only worse. They control both the hardware and software, and God help you if you should try selling a Mac clone that can run OS X. And that was on PowerPC.

If you buy a PC, you're FORCED to purchase Windows and IE.

No longer the case. For instance, you could buy a Mac -- yes, they ARE PCs now, amusing ads notwithstanding. Or you can buy a computer with Linux preloaded -- off the top of my head, Dell and Asus are doing this.

The only way this is true is if you define a PC as an x86-compatible machine running Windows, which makes your point moot -- if you buy a Windows machine, of course you're forced to run Windows, because, guess what, you're buying a Windows machine!

Windows is simply the platform of people who don't know any better. It's the AOL of operating systems.

No, it's worse. It's the platform of people who can't use better.

I have to use Windows at work. Specifically, I have to use Windows XP Professional, since one of the programs I rely on will only run on Windows XP -- not 2K, not Vista. (Oh, and it needs Windows Media Player 10. Not 9, not 11.)

I could install Linux, and I have, but I can't use it during work. I can't get virtualization working properly at the moment, so I can't run Windows in a virtual machine. And this software does NOT work on Wine.

I suppose I could buy a Mac, but what would be the point? The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is Apple products look shinier and work out of the box more often.

I don't wanna hear the tired argument that Apple should be forced to remove Mac OS X from their Macintosh computers. If Microsoft manufactured computers, I would expect them to be have Windows preinstalled.

Except that if Microsoft manufactured PCs, you almost certainly could still install Windows on other PCs. That is the very thing that made Windows a disruptive technology -- the deal that they got from IBM which allowed Windows to run on IBM clones.

Apple does not allow OS X to run on anything but a Mac, and does not allow Macs to come without OS X. So, it is absolutely one huge package, and it is exactly the kind of thing that would get you worked into a froth if Microsoft did something half as bad. The only difference is, Apple is a minority, and people actually want to use Apple products, whereas people are most often forced to use MS products -- but that is not a legal difference.

Re:ho ho ho!

[tristian_was_here]

There should be a "-5 Knob head" that I could use to rat this parent post.