Hi all,
On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:16:14 +0100 Rui Miguel Silva Seabra rms@1407.org wrote:
rmss> I read the events as Neelie Kroes having sold herself out.
While there are groups and people putting out that message, it isn't exactly helpful or necessarily true. I would recommend
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007102408501134
and in particular
http://walkingwithelephants.blogspot.com/2007/10/half-loaf.html
for further reading, which analyses the situation pretty well.
The patent provisions are obviously insufficient for Free Software, and thus Samba. So one might be tempted to say that the Commission has allowed Microsoft to impose terms that are sufficient only for those who are long extinct, or those who don't compete commercially. Having informed the Commission about the inadequacy of those terms, we could also maintain they could not claim ignorance.
But that would be missing the overall picture. The information will be made available now, and there should be no problems in the Copyright and trade secret fields, at least.
So the last item we need to figure out is how to solve the patent issue, which is non-trivial simply because software patents exist, and any executive will treat granted patents as valid patents until successfully invalidated or until the legislative body changes the situation.
The road to competition and interoperability remains abolition of patents on software. While many of us had hoped DG Competition might be more helpful in this by pointing out the obvious flaw of software patents bringing about a situation where interoperability information cannot be used by the actual competitors. This did not happen.
So ultimately this was a step in the right direction, but more work remains to be done.
Regards, Georg