[governance] something to think about for Rio

[Norbert Bollow]

Veni Markovski <veni at veni.com> wrote:

> Everyone considers this a victory also for the free and open source
> community.

IMO anyone who considers this settlement to be "a victory" for the
free and open source community is severely mistaken.

At issue was the question whether Microsoft may continue trying to
non-"Microsoft Windows" computers including in particular GNU/Linux
based computers from working together with "Microsoft Windows"
computers in workgroup environments for purposes like sharing a
printer, shared document storage etc.

In principle, the law is clear that such an abuse of a dominant
market position is illegal.

After much foot-dragging Microsoft has now finally agreed to stop
trying to implement this illegal strategy by means of keeping the
relevant protocol specifications secret (getting them to agree to
that might have been a significant victory if it had happened
before the protocols in questions were successfully reverse-
enginieered), BUT in those settlement negotiations they got the
Commissioner to implicitly agree to tolerating that Microsoft is
now trying to implement their illegal strategy by means of patents.

> When I put the subject line, I also meant that this is changing the
> way important things are happening around the (post)WSIS environment.
> Only four years ago Microsoft was tryin to buy good press coverage.
> Today they had to pay more than half a billion Euro to the EU and to
> comply with the court decision. With regards to affordability of
> internet access that's quite an important step.

What matters with regard to the affordability of internet access is
whether or not Microsoft will succeed in killing the ability of
GNU/Linux to seriously compete.

Getting the Commissioner to agree that Microsoft may insist on
licensing relevant patents in ways which are fundamentally
incompatible with the whole socioeconomic system which forms the
basis of the free and open source community, that was certainly
a major victory for Microsoft.

:-(

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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