Microsoft signs first EU protocol licensee
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Quest Software plans to use Microsoft's User and Group Administration protocol set in products for Active Directory administration and data recovery, among others.
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Microsoft decides to comply with EU's 2004 order to share Windows interoperability data and stop bundling its media player.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's defeat in a European appeals courtÂ Monday has left open-source developers hopeful about the future although still dissatisfied with the company's compliance with a 3-year-old antitrust ruling. The European Commission ordered Microsoft to license its workgroup server communications protocols to rivals in March 2004, aiming to make it easier for those companies to develop and sell enterprise software interoperating -- and competing -- with Microsoft's own products. So far, though, there have been few takers for the licenses Microsoft now proposes under its WSPP (Workgroup Server Protocol Program) -- and the licenses have proved useless to open-source developers. "It's been an abject failure in restoring competition," said Jeremy Allison, co-creator of the open-source workgroup file and print server software Samba. The Commission's ruling, against which Microsoft appealed in June 2004, came at the conclusion of a broader antitrust investigation in which the Commission found Microsoft had used its dominance in desktop operating systems to influence the markets for media players and workgroup server operating systems. Microsoft complied rapidly with other aspects of the ruling, paying a fine of â¬497 million (then $600 million) and appointing an independent monitoring trustee to oversee its compliance, but it dragged its heels on the protocols. Microsoft asked for clarification upon clarification of what the Commission wanted it to do, prompting the independent monitoring trustee appointed by the Commission to declare that the information Microsoft had provided by December 2005 was "useless." In July 2006, frustrated by the delays, the Commission fined Microsoft a further â¬280.5 million for failing to provide technical details of the communications protocols in a timely manner. Now that the European Court of First Instance has rejected Microsoft's appeal, the company must live with the WSPP, as it has lived for some years with a similar licensing plan, the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program), set up following a U.S. Department of Justice ruling in another antitrust case. MCPP has its supporters: "It allowed us to innovate our products in ways we would not have been able to," said Michael Tennefoss, head of strategic marketing at Aruba Networks, adding that Microsoft's thorough documentation allowed the company to complete product development quickly. MCPP is essential to development efforts at Secure Computing, vice president of product management Scott Montgomery said. It has saved the company the expense of reverse-engineering the protocols used by Microsoft's server products to determine how to interoperate with them. Quantifying the cost of that reverse-engineering effort was difficult, said Montgomery, "But it would always come up orders of magnitude greater than the cost of buying the kit." However, he regretted that "Microsoft had to have a gun put to its head before it would disclose this information." Allison is skeptical of the innovation that MCPP's supporters say it enables: No one is using it to create products that compete head-on with core Microsoft technologies, such as Active Directory Domain Controllers, he said. The Samba project's developers can't benefit from either MCPP or its European counterpart WSPP because the licensing terms Microsoft imposes are incompatible with the way open-source and free software projects distribute their software, Allison said. Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of French open-source ERP vendor Nexedi, is pleased that the court has reaffirmed the Commission's ruling but fears that Microsoft will keep finding ways to make it difficult for companies like his to make use of information about its protocols. For Allison, though, the court's decision presents a fresh opportunity to influence the WSPP licenses and level the playing field. "We are going to be pushing very strongly for licenses compatible with open-source projects," he said. (With additional reporting by James Niccolai in Paris and Paul Meller in Brussels.)
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International. ECMA's General Assembly voted by 20-1 in favor of the standard at a meeting in Zurich on Thursday afternoon, and will now submit the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for its approval. The vote against came from a representative of IBM Corp. A standardized document format will make it easier for competing software companies to develop products that can interoperate with one another and to edit the same documents. Products meeting the standard could find favor with governments, or other organizations concerned about interoperability. Interoperability is vital for the preservation of archive information, according to Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at ECMA. The British Library archives electronic documents, but must deal with whatever format they arrive in. The development of interoperable software tools will make that work easier. "The level of precision in this standard is unprecedented," Farquhar said. The standard runs to several thousand pages. To help developers digest the standard, the committee has published a 14-page white paper explaining it. "The committee put a lot of effort into making the document accessible," Farquhar said. That accessibility is important if Microsoft is to win developers over to its document format, as the company faces competition in the standards industry just as it does in the software market. A rival document format,Â OpenDocument Format (ODF), has already won approval from ISO, and was published as an ISO standard last month. ODF is used by office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, and has gained the support of other companies, including IBM. Government officials in France and the U.S. commonwealth of Massachusetts have recommended adoption of ODF as a government standard. ISO approval "is a critical factor for governments," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance, a body that promotes the OpenDocument Format. Microsoft's general manager for interoperability and XML (Extensible Markup Language) architecture, Jean Paoli, agrees that "some public institutions prefer standards that are ISO-certified." There are still several hurdles to overcome before Microsoft can obtain ISO approval. ECMA has asked that the standard be fast-tracked, a process to which national standards bodies now have about 30 days to object. If no one objects, then ISO Subcommittee 34 will spend five or six months examining comments on the standard received from the national standards bodies, and only then will the ISO's Joint Technical Committee 1 vote on the standard.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates signed an agreement Friday with a Spanish association for the blind to develop better software for people with visual impairments.
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Developers of Samba, an open-source version of the file-and-print software used by Windows, will be able to legally incorporate Windows protocols.
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Microsoft said it had signed its first agreement to license its technology, almost three years after European Union antitrust regulators ordered the software company to share data to increase competition. Microsoft said the deal, with Quest Software of California, was meant to comply with an antitrust order issued in March 2004 that demanded licensing of software that helps desktop computers communicate with servers. But the deal was met with skepticism from adversaries, who questioned how a company with a longstanding relationship with Microsoft could be considered a rival. The European Commission threatened Microsoft last week with fines as high as 3 million euros ($3.9 million) a day for failing to comply with the order.
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Microsoft is ready to comply with demands that it alters its Windows software in line with the ruling from the European Commission.
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As part of a European antitrust settlement, Microsoft will supply Windows protocol documentation to developers of the open-source software.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has clarified how licensing for its current version of Windows Server works when paired with virtualization software. However, customers may face a whole new set of licensing rules once the next version, Windows Server 2008, is released later this year. In a white paper called "Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 to Run with Virtualization Technologies," Microsoft outlines clearly how to license the current version of Windows Server -- Windows Server 2003 R2 -- for specific third-party virtualization technology, including VMware ESX, VMware Vmotion and SWsoft Virtuozzo. It also explains licensing for Microsoft's own System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The document can be found on a Web page that also includes previously released virtualization calculators that help customers determine the cost of Windows Server licensing in various virtualization scenarios. Virtualization has complicated server OS pricing because it allows more than one instance of server software to run on a single server, while traditional OS pricing has been per server, assuming that only one version of an OS can run on one piece of hardware. Virtualization allows software to be emulated via a virtual machine, and so run without having to be physically installed. But even if Microsoft has done enough to clarify how its current version of Windows Server should be licensed for virtualization scenarios, customers could find themselves needing new guidelines once Windows Server 2008 is released, something Microsoft expects to do by the end of the year. Formerly code-named Longhorn, the next version of Windows Server will have virtualization technology built in, which could preclude the need for third-party virtualization software. "We believe most customers will choose to use Windows Server virtualization, which comes as a role within Windows Server 2008," said Microsoft spokesman Patrick O'Rourke. "But customers still have the option to use third-party server virtualization software on Windows Server 2008." Pricing for Windows Server 2008 has not yet been announced. According to the Microsoft white paper, current virtualization pricing for Windows Server 2003 R2 is as follows: Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition (SE) allows a customer to run only one instance of the software in either a physical or virtual way on a server. Users need to assign an SE license for each running instance of Windows Server on a system. Customers have more flexibility with the enterprise and datacenter editions of Windows Server 2003, however. They can run one physical instance of Windows Server and up to four simultaneous virtual instances with one Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, and can run unlimited physical or virtual versions of the software when Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition is licensed for every physical processor in a server Windows Server 2008 is currently available in a beta 3 version.
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Microsoft has made its position crystal clear regarding the new version of the GPL, saying that none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as &quot;accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license.&quot;
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Corporate licences make for happy software vendors
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Microsoft has made substantial concessions to the European Commission, finally bringing the company into compliance with a&#160;2004 antitrust ruling, the Commission said Monday.
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Microsoft says it will comply with sanctions imposed by the European Commission and upheld by the Court of First Instance. The EU says the software company must offer an unbundled version of Windows without Windows Media Player.
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Microsoft Corp  ended three  years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with  a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission.
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In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios.
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Microsoft has modified Vista for release in Europe to meet European Commission requirements.