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