M$ lose EU antitrust case

The European Union Court has upheld its commissioners' ruling that M$ don't play fair:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...70917053717322

Well fancy that :D

Rather a long read I am afraid, but what interests me is the technical content of the Court's ruling:

Quote:

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34 Linux is an ‘open source’ operating system released under the ‘GNU GPL (General Public Licence)’. Strictly speaking, it is only a code base, called the ‘kernel’, which performs a limited number of services specific to an operating system. It may, however, be linked to other layers of software to form a ‘Linux operating system’ (recital 87 to the contested decision). Linux is used in particular as the basis for work group server operating systems (recital 101 to the contested decision) and is thus present on the work group server operating systems market in conjunction with Samba software, which is also released under the ‘GNU GPL’ licence (recitals 506 and 598 to the contested decision)....

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Duh?

MS was trying to point out that it has plenty of competition in the interoperability department. Case point Samba within Linux, open directory etc. It also argued that Linux has groupware but since they are open source... yeah DUH. There is a flip side to this decision - I don't really care one way or another but there are plenty of products that inter-operate with MS whether MS wants them to or not. But forcing MS to open up closed architecture is going to open op more holes in an already riddled system. We've debated open disclosure before but that is a flip side.

The case basically said that MS uses secret code to connect it's products. And this gives them an unfair advantage. Therefore they must open up this code. Wonder if this effects AD security. If so this decision could give MS and advantage going forward. Bet no one has written that yet?

Hmm, I was just watching the news on TV and they said that MS had to release some of their source code - I thought that was a tad unfair but reading the above link it appears they just need to define and document the protocols that work group servers use to communicate (someone needs to define a work group and a domain to the EC) - the actual code will remain closed, which I think is pretty fair.

I think this will result in a lot of 4 rate applications popping up that do not work well with a work group/domain infrastructure, as there will no doubt be a race to produce these app's and get it on to the market 1st.......I personally will still lean toward an MS product for an MS domain. However a good thing that will almost certainly come from it is that providing some decent and realistically competitive software emerges, then MS will have to drop their prices to compete.....and that is most defiantly not a bad thing...