Microsoft has submitted documents required by the European Commission in an effort to avoid further fines for breaching an antitrust ruling, a spokeswoman for the European Union regulator said on Monday. "We received the technical documentation from Microsoft. The competition services are currently analyzingit with the help of the trustee. It's too early to say whether they complied with the decision," the spokeswoman said.
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Member since:2005-07-11
" Throughout this entire ordeal, I've never been able to understand why Microsoft should have to give their technology and IP away. "
IP (Intellectual Property) is usually considered the collective of disparate areas and laws. It consists of Trademark law, Copyright law, and Patent law, etc.
So out of this, what is MS being forced to gave away that is considered to be its own Intellectual Property?
MS has been requested by the EU to document and release specifications of its APIs.
The APIs are certainly not trademarks.
Now the source code and binaries etc defining these APIs are certainly copyrighted, and the techniques used within to carry out a specific function may or may not be patented depending on the technique.
However, being forced to open up its APIs to full documentation so that third parties may write application that utilise the interface, is certainly not making MS release any of its 'Intellectual Property'.
Member since:2005-07-08
So you're not familiar with software engineering. That's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm being serious--many professional software developers don't understand it either. Let me explain:
Engineering is concerned with creating specifications that describe solutions to given problems. In software engineering, there are three high-level specifications: design, implementation, and interface.
Design comes first. This is where you take the requirements for the program, create scenarios and use cases, and develop an architecture that includes things like objects and methods. This step is what separates the men from the boys, so to speak.
Now comes implementation. Here's where you fire up your favorite version of vi--or whatever you kids use today, with your rock & roll music and such--and get to coding: data structures, algorithms, and control. If this is the hardest part of the process, you're doing something wrong.
The final part is to provide some way for the user or other software to access the functionality. This is called an interface. Many modern software applications have literally dozens of different interfaces, ranging from (G)UIs to APIs to network protocols.
The three layers of specifications correspond roughly to the four kinds of people that interact with software: users need to know the UI and/or GUI portions of the interface specification; 3rd-party developers need to know the full interface specification; testers need to know the interface and design specifications; and developers must have access to all specifications.
They key here is that all that 3rd-party developers need is the interface specifications in order to design their own software to interoperate with your's. It's very rare that interoperability cannot be acheived with a complete set of interface specifications, and that situation is usually a sign of poorly designed software.
Just as there is no law demanding that software comes with end-user documentation, there is none that requires software vendors to provide interface specifications. Normally, it's a software vendor's right to keep their interface specifications proprietary. This simply means that they don't want 3rd-party software to interoperate with their's, and that's their prerogative. They can also license their interface specifications on a commercial basis.
The nature of the OS market and Microsoft's position in it creates a situation where 3rd-party developers must interoperate with Microsoft software in order to survive. It isn't always possible to license the specifications, for reasons that range from the 3rd-party being unable to afford it, to Microsoft just not feeling like offering the license at all.
OSS has created another problem with this situation. There are plenty of OSS vendors that could be happy to fork over the cash to license certain interface specifications, but Microsoft and other proprietary vendors (e.g. graphics vendors) will only release the specifications under NDA. This means that the vendor cannot release software that uses the proprietary interface under an OSS license. Most OSS vendors are legally required to release this software as OSS due to the terms of their license to distribute the software. Others have community or corporate policies that prohibit them from distributing proprietary code.
We can debate the extent to which the EU's support for OSS has impacted their antitrust rulings against Microsoft. However, there is no debate concerning the economic impact of Microsoft's decision to keep most of their interface specifications proprietary. They have the power to kill any kind of software vendor by refusing to license specifications or by making changes to "standard" specifications. This is an unreasonable amount of power for a corporation that commands the vast majority of the PC and server markets.
Are the interface specifications a component of Microsoft's IP? Certainly. Is this enough to replicate Microsoft's implementations? Certainly not. The crown jewels for Microsoft are their design specifications. That's what makes their software so, um... good. That's the most valuable portion of the IP of any software vendor, and releasing interface specifications doesn't affect their ability to protect their IP related to designs or implementations.
The only reason why a software vendor in Microsoft's position would fight so hard against the request to open their interface specifications is if they determined that the ability to control access to their interfaces was more valuable that the combined value of their design and implementation.
That's the issue at bar for Microsoft. It turns out that their designs and implementations aren't so great, and they're concerned that 3rd-parties can develop better designs and implementations based on the same interfaces. That's pretty much the definition of anticompetitive behavior, and that's why the EU is demanding that Microsoft open its interface specifications.
See, there's not much to misunderstand once you get past the basics.
Member since:2005-11-11
//Throughout this entire ordeal, I've never been able to understand why Microsoft should have to give their technology and IP away.
Anti-competitive behaviour yes, needs to be dismantled, but not at the expense of billion dollar investments in technology and IP.
It's hard to know the ins and outs of Microsoft but there has to be a separation between commercial competitive practices and engineering.//
Microsoft are not asked to "give their IP away" at all. Microsoft are asked to provide specifications of how their Windows clients can be interfaced to over a network LAN.
The easiest analogy is perhaps a telephone network. The makers of telephone exchanges have a common specification to work with in regards to how a common telephone handset is interfaced. There are hardware details like the physical wire pair, the line impedance, the microphone voltages, the ring voltages, the frequencies of the dial tones etc, and software details such as the sequence "lift handset, wait for dial tone, dial number including prefixes for long distance and international, wait for answer, speak, hang up" etc, etc. These are all standard and specified. Anyone can make a telephone exchange that can provide a switching service for standard handset telephones. The making of exchanges (and handsets for that matter) is therefore open to free market competition.
This does not mean that siemens or phillips or alcatel or whoever is required to reveal the circuit diagrams of their handsets. The only requirement is conformance of those handsets to a fully specified signalling protocol.
Taking this analogy to the EU case with Microsoft, all Microsoft are being asked for is the specification of the "signalling protocol" that their product Windows client desktop machines (= "handsets") conform to. This is so that anyone else (other than Microsoft themselves) are able to build compatible LAN server products (="exchanges"). Microsoft are not being asked to reveal how they built their Windows machines ("handsets"), they are only being asked to reveal how to work with their Windows machines ("handsets").
Microsoft want to keep this a secret, so that only Microsoft can build both "handsets" and "excahnges". This would be analogous to allowing just one company to provide and control the entire telephone network. This is anti-trust and anti-competitive, and it is therefore illegal.
Edited 2006-08-01 09:12
Member since:2005-07-06
> I've never been able to understand why Microsoft should have to give their technology and IP away.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the clients, and have tried to use it to get a monopoly on servers by using proprietary API between servers and clients.
CEE consider that this is an abuse of monopoly so they asked Microsoft to provide the specification of their API.
Simple and sensible.
You probably didn't even try to understand..
Member since:
2005-12-15
Throughout this entire ordeal, I've never been able to understand why Microsoft should have to give their technology and IP away.
Anti-competitive behaviour yes, needs to be dismantled, but not at the expense of billion dollar investments in technology and IP.
It's hard to know the ins and outs of Microsoft but there has to be a separation between commercial competitive practices and engineering.
Edited 2006-08-01 01:53