"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.
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