Microsoft: "Our software patents preclude interoperability"
Throughout the last two days in European Court, Microsoft tried to
explain to the European Court and Commission its "Blue Bubble Theorem"
about Active Directory Services (ADS) being surrounded by a Blue
Bubble within which interoperability was impossible.
Carlo Piana, Free Software Foundation Europe's lawyer on the case
explains: "The interventions made perfectly clear that the Blue Bubble
only existed in the lawyers' pleadings. Meanwhile, Microsoft left no
doubt as to the legal nature of that Bubble: a conglomerate of 46
patents that it claims it holds on ADS, whose main effect is to
prevent interoperability and, eventually, competition."
So Microsoft maintains that without licenses to these software
patents, which they would strongly object to and essentially referred
to as "expropriation", forcing the interoperability information to be
released might turn out to be irrelevant: Future competitors might
find themselves involved in costly software patent litigation rather
quickly.
"This proves effectively how software patents are fundamentally
opposed to competiton, and thus harm economy and society. In the
European fight about software patents, the proponents tried to make
the claim software patents were about innovation. Today Microsoft once
more demonstrated how they are indeed helping build and maintain
illegal monopolies", Georg Greve, president of Free Software
Foundation Europe (FSFE) said today and continued: "It reminded me of
a 1991 quote of Bill Gates that summarises software patents rather
effectively [1]:
'If people had understood how patents would be granted when
most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents,
the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The
solution ... is patent exchanges ... and patenting as much as
we can... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be
forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That
price might be high: Established companies have an interest in
excluding future competitors.'"
FSFE referred to that quote in a feature article [2] earlier this
week. Greve concludes: "Software patents are limited mini-monopolies
on ideas that should allow to share ideas for the inspiration and
benefit for society. In software they have the opposite effect and
build mega-monopolies."
[1] http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001447.shtml
[2] http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/ms-vs-eu/article-20060421.it.html
About the Free Software Foundation Europe:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charitable
non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate
in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and
redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition
- allow equal participation in the information age. Creating
awareness of these issues, securing Free Software politically and
legally, and giving people freedom by supporting development of Free
Software are central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in
2001 as the European sister organisation of the Free Software
Foundation in the United States.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/
"Businesses and public authorities have to pay prices that are kept high
by Microsoft's refusal to share interoperability information with its
competitors, as is common practice in the industry," explains Andrew
Tridgell, president and founder of the Samba Team in his presentation on
behalf of Free Software Foundation Europe in European Court today.
Yesterday, Microsoft stated that it had spent 35 thousand person-hours
on documenting that kind of information - and essentially failed.
Tridgell continues "Microsoft keeps claiming that it was asked to show
its source code to competitors, which is absurd. We are exclusively
interested in industry-standard interoperability information, such as
Interface Definition Language (IDL) files commonly used for these kind
of protocols. By our reverse-engineering, we were able to conclude that
the total Active Directory description would amount to roughly 30.000
lines, of which the admittedly best experts of the Samba Team were able
to reverse-engineer 13.000 over the course of six years. These IDL files
easily fit on a single floppy disk and would go a long way towards
providing the interoperability information requested."
"If Microsoft had shared that information when the Commission first
requested it, customers could already find small embedded devices in
stores for around 100 EUR that could offer the Active Directory
functionality implemented in Samba - Microsoft's implementation of these
protocols has hardware requirements ten times bigger. Think of a small
box the size of a router, compared to an entire PC," Carlo Piana, FSFE'S
lawyer on the case continues.
"The prevention of competition by Microsoft to leverage their desktop
monopoly into other areas imposes a stark price on all professional
computer users. Are we really to believe that Microsoft has no idea what
is running on 90% of the computers around this planet so they have to
call in their retired engineers to explain to them the working of
Windows XP?" Georg Greve, president of FSFE summarises. "Enough is
enough. Microsoft should stop playing games with the Commission and the
Court and leave the field of innovation of obstacles to competition and
freedom of choice!"
About the Free Software Foundation Europe
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable
non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate
in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and
redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition -
allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness
of these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and
giving people freedom by supporting development of Free Software are
central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in 2001 as the
European sister organisation of the Free Software Foundation in the
United States.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/
FSFE: "Microsoft locks in customers and pushes software patents to prevent
competition."
"Microsoft's software locks in users and now the company is lobbying to get
this lock-in effect legalised by software patents" is the basic message of a
feature article Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has published on its
website [1] today.
The article - written by FSFE's vice president Jonas Öberg and FSFE's lawyer
Carlo Piana explains: "Any Business - regardless whether it is a small
startup, a global car manufacturer or a public authority - regularly runs a
net consisting of GNU/Linux-, Unix- and Apple-based machines on the one hand
and Windows on the other. Communication works fine within these two worlds.
But not in between. There, co-operation lacks - n ot due to a law of nature
but Microsoft does not want Windows to be understood by other operating
systems."
The European Commission at present is trying to force the software giant to
publish interoperability information that allows seamless communication
between these two worlds. FSFE supports the Commission as third party since
the original investigation in 2001. Monday, April 24th a five-day trial - the
longest in European history - starts in Luxembourg.
The outcome of this suit will be seminal for the future information society:
"Developers have been struggling to use reverse-engineering to replicate the
behaviour of a Windows server, but this is a very cumbersome method and it
has its limits: Without proper documentation of the protocols and
specifications, any competitor will always lag behind the company that can
introduce arbitrary changes of the interface language, as Microsoft has been
doing," FSFE president Georg Greve explains. "Software patents could add a
whole new dimension to this problem: Not only would any competitor find
themselves in an extremely disadvantaged position in trying to compete with
the monopoly. If patents are granted on these interfaces, implementing
interoperability constitutes potential software patent infringement.
Competition itself could de-facto become illegal."
So while Microsoft is still fighting to not publish specifications and
protocols to enable equal grounds for competition, at the same time it
lobbies hard to establish a legal basis for the software patents it has filed
throughout the past years. Paradoxically, the same European Commission that
fights so hard to even the grounds for competition in European Court supports
this quest that threatens to make competition itself de-facto illegal.
The feature artice points it out: "Even if the company is forced to publish
its secret software protocols or leave key features out of Windows, a
European software patent law might eventually let it stamp out competition
from Free Software. Though two previous attempts at enacting a European
software patent were defeated, Charlie McCreevy, Europe's commissioner for
Internal Markets and Services could well resurrect the project this year."
Translations of this feature article can be found in Spanish, French, Italian
and German early next week.
About the Free Software Foundation Europe
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable
non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate
in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and
redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition -
allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness
of these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and
giving people freedom by supporting development of Free Software are
central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in 2001 as the
European sister organisation of the Free Software Foundation in the
United States.
www.fsfeurope.org
[1] http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/ms-vs-eu/article-20060421.en.html
1. Happy birthday FSFE
2. Pablo Machón and Xavier Reina join the FSFE core team
3. GPLv3 conference in Torino
4. gnuvox, the voice of Free Software in Italy
5. Official FSFE statement on patent system in Europe
6. Fellowship of FSFE participates to LUGConference 2006
7. Karsten Gerloff at TACD
1. Happy birthday FSFE
On 10 March 2001, the Free Software Foundation Europe has started its
work. A lot of successful work was done in these five years. The FSFE
has not only become Europe's major stakeholder for Free Software on
national, European and UN level, it has also managed to build up a large
virtual community for freedom in the digital age with the Fellowship.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2006q1/000133.html
2. Pablo Machón and Xavier Reina join the FSFE core team
The Free Software Foundation Europe continues to expand its capacity
as well as its geographic presence: Pablo Machón and Xavier Reina joined
the FSFE core team. Both have been contributing precious work for years,
and they are committed to increase FSFE's activities in Spain.
3. GPLv3 conference in Torino
The FSFE organized a conference in Torino where Richard Stallman talked
about the future of Free Software and the changes in the upcoming
version 3 of the GNU General Public License. The event was well
received, with big success of public, thanks also to the collaboration
with Politecnico di Torino, NetStudent and Hipatia. Recordings of the
event are available on
http://streaming.polito.it/TFOFS
and a transcript of Richard Stallman's speech is on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/torino-rms-transcript.en.html
4. GNUvox, the voice of Free Software in Italy
Free Software Foundation Europe Chapter Italy has launched a project
to improve communication and information of Free Software in Italian.
The aim is to send the message "Free Software, Free Society" beyond the
borders of the Free Software community. The fist step of this project
is the blog GNUvox.info, the daily source of information about Free
Software in Italian.
http://gnuvox.info/
5. Official FSFE statement on patent system in Europe
Ciaran O'Riordan drafted FSFE's response to the European Commission's
questionnaire "On the patent system in Europe" which has been delivered
and is now online:
http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat/fsfe-patstrat-response.en.html
The deadline for submitting responses has been extended to April 12th,
so FSFE encourages free software supporters to do so - possibly based on
FSFE's response.
6. Fellowship of FSFE participates to LUGConference 2006
LUGRoma organized one of the best community driven events of the past
years in Italy. The Fellowship of FSFE participated officially with
Stefano Maffulli. Many other Fellows where at the Conference, some of
themalso as members of LUGs. The conference allowed meeting many people
of the community and listening to suggestions and criticisms. There was
time to discuss the proposal of Austrian Fellow Stephan Peijnik (sp) for
an international meeting of Fellows and find volunteers for the
organization of the event. Join the discussion on
https://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/sp/free_software_blog/multi_national_free_s…
More info, in Italian:
http://www.lugroma.org/contenuti/eventi/lugconf06https://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/maffulli/rants/impressioni_dalla_lugconfere…
7. Karsten Gerloff at TACD conference
In Brussels, Karsten Gerloff represented FSFE at a conference about "The
politics and ideology of intellectual property". The event was organised
by TACD (Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue), a forum of 65 consumer
organisations from the EU and the US. For two days, researchers and
activists discussed the intellectual background of copyrights and
patents. Karsten established new contacts and strengthened FSF Europe's
connections to other NGOs working for Access to Knowledge alongside FSF
Europe.
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
Dear All,
Alea iacta est - the raffle has taken place. And the winners are...
Andrea Di Dato, Italy
Wouter van Heyst, Netherlands
Andrea and Wouter both will receive a HP Compaq Notebook - both pre-installed
with Debian GNU/Linux.
We congratulate the lucky winners and thank all of you for joining this great
community!
kind regards
Joachim Jakobs
P.S. If you also wish to add your support and contribution to FSFE's
work, you can sign-up online at https://www.fsfe.org/join_us
About the Free Software Foundation Europe:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charitable
non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may
participate in a digital society. Therefore the Freedoms to use,
copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free
Software definition- allow equal participation in the information
age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software
politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting
development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE. The
FSFE was founded in 2001 as the European sister organisation of the
Free Software Foundation in the United States.
Further information: http://www.fsfeurope.org
--
Joachim Jakobs <jj(a)office.fsfeurope.org
Media Relations - FSF Europe (http://fsfeurope.org)
Tel: +49 700 - 373387673, Ext.: 4004
Mobile: +49-179-6919565
To find out what keeps the digital society going
please check our Free Software press review today at
https://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/jj/pressreview
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom! (http://www.fsfe.org)