Microsoft has filed a new lawsuit against the European Commission, the latest move in its long-running battle against antitrust sanctions imposed by the Commission for abuse of its dominant Windows software. The lawsuit before the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg is to clear up whether some Microsoft software protocols or computer rules of the road should be made public or be kept secret as intellectual property.
The issue arises out of a March, 2004, decision by the European Commission finding Microsoft abused dominance of the Windows operating system so it could damage rival makers of work-group servers and rival makers of media players.Microsoft paid a 497 million-euro fine and issued remedies on the two issues, but nearly 1-1/2 years later those sanctions have yet to bite. The lawsuit, filed on August 10 but which only became public on Wednesday, deals only with an aspect of the work-group servers issue. The biggest makers of rival server software are "open source" providers who, like Microsoft, make server software that runs printing, filing and security tasks for small office groups. They make public the source codes for their products.
News source: Reuters
The issue arises out of a March, 2004, decision by the European Commission finding Microsoft abused dominance of the Windows operating system so it could damage rival makers of work-group servers and rival makers of media players.Microsoft paid a 497 million-euro fine and issued remedies on the two issues, but nearly 1-1/2 years later those sanctions have yet to bite. The lawsuit, filed on August 10 but which only became public on Wednesday, deals only with an aspect of the work-group servers issue. The biggest makers of rival server software are "open source" providers who, like Microsoft, make server software that runs printing, filing and security tasks for small office groups. They make public the source codes for their products.
News source: Reuters
News story updated and re-sourced to the author.
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Steven Parker @ 15:44 CET
Last edited by 33280 on 08 Sep 2005 - 14:36
You know as far as I remember, the European Comission is one of the few groups out there willing to take on Microsoft.
Sure, to a lot of people it may seem petty, stupid and even thuggish, but they do make the odd valid point.
For example, with regards to the media player thing, imagine if Microsoft DID muscle out the competition, imagine if things like winamp, quicktime and so on ceased to exist, then what?
The same thing nearly happened in the browser market, that's why IE has 90%+ of the market and look what Microsoft did there - they used thier own web standards which makes it more difficult to code a fully working webiste and it makes it harder for competitors to make a browser that will display websites as they are intended. Imagine if microsoft did that in the music world, you could kiss goodbye to your iPod right away for a start.
I know this particular case isn't related to the media player case, but I thought I'd at least point this out about the European Comission.
No back on topic: I real hope MSFT loses this suit...One of the things I dislike about them is the way they want to rule the market in every place... That's so bad to the end-user
The proof is in the pudding - the "N" version of XP is dead in the water, with major EU OEMs not wanting to touch it.
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