Groklaw Examines Microsoft's Promises

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Groklaw has examined that 'new leaf' Microsoft turned the other day. PJ has a lengthy analysis of Microsoft's latest promises. To make a long story short, the promises are more of the same stuff and don't help anyone but Microsoft. They only protect 'noncommercial' development and are set up to create a patented standards toll road so that Microsoft can charge competitors to compete. As PJ puts it, 'This is a promise to remain incompatible with the GPL, as far as I can make out.'"

Comments

And there was a collective sigh of "no shit."

[Reality Master 201]

It's what we in the biz call "a load of bullshit," and probably comes from the legal department (by way of marketing), who're possibly worried that the EU might do something to them.

Re:And there was a collective sigh of "no shit."

[filbranden]

I agree it would be better for me as a consumer if Microsoft went all-open, but what right do I have to force them to do it?

You forget that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and that they use dirty tactics against their competitors.

that's how our current capitalist/free market system works

And that's exactly one of the problems of the capitalist and free market system (I'm not trolling here! No economic system is perfect and others failed miserably much quicker than capitalism, but that's not my point). The problem here is that once a company becomes a monopoly, it has too much power in its hands. It has, for example, power enough to extinguish small competitors by artificially lowering prices until the competitor dies and then, with no one to compete, rise prices again.

Microsoft is a good example of a company that takes profit from the "loopholes" of capitalism. By using lock in to their proprietary formats and bundling IE and WMP in the OS, they've achieved to keep for a long time more than 90% of market share on a wide range of products, to force people to upgrade and pay them more money, and all that without innovating (if you really look at their products, you'll see that in the last 5 years they didn't introduce any new feature worth buying, mostly cosmetic changes only). All that just using dirty tactics by making sure no one could create programs compatible or interoperatable with theirs.

I do believe in a free market, but this market we have with Microsoft is anything but free. And I do think governments have the responsability to level the playing field here.

Why you think Microsoft ownes it to any of you to give away their computer code is beyond me.

The biggest issue here is why did we get into this situation. If Microsoft had used and promoted open standards since the begining, they wouldn't be in this situation today. They would have to compete in quality of their products, not based on the legacy that only they can access. Since they chose to do everything they could to avoid interoperability at all costs, being forced to do that now is the least I expect.

MS just don't get how the GPL works

[timmarhy]

I don't get how MS is so afraid of the GPL.

it only requires you provide the source code when you distribute your program. It doesn't mean you have to not charge for software or that software even be free. MS lose nothing if they say distributed win XP with source under the GPL, and it would certainly open up a whole new world of compatability for them that would result in tools that expand their market oppertunities.

it would at the same time prevent competitors taking that code and distributing a product without making the sources available themselfs, which would allow contribution of said sources into MS's own products.

Re:MS just don't get how the GPL works

[Chandon Seldon]

The GPL allows competition.

Microsoft's entire business model is to exploit the monopolies granted by copyright and patent law.

Re:We come in peace!

[filbranden]

In my opinion, there are very few times when a company's main goal isn't to help themselves.

The problem is not Microsoft wanting to profit and not wanting to help their competitors. The problem is they doing that while doing a big announcement that they want to help and interoperate, which is exactly what they did.

Re:Someone should make a horror movie.

[vux984]

More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."

Nobody is forcing them to make a change. They can run windows xp for as long as they like. People out there are still running windows 95.

Oh... you meant you want to force microsoft not to release a new edition while discontinuing their old ones? Tough shit. Might as well cry to ford that you don't want them to update their models every year. See how far you get with that.

Or perhaps you mean, Infoworld thinks if Microsoft sees enough demand for continued XP support they'll continue to support it, and that's what this stunt is all about. Of course its a nice theory. They're a company after all. They aren't going to leave a big pile of money on the table.

If MS thinks people WON'T buy Vista, and will migrate away from windows if they can't buy XP then they'll support XP.

But they aren't really in that predicament at all. Not many of these so-called respected IT people are going to switch to linux or OSX if they can't buy XP, switching to linux doesn't get their activeX/iis/active directory/whatever infrastrucure going seamlessly without any retraining or re-implementation, etc. Its not that they don't want vista, its that they don't want to change at all.

So they're fucked. They can bitch and throw a tantrum all they want, MS can move forward and they'll come kicking and screaming because they bought into an OS that they don't have any control over, and Vista is still the easiest upgrade path they have. They made their bed when they signed up for proprietary software. Microsoft has released how many versions of windows? And how many versions of DOS before that?? If they didn't think that sooner or later MS would drag them forward they haven't been paying attention.

Apple users went through the same thing when they switched from OS9 to OSX and from PPC to intel... its just that apple isn't 90+ percent of the business desktop operating system market so "Infoworld" and IT people in general never got up in arms over it.

OS9 -> OSX is a lot like XP to Vista... OSX ran like a DOG compared to OS9 on the same hardware, tons of incompatible software, missing drivers for tons of hardware, completely redone interface with a lot of controversial issues -- like the dock, unix and security added in... good thing OS9 was so different it had to be run completely virtualized because NOT a single OS9 program would have gotten off the ground in OSX. And then just a couple years later they switched to intel and OS9 was dead as a doornail, and couldn't even be virtualized.

That is the price of progress and the nature of vender lockin. I feel sorry for end users when they get caught with their pants down during a transition... but IT people? They should fucking know better and should have seen this coming miles away and planned for it.

Re:To make a long story short:

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Can we have equal time for complaints about Apple's use of patented power connectors?

Sure, just as soon as Apple is declared to have a monopoly on portable, digital music players, which is still an undecided matter by the courts. Also, didn't I read somewhere that Apple just licensed the use of an existing variant of USB from JAE? While it is patented, I don't think it is Apple's patent, so that is a bit different.

How about Sun's legal threats against people who innovate on top of Java in unauthorized fashion?

Why? What do they have a monopoly on?

Is there any party Microsoft has made a patent sharing agreement with to date that is not a net recipient?

I don't think you understand the issue most people have with Microsoft. It isn't that they don't license their patents. It is that they use proprietary technologies to disadvantage potential competitors, and that disadvantage is only possible because of their monopolies (which is illegal and undermines the capitalist free market).