OSNews

The article is a bit short on details. What sort of security features might the EU interfere with? Presumably it's speaking of the firewall and antivirus/malware solutions which are packaged with Vista; and presumably their concern is that, with such bundling, there's no reason for consumers to buy other antivirus or firewall products. But this seems like somewhat perverse logic to me. For example, if Microsoft /didn't/ bundle security features with Vista, would people not accuse them of shipping an OS which was insecure and not feature-complete? Isn't some kind of security system something that should be expected of any modern OS? What does OSX have, if anything? It's difficult to compare Windows and OSX, I suppose, since Windows is so much more massively targeted, and has such a history of insecurity against OSX's fairly good track record, but it still seems like a fair question to ask.

On the other side of the coin, we also have to acknowledge that antivirus vendors and so on have basically made their money riding on the back of Microsoft's mistakes. Is Microsoft under some kind of obligation to continue making mistakes, or at least an obligation to continue being less than diligent with the security of their OS, just so that other security companies can continue to make a profit by filling in the blanks? It seems to me rather like asking whether conglomerates like the RIAA have some kind of right to continue to make unimaginable profits off of an archaic business model. Just because things have historically been one way, and that way has benefited people, does not mean that things must remain that way despite being obsoleted, surely?

Basically, the question in my mind seems to be, do security companies have a right to equal consumer mindshare with Microsoft? If, say, Symantec came out with a new OS which contained its existing security products built in, would we lobby for these products to be removed just so that Microsoft and others would have a level playing field? Even though it would result in a less secure Symantec OS ootb? And, if Symantec was required to ship their OS sans security products, would we complain about the OS having some kind of system for automatically purchasing and installing Symantec's security products, over and above Microsoft's? I mean, it is Symantec's OS---shouldn't they be in the privileged position of being able to offer their own products to run on their own OS?! Isn't this what Linspire does with CNR, or Ubuntu with its repositories even? And surely integration is a prime feature of software that should not be criticized when it works well and makes the user's life easier?

Just seems like the EU would be setting a bad precedent in all sorts of ways if they do prevent Microsoft shipping security features with Vista. I kinda hate to agree with Microsoft, but I think enforcing a totally level playing field in this way is actually unfair, rather than fair. Copyrights and patents, much as they're abused, are an explicit acknowledgement that a totally level playing field isn't fair---some amount of privilege and monopoly should be granted in some cases. And, by way of example, much as people complain about IE being bundled, Firefox is still pretty popular...