Sadly, it is the bits behind the vest that are the problem for several British troops killed in places like Iraq each year because they hadn't been supplied with the right body armour or had been required to return it so other troops with greater perceived need could have it.
I'm no fan of the war in Iraq or the politicians behind it, but if we're going to send our boys and girls into a dangerous situation like that, you'd think giving them the best equipment available would be the least we could do. Hopefully with this being a home-grown invention, it might go some way to protecting them better.
I know it's inevitable and I want our troops protected, but its ironic how much this looks like the garb worn by the enforcer types in dozens of dystopia movies.
They're just fitting in with the modern trend. In the time I've lived here in Cambridge, the average police uniform has gone from the friendly, lots-of-white Police Service garb to the almost-all-black Police Force look of today. This has, of course, been happening in parallel with the systematic erosion of individual rights and increases in summary powers for the police, all with the backing of both our national government and, in some cases, our local councils. It would be sadly ironic if police officers became even more invulnerable^Wisolated due to an invention from our very own university.
More sensible countries have a clause in there that specifically prohibits commercial gain and everything else is fine. Which is as it should be.
You were making a decent case until that point, but this position is unrealistic. Taken to its logical conclusion, it still means that one person can buy a work at a knock-down price and then the whole world can have a copy while the original artist gets compensated only once. If the work were being sold on that basis, the original asking price would surely have been higher.
The same argument applies to the idea that copying is OK as long as it's only for personal friends. Apply the six degrees of separation principle, and you've just given the work to anyone in the entire world who wants it (and, in the Internet age, you could have done it within a matter of hours).
You're not wrong, but in the US, fair use it based on four relatively generic criteria, which basically come down to:
the nature of the use (e.g., whether it's commercial or non-profit)
the nature of the copyrighted work itself
how much of the original work is involved and how significant this part is relative to the whole thing
the effect on the market for the original.
Other jurisdictions have similar laws, but as far as I'm aware, the US has the most liberal in terms of allowing use of copyright material.
The fact that the material is potentially distributed to a wide audience here isn't the important thing, it's the contribution that makes to the four factors of fair use that matters. In the case of a screenshot in a game review, it's only a tiny part of the game, being used for critical purposes, and unlikely to be something people will use instead of the original. In the case of copying a whole song for a YouTube clip, even if it's just background music, none of those things necessarily applies.
Now, I haven't bothered downloading the video in this case, so I have no opinion on this specific instance of copying music, but in general the law seems to say that you can't just use music being in the background of something else as an excuse for copying and redistributing it. FWIW, in other countries there are central licensing organisations to deal with precisely this type of use (among others). People producing things like TV programmes have to deal with it all the time.
So Windows only downloaded and installed a program, _despite_ the users express wishes.
I think that's a harsh way of looking at it, FWIW. The only thing downloaded was an update to the automatic update software itself, which was necessary to check for other updates per the user's wishes. I think it was foolish of Microsoft not to treat that as an update in its own right and notify/consult the user accordingly, but it's not like they pushed out a disadvantageous update to Media Player, or IE, or indeed WDS. After all, how many users who have automatic checking for updates enabled really wouldn't have said yes when asked if they wanted to apply the patch to keep it working?
Which would be a fair point, if it were true. But in fact, the upgrade a few weeks back was to the auto-update mechanism, and was only installed if your auto-update mechanism was set to check for new updates (even if not to download or install them automatically). Now, you can argue that updating the update mechanism in order to check things is or isn't a significant update in its own right: clearly it changes things, so you at least have a case. But what you wrote is simply, objectively, factually incorrect.
That tingly feeling (no, the other one) is due to you being an end user and not an administrator and thus having absolutely no clue what the entire article is actually talking about. Nobody cares if the update is pushed down onto a home user's machine
Woah. Get over yourself, already. The comment I replied to, and indeed the thread title itself, implied that something was forced on people. In fact, this is not the case, for either the home market that you seem to think is irrelevant (I'm betting MS disagree with you) or the WSUS-enabled corporate network arena. The only time this thing is installed is if you have configured your update server to push something out automatically. Now, you can argue about the classification, and you can argue about changing the package scope, but I still have to ask why any professional sysadmin has their system configured to push out anything without explicit approval, or indeed leaves anything set that way once the major roll-out across the network has been done. Maybe you had a problem with this, but from the rest of the discussion here, plenty of sysadmins didn't, so I'm thinking you're just pissed because you screwed up somewhere or your office procedures suck.
Because you're a moron is why you think that. Microsoft pushed this out with the flag of "critical or security" update which means that even those companies who use WSUS or other MS auto-update packages to have more control got hit with this if they go with the setting of auto-install critical and security updates to desktops.
If large companies using WSUS have it set to auto-install anything across their entire network before it's checked by the sysadmins, then I'm not the moron here.
Yes, Microsoft's classification of this update is inappropriate. I haven't seen anyone disputing that. But that's a far cry from the FUD about forcing updates onto everyone's PCs. That doesn't happen for home users with vanilla automatic updates, and it doesn't happen for large networks using WSUS to push out updates centrally.
No, the real issue is that you shouldn't be forced to get an update you didn't consent to.
And I have to wonder what problem everyone else is having, because my PC duly popped up an automatic update notification for this earlier today, and I told it to go away and not come back, with no trouble and no observable adverse consequences.
Why do I get the feeling that this story is caused by a lot of people who don't know how to configure automatic updates properly, and a lot of FUD because of the PR cock-up a few weeks ago? You can argue about how they classified the update, but certainly nothing has been "forced" onto my PC today as a result of the update going out.
Don't act like XP is the fix for this. You have to go back to Win2K to tell Microsoft you don't want "Product Activation". All you folks touting XP as not having Vista's critical philosophical flaw of treating customers like criminals are really annoying the hell out of me. Microsoft has done this since XP hit the market, Vista is just even pushier about it.
In other words, Vista is worse than XP. It's also cheaper, and since I no longer have the legal option of buying Windows 2000, that makes XP the least of evils. I am well aware of the similarly dubious behaviour that XP has in terms of product activation, WGA, etc. But I'd rather that than Vista, and I'd rather Windows than Linux or Mac when the latter two don't run most of the software I want to run.
Neither will happen. [...] They are completely insulated from the consequences of their actions, know it, and act accordingly.
Sure they are. That's why they extended the support for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP by a large margin in response to pressure from big business and major hardware vendors like Dell. And that was several years ago, before some of those major businesses, governments, etc. started to regard both installing Linux and switching to Mac as credible alternatives.
Microsoft hasn't had enough weight to throw around in this business to get away with forced upgrades for several years now, and they know it. They'll market aggressively, but they're not stupid, and they'll supply what the market wants if it makes them more money.
It won't be long before XP will not be able to be activated. I don't know when that will be but at some point you and everyone else that chooses not to use a good copy (er...I mean pirated copy) of XP will have to go go Vista.
For the record, my PCs are 100% legal, and that includes my copies of Windows XP.
As for the activation thing: the first time they try that, I will file a formal complaint with the relevant minister in my government under my country's legal provisions for abusers of DRM-like technologies, and if that doesn't work, I will return the product to the vendor as unfit for purpose and require my money back. But I rather doubt Microsoft would let it come to this, because the bottom line is that they are making money on the new XP sales, and they are well aware that there are more alternatives than choosing Vista if they force people's hands, approximately none of which would make them any money.
I feel like I'm being accused of criminal activity from the first second I install a MS product now.
Likewise. This is why I refuse to install Vista on any new PC I'm putting together, or to accept the "upgrades" to things like Media Player that make them worse. I don't even have to jump to an alternative platform such as Linux or Mac, nor do I need to break the law and pirate something: I just buy XP instead. As long as people keep doing this, retailers will get the message and keep supplying it. When enough big retailers are losing out on profits because of Vista, they will make their feelings clear enough to Microsoft, and either the problem will go away or the Microsoft executives responsible will start going away.
This is not about what every business should do, or must do, its about how Microsoft must document interfaces to a piece of software considered a nearly required piece of equipment, Windows, on most computers.
It's not even about that. It's about whether Microsoft is using a monopoly in one market to gain an artificial advantage in another market.
If they do not have good interface documentation for internal use themselves, that non-existent documentation isn't providing a lot of advantage to them over their competitors, is it? Sure, it might be possible for someone within Microsoft to go read all the source code for the other areas they need to talk to, but I don't know how realistic that is, and unless you work/worked for Microsoft, I doubt you do either. Any court ruling about what Microsoft must do to restore fair competition in non-monopoly markets ought to take this into account.
Obviously if Microsoft do already have relevant documentation available internally that isn't public, they might reasonably be required to release it to others to restore equity, but in that case, clearly they can do so with minimal cost so they can't justifiably complain about that.
But you're right, everyone should be held accountable for their shortcomings when it comes to deviating from Open Systems standards, or using proprietary protocols instead of public ones.
The thing is, if they are a monopoly, and able to use their proprietary exceptions to create a barrier to entry for competitors (as well as groups who aren't in any sense competing with you) then they get held to a higher standard.
I respectfully disagree. There is nothing wrong in law with being successful enough to establish a monopoly in a formerly competitive market. Nor is there anything wrong with barriers to entry in that market; you will always have these to some extent whether intended or not.
The point of the competition law is that you may not use a monopoly you have in one market to gain an otherwise unjustified competitive advantage in another market. For example, if Microsoft has an effective monopoly in the desktop operating system market, then it is illegal for Microsoft to use that monopoly to force people to use only Microsoft software for their office suite, games, etc.
The major legal actions against Microsoft were because of things like bundling Media Player and Internet Explorer as effectively integrated parts of Windows. This gives them an unfair advantage when the media player and web browser markets would otherwise be more competitive, partly because everyone gets the Microsoft offering by default and partly because they are more tightly integrated into Windows, hence the rulings about producing a version of Windows with Media Player unbundled. That ruling was, of course, silly: it is unlikely that any consumer is going to voluntarily take a lesser-featured product rather than a fully-featured one for the same price. If the court wanted to rule along those lines, it should have required Microsoft to distribute Windows without including Media Player at all in any version, but allowing them to make Media Player available as a separate, independent product, if they wanted to (thus putting it on the same footing as QuickTime, Real Player, the OSS offerings, and any other potentially competitive products).
In other words, the legal/economic problem with Microsoft's proprietary interfaces and such is not that the Office file format isn't fully documented or that DRM'd Windows Media content is difficult to play using other media players, it's that it is unreasonably difficult for a competitor in the media player or internet browser markets to compete with Microsoft's established offerings as long as the backdoor Windows interfaces used by those established offerings are open to everyone equally.
The irony, of course, is that most of the court cases against Microsoft have been in technical/ethical grey areas: disk compression, web browsing, media playing, etc. All of these are areas where Microsoft can at least make a decent case that a modern operating system might reasonably be expected to provide the relevant services to applications, and their bundled apps are just thin front-ends sitting on top of the OS APIs. As long as anyone else's application has access to those same APIs and OS integration if they want them, it's far from clear that anti-bundling rulings are really in the interests of the consumer. Meanwhile, using lock-in file formats in their effective monopoly on office suites is making it more difficult for others to compete, which clearly has the potential to harm consumers in such a vital market, but as far as I know there's nothing actually illegal about that.
I don't really know much about it but it seems an "average" OSS project being nonprofit won't have the financial resources a business will have. MS has a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and a fraction of that should be enough to document all the APIs, system calls, or whatever.
Sure, but I don't think that's relevant here. Microsoft was on trial for abusing a monopoly position, not for being a successful profit-making business. The remedy is intended to allow others to compete fairly in markets where Microsoft does not have a monopoly. Given that AFAIK a legal precedent is set by rulings at this level, and that there is no guarantee that any future business that falls foul of the same monopoly rules will be anything like the size of Microsoft, I submit that it would be for the best if any such precedent does not rely on the immense wealth of the monopoly party.
I haven't heard anything about the source code being required, where did you see that?
The ruling doesn't say anything to that effect, but a silly number of responders to my original post in this thread seemed to think this was a reasonable thing to expect if Microsoft don't happen to have full documentation available.
Don't be silly. There are hundreds of thousands of projects in SourceForge alone where the documentation is bordering on non-existent. Plenty of the "released" projects don't even have serious user documentation, never mind docs for those who might want to interoperate. But they are mostly small, niche projects, so this doesn't matter much in practice.
Looking only at the big name OSS projects where interoperability really does matter, you either deliberately or inadvertently dropped the "comprehensive, correct" qualifiers I used. I doubt many here would support letting Microsoft off with producing a wiki and inviting everyone else to write the documentation for them.
In any case, this is all academic, because I wasn't arguing that no OSS application maintains decent documentation. I was just pointing out the absurdity of an argument that it might be illegal to distribute any OSS product that didn't provide just-so technical documentation for others even if the developers didn't need it internally themselves.
Not that I necessarily disagree with everything you wrote, but speaking as another software engineer, the value of code is vastly overrated.
Take a look at any mid-sized takeover in business. The execs at the buying company are all issuing press releases with a token mention about the great people at the bought company, followed by lots of glorifying the wonderous IP they now own. The reality is that for almost any established and non-trivial project, it's not the code itself that is valuable, it's the understanding that went into writing it and the experience that come out the other side. In other words, it's the people. If those people left, then legal issues aside, they could no doubt create a new code base that could do the same things, and in far less time and with better quality results thanks to learning from hindsight.
From the flip side, any developer who's started working at a new employer and been thrown into an existing project has probably experienced the steep learning curve that comes with it. How often do you really sit down and work out how something subtle works by reverse engineering the code, rather than just ask someone who already knows or consult some documentation if you're lucky enough to work on a project where the docs are decent?
I think this is amply demonstrated by the number of anecdotes that used to get posted on Slashdot, where some keen hobbyist tried to get into working on one of the big name OSS projects, and gave up in disgust because after a day of work they could barely even get it to build, and didn't even know where to start with finding their way around. I've noticed that there are fewer such posts these days. Determining whether this is because the big name OSS software has become simpler so people don't have problems any more, or it's become so big and complicated that most people don't even try, is left as an exercise for the reader.
But one thing is clear. While good interface documentation need not mean separate paper copies of words that describe what you think the code once did, and might just be a well documented interface in the source code, it is certainly not the entire code base. If that were true, the entire industry wouldn't rely on principles like separating interface from implementation and modular design.
As I said, if Microsoft finds it unreasonable to write this documentation because their internal developers don't have documentation, well then they could always just release the source code.
Yes, they could. But that is far more than competition law requires them to do, so they won't, and nor is any court going to require them to.
It's sad that so many people in this discussion are saying that Microsoft should just release the source code. Only a tiny proportion of the software world works like that, and the rest is under no obligation to join them. You shouldn't try to use poorly informed legal argument as a way to get more than you're entitled to.
I have never defended the 10,000 Euro price tag here. That's clearly an unjustified anti-competitive mechanism in its own right. But scrapping that wasn't what the post I challenged was arguing for.
Look, a common complaint about open source is crappy documentation. Yet somehow every day, new people join projects, fork projects, fix bugs or add features they need. They often do this little or no documentation and manage to figure it out mainly by reading the source code. It can be done, and it gets done every day.
Does it, really, on large projects? What proportion of people working on, say, OpenOffice or Firefox do you think are drop-in people who read up on a particular area just to fix a little bug, and what proportion of the contributors are basically full-time employees or otherwise in direct contact with the long-term contributors and therefore less dependent on either good documentation or understanding a massive code base without help?
In any case, this is rather a side track. The point is not whether working without such documentation is possible, it is whether it would be fair to expect someone just wanting to interoperate with an OSS application to study and understand a potentially huge code base just to achieve that goal. An alternative would be that anyone wanting to work on interoperability be entitled to have the OSS developers produce reasonably correct and comprehensive interface documentation for their use, even if such documentation is not used internally by the OSS folks themselves. That is effectively what the OP was claiming should be done to Microsoft here. If it's unreasonable to impose such a condition on the OSS people, because by your argument such documentation isn't necessary to the project's own contributors, then why is it reasonable to impose it on Microsoft just because they're the villain of the piece here?
Open Source software generally comes along with the interface document, the code itself.
I'm both surprised and disappointed that within a few minutes of my post, three people have all challenged it on this basis.
Just dumping the whole code base is in no way an acceptable substitute for providing good interface documentation. Sure, code should be self-documenting by using appropriate names in interfaces. Sure, designs should be clean and easy to understand. But the goal of this ruling is to facilitate interoperability in the spirit of the law. It is unreasonable to require people to scan through all the implementation code for something just to find out how the interface works and use it. That's not documenting the interface to aid interoperability, it's obfuscating it to make the effort required for compatibility prohibitive. So if the replies I'm getting are anything to go by, it sounds like a lot of work would be required for your average OSS project to comply with this ruling. If it's unfair to expect it of them, why is it fair to expect it of a business?
I'm no big fan of Microsoft in this case — read my first post to the discussion if you're in any doubt about that — but I do think that any penalty awarded by the courts has to be reasonable. You can't use a requirement that a monopoly allow interoperability as an excuse to get access to all their source code and trade secrets. That isn't fair, even on Microsoft, and it certainly wouldn't be fair on the many smaller companies in niche markets who might be subject to the same ruling once the precedent is set.
It's not that simple at all. Providing the complete interface spec completely free of charge imposes a huge (some might say unrealistic, even) burden on businesses. How would you feel if distribution were prohibited for every open source application that didn't provide and maintain comprehensive, correct documentation on all their interfaces and protocols? (If anyone is about to argue that open source is a moving target and such a prohibition could never work in practice, they're ducking the legal/ethical issue. If this is the case, then it's hardly fair to impose legal restrictions on businesses that not everyone is obliged to follow, since this artificially harms the ability of the businesses to do their work.)
Requiring a businesses with a monopoly advantage to provide access to such interface documentation as they have themselves internally, at no more than a reasonable charge to cover the legitimate costs of supplying that information, for the purposes of allowing interoperability, is one thing. Requiring them to provide complete specs, at no charge at all, to anyone who asks for any reason, is something else entirely.
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.
for a fixed-width font, which you're going to use to look at source code, logfiles, configuration files, and the like, it is critically important that all printable ASCII characters be clearly distinguishable visually
Indeed.
There are precious few such fonts that really look good: the three best ones that I know about are Andale Mono, Lucida Console, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
For what it's worth, I've tried all of the above for a reasonable length of time, and for me personally, Consolas is an improvement over any of them. This is based on using it at work for several months now, not on any of the background files connected with this Slashdot discussion: I haven't yet noticed anything that isn't clearly distinguished among the characters I use writing in various programming languages. YMMV, but from your comments, I'd certainly recommend trying it if you haven't already.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it is the bits behind the vest that are the problem for several British troops killed in places like Iraq each year because they hadn't been supplied with the right body armour or had been required to return it so other troops with greater perceived need could have it.
I'm no fan of the war in Iraq or the politicians behind it, but if we're going to send our boys and girls into a dangerous situation like that, you'd think giving them the best equipment available would be the least we could do. Hopefully with this being a home-grown invention, it might go some way to protecting them better.
I know it's inevitable and I want our troops protected, but its ironic how much this looks like the garb worn by the enforcer types in dozens of dystopia movies.
They're just fitting in with the modern trend. In the time I've lived here in Cambridge, the average police uniform has gone from the friendly, lots-of-white Police Service garb to the almost-all-black Police Force look of today. This has, of course, been happening in parallel with the systematic erosion of individual rights and increases in summary powers for the police, all with the backing of both our national government and, in some cases, our local councils. It would be sadly ironic if police officers became even more invulnerable^Wisolated due to an invention from our very own university.
More sensible countries have a clause in there that specifically prohibits commercial gain and everything else is fine. Which is as it should be.
You were making a decent case until that point, but this position is unrealistic. Taken to its logical conclusion, it still means that one person can buy a work at a knock-down price and then the whole world can have a copy while the original artist gets compensated only once. If the work were being sold on that basis, the original asking price would surely have been higher.
The same argument applies to the idea that copying is OK as long as it's only for personal friends. Apply the six degrees of separation principle, and you've just given the work to anyone in the entire world who wants it (and, in the Internet age, you could have done it within a matter of hours).
You're not wrong, but in the US, fair use it based on four relatively generic criteria, which basically come down to:
Other jurisdictions have similar laws, but as far as I'm aware, the US has the most liberal in terms of allowing use of copyright material.
The fact that the material is potentially distributed to a wide audience here isn't the important thing, it's the contribution that makes to the four factors of fair use that matters. In the case of a screenshot in a game review, it's only a tiny part of the game, being used for critical purposes, and unlikely to be something people will use instead of the original. In the case of copying a whole song for a YouTube clip, even if it's just background music, none of those things necessarily applies.
Now, I haven't bothered downloading the video in this case, so I have no opinion on this specific instance of copying music, but in general the law seems to say that you can't just use music being in the background of something else as an excuse for copying and redistributing it. FWIW, in other countries there are central licensing organisations to deal with precisely this type of use (among others). People producing things like TV programmes have to deal with it all the time.
So Windows only downloaded and installed a program, _despite_ the users express wishes.
I think that's a harsh way of looking at it, FWIW. The only thing downloaded was an update to the automatic update software itself, which was necessary to check for other updates per the user's wishes. I think it was foolish of Microsoft not to treat that as an update in its own right and notify/consult the user accordingly, but it's not like they pushed out a disadvantageous update to Media Player, or IE, or indeed WDS. After all, how many users who have automatic checking for updates enabled really wouldn't have said yes when asked if they wanted to apply the patch to keep it working?
Which would be a fair point, if it were true. But in fact, the upgrade a few weeks back was to the auto-update mechanism, and was only installed if your auto-update mechanism was set to check for new updates (even if not to download or install them automatically). Now, you can argue that updating the update mechanism in order to check things is or isn't a significant update in its own right: clearly it changes things, so you at least have a case. But what you wrote is simply, objectively, factually incorrect.
That tingly feeling (no, the other one) is due to you being an end user and not an administrator and thus having absolutely no clue what the entire article is actually talking about. Nobody cares if the update is pushed down onto a home user's machine
Woah. Get over yourself, already. The comment I replied to, and indeed the thread title itself, implied that something was forced on people. In fact, this is not the case, for either the home market that you seem to think is irrelevant (I'm betting MS disagree with you) or the WSUS-enabled corporate network arena. The only time this thing is installed is if you have configured your update server to push something out automatically. Now, you can argue about the classification, and you can argue about changing the package scope, but I still have to ask why any professional sysadmin has their system configured to push out anything without explicit approval, or indeed leaves anything set that way once the major roll-out across the network has been done. Maybe you had a problem with this, but from the rest of the discussion here, plenty of sysadmins didn't, so I'm thinking you're just pissed because you screwed up somewhere or your office procedures suck.
Because you're a moron is why you think that. Microsoft pushed this out with the flag of "critical or security" update which means that even those companies who use WSUS or other MS auto-update packages to have more control got hit with this if they go with the setting of auto-install critical and security updates to desktops.
If large companies using WSUS have it set to auto-install anything across their entire network before it's checked by the sysadmins, then I'm not the moron here.
Yes, Microsoft's classification of this update is inappropriate. I haven't seen anyone disputing that. But that's a far cry from the FUD about forcing updates onto everyone's PCs. That doesn't happen for home users with vanilla automatic updates, and it doesn't happen for large networks using WSUS to push out updates centrally.
No, the real issue is that you shouldn't be forced to get an update you didn't consent to.
And I have to wonder what problem everyone else is having, because my PC duly popped up an automatic update notification for this earlier today, and I told it to go away and not come back, with no trouble and no observable adverse consequences.
Why do I get the feeling that this story is caused by a lot of people who don't know how to configure automatic updates properly, and a lot of FUD because of the PR cock-up a few weeks ago? You can argue about how they classified the update, but certainly nothing has been "forced" onto my PC today as a result of the update going out.
Don't act like XP is the fix for this. You have to go back to Win2K to tell Microsoft you don't want "Product Activation". All you folks touting XP as not having Vista's critical philosophical flaw of treating customers like criminals are really annoying the hell out of me. Microsoft has done this since XP hit the market, Vista is just even pushier about it.
In other words, Vista is worse than XP. It's also cheaper, and since I no longer have the legal option of buying Windows 2000, that makes XP the least of evils. I am well aware of the similarly dubious behaviour that XP has in terms of product activation, WGA, etc. But I'd rather that than Vista, and I'd rather Windows than Linux or Mac when the latter two don't run most of the software I want to run.
Neither will happen. [...] They are completely insulated from the consequences of their actions, know it, and act accordingly.
Sure they are. That's why they extended the support for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP by a large margin in response to pressure from big business and major hardware vendors like Dell. And that was several years ago, before some of those major businesses, governments, etc. started to regard both installing Linux and switching to Mac as credible alternatives.
Microsoft hasn't had enough weight to throw around in this business to get away with forced upgrades for several years now, and they know it. They'll market aggressively, but they're not stupid, and they'll supply what the market wants if it makes them more money.
It won't be long before XP will not be able to be activated. I don't know when that will be but at some point you and everyone else that chooses not to use a good copy (er...I mean pirated copy) of XP will have to go go Vista.
For the record, my PCs are 100% legal, and that includes my copies of Windows XP.
As for the activation thing: the first time they try that, I will file a formal complaint with the relevant minister in my government under my country's legal provisions for abusers of DRM-like technologies, and if that doesn't work, I will return the product to the vendor as unfit for purpose and require my money back. But I rather doubt Microsoft would let it come to this, because the bottom line is that they are making money on the new XP sales, and they are well aware that there are more alternatives than choosing Vista if they force people's hands, approximately none of which would make them any money.
I feel like I'm being accused of criminal activity from the first second I install a MS product now.
Likewise. This is why I refuse to install Vista on any new PC I'm putting together, or to accept the "upgrades" to things like Media Player that make them worse. I don't even have to jump to an alternative platform such as Linux or Mac, nor do I need to break the law and pirate something: I just buy XP instead. As long as people keep doing this, retailers will get the message and keep supplying it. When enough big retailers are losing out on profits because of Vista, they will make their feelings clear enough to Microsoft, and either the problem will go away or the Microsoft executives responsible will start going away.
This is not about what every business should do, or must do, its about how Microsoft must document interfaces to a piece of software considered a nearly required piece of equipment, Windows, on most computers.
It's not even about that. It's about whether Microsoft is using a monopoly in one market to gain an artificial advantage in another market.
If they do not have good interface documentation for internal use themselves, that non-existent documentation isn't providing a lot of advantage to them over their competitors, is it? Sure, it might be possible for someone within Microsoft to go read all the source code for the other areas they need to talk to, but I don't know how realistic that is, and unless you work/worked for Microsoft, I doubt you do either. Any court ruling about what Microsoft must do to restore fair competition in non-monopoly markets ought to take this into account.
Obviously if Microsoft do already have relevant documentation available internally that isn't public, they might reasonably be required to release it to others to restore equity, but in that case, clearly they can do so with minimal cost so they can't justifiably complain about that.
But you're right, everyone should be held accountable for their shortcomings when it comes to deviating from Open Systems standards, or using proprietary protocols instead of public ones.
The thing is, if they are a monopoly, and able to use their proprietary exceptions to create a barrier to entry for competitors (as well as groups who aren't in any sense competing with you) then they get held to a higher standard.
I respectfully disagree. There is nothing wrong in law with being successful enough to establish a monopoly in a formerly competitive market. Nor is there anything wrong with barriers to entry in that market; you will always have these to some extent whether intended or not.
The point of the competition law is that you may not use a monopoly you have in one market to gain an otherwise unjustified competitive advantage in another market. For example, if Microsoft has an effective monopoly in the desktop operating system market, then it is illegal for Microsoft to use that monopoly to force people to use only Microsoft software for their office suite, games, etc.
The major legal actions against Microsoft were because of things like bundling Media Player and Internet Explorer as effectively integrated parts of Windows. This gives them an unfair advantage when the media player and web browser markets would otherwise be more competitive, partly because everyone gets the Microsoft offering by default and partly because they are more tightly integrated into Windows, hence the rulings about producing a version of Windows with Media Player unbundled. That ruling was, of course, silly: it is unlikely that any consumer is going to voluntarily take a lesser-featured product rather than a fully-featured one for the same price. If the court wanted to rule along those lines, it should have required Microsoft to distribute Windows without including Media Player at all in any version, but allowing them to make Media Player available as a separate, independent product, if they wanted to (thus putting it on the same footing as QuickTime, Real Player, the OSS offerings, and any other potentially competitive products).
In other words, the legal/economic problem with Microsoft's proprietary interfaces and such is not that the Office file format isn't fully documented or that DRM'd Windows Media content is difficult to play using other media players, it's that it is unreasonably difficult for a competitor in the media player or internet browser markets to compete with Microsoft's established offerings as long as the backdoor Windows interfaces used by those established offerings are open to everyone equally.
The irony, of course, is that most of the court cases against Microsoft have been in technical/ethical grey areas: disk compression, web browsing, media playing, etc. All of these are areas where Microsoft can at least make a decent case that a modern operating system might reasonably be expected to provide the relevant services to applications, and their bundled apps are just thin front-ends sitting on top of the OS APIs. As long as anyone else's application has access to those same APIs and OS integration if they want them, it's far from clear that anti-bundling rulings are really in the interests of the consumer. Meanwhile, using lock-in file formats in their effective monopoly on office suites is making it more difficult for others to compete, which clearly has the potential to harm consumers in such a vital market, but as far as I know there's nothing actually illegal about that.
I don't really know much about it but it seems an "average" OSS project being nonprofit won't have the financial resources a business will have. MS has a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and a fraction of that should be enough to document all the APIs, system calls, or whatever.
Sure, but I don't think that's relevant here. Microsoft was on trial for abusing a monopoly position, not for being a successful profit-making business. The remedy is intended to allow others to compete fairly in markets where Microsoft does not have a monopoly. Given that AFAIK a legal precedent is set by rulings at this level, and that there is no guarantee that any future business that falls foul of the same monopoly rules will be anything like the size of Microsoft, I submit that it would be for the best if any such precedent does not rely on the immense wealth of the monopoly party.
I haven't heard anything about the source code being required, where did you see that?
The ruling doesn't say anything to that effect, but a silly number of responders to my original post in this thread seemed to think this was a reasonable thing to expect if Microsoft don't happen to have full documentation available.
Don't be silly. There are hundreds of thousands of projects in SourceForge alone where the documentation is bordering on non-existent. Plenty of the "released" projects don't even have serious user documentation, never mind docs for those who might want to interoperate. But they are mostly small, niche projects, so this doesn't matter much in practice.
Looking only at the big name OSS projects where interoperability really does matter, you either deliberately or inadvertently dropped the "comprehensive, correct" qualifiers I used. I doubt many here would support letting Microsoft off with producing a wiki and inviting everyone else to write the documentation for them.
In any case, this is all academic, because I wasn't arguing that no OSS application maintains decent documentation. I was just pointing out the absurdity of an argument that it might be illegal to distribute any OSS product that didn't provide just-so technical documentation for others even if the developers didn't need it internally themselves.
Not that I necessarily disagree with everything you wrote, but speaking as another software engineer, the value of code is vastly overrated.
Take a look at any mid-sized takeover in business. The execs at the buying company are all issuing press releases with a token mention about the great people at the bought company, followed by lots of glorifying the wonderous IP they now own. The reality is that for almost any established and non-trivial project, it's not the code itself that is valuable, it's the understanding that went into writing it and the experience that come out the other side. In other words, it's the people. If those people left, then legal issues aside, they could no doubt create a new code base that could do the same things, and in far less time and with better quality results thanks to learning from hindsight.
From the flip side, any developer who's started working at a new employer and been thrown into an existing project has probably experienced the steep learning curve that comes with it. How often do you really sit down and work out how something subtle works by reverse engineering the code, rather than just ask someone who already knows or consult some documentation if you're lucky enough to work on a project where the docs are decent?
I think this is amply demonstrated by the number of anecdotes that used to get posted on Slashdot, where some keen hobbyist tried to get into working on one of the big name OSS projects, and gave up in disgust because after a day of work they could barely even get it to build, and didn't even know where to start with finding their way around. I've noticed that there are fewer such posts these days. Determining whether this is because the big name OSS software has become simpler so people don't have problems any more, or it's become so big and complicated that most people don't even try, is left as an exercise for the reader.
But one thing is clear. While good interface documentation need not mean separate paper copies of words that describe what you think the code once did, and might just be a well documented interface in the source code, it is certainly not the entire code base. If that were true, the entire industry wouldn't rely on principles like separating interface from implementation and modular design.
As I said, if Microsoft finds it unreasonable to write this documentation because their internal developers don't have documentation, well then they could always just release the source code.
Yes, they could. But that is far more than competition law requires them to do, so they won't, and nor is any court going to require them to.
It's sad that so many people in this discussion are saying that Microsoft should just release the source code. Only a tiny proportion of the software world works like that, and the rest is under no obligation to join them. You shouldn't try to use poorly informed legal argument as a way to get more than you're entitled to.
I have never defended the 10,000 Euro price tag here. That's clearly an unjustified anti-competitive mechanism in its own right. But scrapping that wasn't what the post I challenged was arguing for.
Look, a common complaint about open source is crappy documentation. Yet somehow every day, new people join projects, fork projects, fix bugs or add features they need. They often do this little or no documentation and manage to figure it out mainly by reading the source code. It can be done, and it gets done every day.
Does it, really, on large projects? What proportion of people working on, say, OpenOffice or Firefox do you think are drop-in people who read up on a particular area just to fix a little bug, and what proportion of the contributors are basically full-time employees or otherwise in direct contact with the long-term contributors and therefore less dependent on either good documentation or understanding a massive code base without help?
In any case, this is rather a side track. The point is not whether working without such documentation is possible, it is whether it would be fair to expect someone just wanting to interoperate with an OSS application to study and understand a potentially huge code base just to achieve that goal. An alternative would be that anyone wanting to work on interoperability be entitled to have the OSS developers produce reasonably correct and comprehensive interface documentation for their use, even if such documentation is not used internally by the OSS folks themselves. That is effectively what the OP was claiming should be done to Microsoft here. If it's unreasonable to impose such a condition on the OSS people, because by your argument such documentation isn't necessary to the project's own contributors, then why is it reasonable to impose it on Microsoft just because they're the villain of the piece here?
Open Source software generally comes along with the interface document, the code itself.
I'm both surprised and disappointed that within a few minutes of my post, three people have all challenged it on this basis.
Just dumping the whole code base is in no way an acceptable substitute for providing good interface documentation. Sure, code should be self-documenting by using appropriate names in interfaces. Sure, designs should be clean and easy to understand. But the goal of this ruling is to facilitate interoperability in the spirit of the law. It is unreasonable to require people to scan through all the implementation code for something just to find out how the interface works and use it. That's not documenting the interface to aid interoperability, it's obfuscating it to make the effort required for compatibility prohibitive. So if the replies I'm getting are anything to go by, it sounds like a lot of work would be required for your average OSS project to comply with this ruling. If it's unfair to expect it of them, why is it fair to expect it of a business?
I'm no big fan of Microsoft in this case — read my first post to the discussion if you're in any doubt about that — but I do think that any penalty awarded by the courts has to be reasonable. You can't use a requirement that a monopoly allow interoperability as an excuse to get access to all their source code and trade secrets. That isn't fair, even on Microsoft, and it certainly wouldn't be fair on the many smaller companies in niche markets who might be subject to the same ruling once the precedent is set.
It's not that simple at all. Providing the complete interface spec completely free of charge imposes a huge (some might say unrealistic, even) burden on businesses. How would you feel if distribution were prohibited for every open source application that didn't provide and maintain comprehensive, correct documentation on all their interfaces and protocols? (If anyone is about to argue that open source is a moving target and such a prohibition could never work in practice, they're ducking the legal/ethical issue. If this is the case, then it's hardly fair to impose legal restrictions on businesses that not everyone is obliged to follow, since this artificially harms the ability of the businesses to do their work.)
Requiring a businesses with a monopoly advantage to provide access to such interface documentation as they have themselves internally, at no more than a reasonable charge to cover the legitimate costs of supplying that information, for the purposes of allowing interoperability, is one thing. Requiring them to provide complete specs, at no charge at all, to anyone who asks for any reason, is something else entirely.
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.
for a fixed-width font, which you're going to use to look at source code, logfiles, configuration files, and the like, it is critically important that all printable ASCII characters be clearly distinguishable visually
Indeed.
There are precious few such fonts that really look good: the three best ones that I know about are Andale Mono, Lucida Console, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
For what it's worth, I've tried all of the above for a reasonable length of time, and for me personally, Consolas is an improvement over any of them. This is based on using it at work for several months now, not on any of the background files connected with this Slashdot discussion: I haven't yet noticed anything that isn't clearly distinguished among the characters I use writing in various programming languages. YMMV, but from your comments, I'd certainly recommend trying it if you haven't already.