Microsoft accepts EC competition ruling on interoperability info: analysis

It’s taken a while to pick apart Neelie Kross’s announcement that Microsoft have accepted the conditions of the European Commission’s 2004 ruling on abuse of market position. The European Commissioner for Competition Policy stated at a press conference on Monday that:

“Put together, these changes in Microsoft’s business practices, in particular towards open source software developers, will profoundly affect the software industry. The repercussions of these changes will start now and will continue for years to come.”

Yet it is not clear whether the news for open source is all that good.

Groklaw rightly points out that the €10,000 one-off fee for secret interoperability information “to be paid by companies that dispute the validity or relevance of Microsoft’s patents” is out of reach of most of the open source community. And the options the European Commission lay out for open source developers implementing patented interoperability information are “design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.”, when, as Groklaw points out “The GPL can’t take a license for a patent, period.”

The FFII are one group not happy with the decision. In a statement issued yesterday, Benjamin Henrion, FFII representative in Brussels, accused the commission of misunderstanding the challenges faced by open source:

“The Commission does not understand how open source works. It naively accepted Redmond’s assurances that they will play fair. It is a sham. They have planned for years to control the open source economy through software patents.”

Business Week have a range of reactions from elsewhere in the software community, including the Free Software Foundation Europe and the European Committee for Interoperable Systems. As they put it, “The open-source software sector isn’t popping open champagne bottles just yet.”