[Sussex] Europe is finaly going to fine M$

[Steven Dobson]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 00:24 +0100, John Crowhurst wrote:
> On Tue, June 27, 2006 12:59, Andrew Guard wrote:
> > At long last Europe is going to enforce there E2 a day fine!
> >
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5120536.stm
> 
> I wish they were looking into more of the anti-competitive measures
> Microsoft have been spinning and set the fine to a much better Euro$20M a
> day. Euro$2M is a gnat's bite to such a company.

But from the BBC article Microsoft is having to comply with the ruling
in full.  They are now complaining that producing all that documentation
means that they have to give away "trade secrets".

I believe that is a principle of the law that you are not allowed to
profit from illegal activities.  If Microsoft has used it's trade
secrets to gain it's monopoly position, then it should not expect to
hang on to them.

I recall that Microsoft a while back started to release source under the
pretext that "source code offers the best documenation of what the code
does".  This was rejected by the EU.  Microsoft had placed some kind of
anti-FLOSS license around their source code stopping FLOSS projects from
use it.  I don't think you can (or that the EU would allow) that kind of
restriction around documentation.  If you look at the SCO v IBM case the
publication of books about the internals of the Unix kernel is just one
of the defences IBM is using.  While the text clearly remains under
copyright, the ideas, methods and concepts a book discusses are placed
in the Public Domain.

The Samba project was closly involved in Microsoft's anti-trust case and
will benefit greatly from the technical details of the SMB protocol
Microsoft will now have to published.  It will make is much, much easier
to develop software that works with Window's servers and workstations.
This is the real fine in my eyes.  This is what I believe will hurt
Microsoft the most.

Steve