[Fsfe-ie] The MS anti-trust, FSFE, and Samba

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

For anyone interested in the recent anti-trust ruling, there's a good
interview (text and ogg) on Groklaw now with Georg Greve and Carlo Piana of
FSFE and Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459

The one sentence history is that the European Commission investigated
Microsoft for abusing their dominant desktop market to distort the server
market and found them guilty, so to rectify the market they were ordered to
publish some specs so that others could develop interoperable software -
Microsoft dragged their heels and the European Commission started a
1.5-million per-day fine, so Microsoft appealled to the Court of First
Instance and on Monday, that court confirmed that the European Commission
was right.

(ok, ok, so it was more than one sentence and I just replaced the full stops
with "and" :)

FSFE's press statement from Monday is here:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q3/000186.html

And a previous Groklaw story is at:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070917053717322

All along, FSFE argued the general point that free software should not be
excluded and the specific point that Samba is the only remaining competitor,
so excluding Samba would make the information useless.  The European
Commission agreed.

About the future, MS can now only appeal to the very highest court - the
European Court of Justice - but they can only mount an appeal their on the
procedural and legal aspects, not on the facts or substance of the case.


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org