Vista European anti-trust claim
p2pnet.net News:- European Union regulators want Bill and the Boyz to stop using Vista to perpetuate existing monopolies and to try to extend their market dominance into other areas, including Web-based computing.
With that in mind, they’ve asked the European Commission to quickly make a decision on a complaint they filed last February, says Associated Press.
There are more “privileged interconnections” between Vista and other Microsoft products than in earlier versions of Windows, according to Thomas Vinje, attorney for the European Committee for Interoperable Standards, says InformationWeek. , going on:
“Those ‘interconnections,’ Vinje said in an interview Friday, violate a 2004 European Commission finding that Microsoft’s bundling of applications and operating systems is anticompetitive.”
Microsoft, “has described the group as a front for IBM Corp. and other rivals that have constantly tried to use regulatory complaints to their business advantage,” says AP.
But, “The ECIS said Microsoft’s XAML markup language – which it said was positioned to replace the current Web page language HTML – was designed ‘from the ground up to be dependent on Windows’,” the story says, continuing, “The very same practices the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years ago have now been implemented in Vista,” the ECIS said.
The ECIS also says Vista interoperability standards will effectively lock out products from competing application providers, says InformationWeek.
“For example, it claims Microsoft’s Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), as opposed to the more commonly used HTML Web authoring language, ‘is designed from the ground up to be dependent on Windows, and thus is not cross-platform by nature’,” according to Vinje.
In addition, the ECIS also alleges Microsoft’s decision, to use its Open XML file format (OOXML) within Vista and Office 2007 is a move to, “displace ODF [Open Document Format], the existing ISO approved, truly open document file format,” the story adds.
The ECIS represents IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, RealNetwork and Oracle, as well as Opera, Red Hat and Linspire.
Also See:
Associated Press – Microsoft rivals renew call on EU to act on Vista, January 26, 2007
InformationWeek – Microsoft rivals claim Vista violates European antitrust rules, January 26, 2007
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January 27th, 2007 at 11:41 am
“European Union regulators want Bill and the Boyz to stop using Vista to perpetuate existing monopolies and to try to extend their market dominance into other areas, including Web-based computing.”
Isn’t this at odd with with long duration periods for copyright duration for software? At present software enjoys a protection period of about 100 years, a ridiculous duration considering that when the software becomes “public domain” it is useless. A question proves my point: Is anyone selling new computers with Win98? Of course not.
Regulators and legislators, then, should get together and talk to each other, to bring some sense into being.
The “monoply” problem stems from the absurd copyright duration rules (one size fits all) in copyright legislation, yet no one talks abou it. I wonder why.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com