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EDRI-gram
biweekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe
Number 3.6, 24 March 2005
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Information about EDRI and its members: http://www.edri.org/
============================================================ 4. EU rejects Microsoft's licence ============================================================
The European Commission has rejected Microsoft's proposal to comply with the EU anti-trust ruling. Microsoft needs to enable other software providers to interoperate with computers that run the Windows operating system. But the proposed Microsoft server interoperability licence contains a number of serious flaws including unjustifiably high royalty fees and the exclusion of open source vendors, according to the Commission.
In March 2004 Microsoft got a record fine of 497 million euro after a five-year investigation by the Competition Commissioner into Microsoft's business practice. According to the Commission's ruling Microsoft's illegal business practice has enabled it to acquire a dominant position in the market for work group server operating systems and has significantly weakened competition on the media player market. As a remedy the Commission ordered Microsoft to offer a version of Windows without bundled media player and to share more technical information with server rivals. Microsoft has paid the fine but is still negotiating with the Commission how to comply with the remedies after losing an attempt to suspend the sanctions at the EU Court of Justice.
Microsoft announced that it will offer a server interoperability licence that will give competitors access to server communication protocols. But the Commission has rejected the proposed license because open source vendors are excluded, the price of the license is too high and it requires competitors to take an all-in-one licence for different protocols.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) filed the original complaint with the commission that Microsoft's proposed licensing terms made it impossible for companies that write open source software to compete on a level playing field. The Microsoft licence allows free software projects like Samba to use the software interface information, but bans it from publishing the software as free software. "Obviously, while paying royalties is not impossible [..], with Free Software nobody knows exactly how many copies using a certain program are circulating, as free software is allowed to be copied as often as necessary, freely", says Stefano Maffulli, from the Italian FSFE.
The Commission is also critical of the quality of the stripped-down Windows version and has rejected Microsoft's proposal to limit the powers of a non-partisan trustee to monitor its compliance with EU-imposed sanctions.
Microsoft's draft licence, step by step (18.03.2005) http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,39191959,00.htm
Free Software Foundation Europe press release (11.02.2005) http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2005q1/000092.html
EU Court confirms Commission's decision against Microsoft (29.12.2004) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number2.25/microsoft