Microsoft signs first EU protocol licensee
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has signed up the first licensee for the workgroup server protocols the European Commission ordered it to open up to competitors in aÂ 2004 antitrust ruling, it said Thursday. The announcement comes a week after the Commission sent Microsoft a "statement of objections," saying it was not satisfied that the information Microsoft planned to provide under its Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) warranted the prices the company planned to charge. The licensee, Quest Software of Aliso Viejo, California, plans to use Microsoft's User and Group Administration protocol set in products based on Microsoft's Active Directory, extending the way those products link with Unix, Linux, and Java authentication systems, the companies said Thursday. Quest develops software for Active Directory administration and data recovery, in addition to tools for application, database and server administration. The companies signed their licensing deal on March 1, the day the Commission published its objections, said Tom Brookes, a spokesman for Microsoft. Quest will pay the full list price to which the Commission objected, 5.25 percent of net revenue on the products in which the protocols are being integrated, Brookes said. The Commission ordered Microsoft to create the WSPP as one of the remedies in a March 2004 antitrust ruling, in which it found Microsoft had abused its dominant position in the desktop operating system market to gain advantages in the markets for media players and workgroup server software. It ordered Microsoft to pay a â¬497 million (then around $600 million) fine, release a version of Windows without an integrated media player, and release details of the protocols used for communication between computers running the desktop and workgroup server versions of Windows, to enable competitors to build interoperable software. Microsoft is stillÂ appealing the ruling, but paid the fine and released the software and protocol information anyway. Since the ruling, the Commission has complained that Microsoft is not releasing the right kind of information fast enough, while Microsoft has protested that the Commission has not made its demands clear. In July 2006, the CommissionÂ fined Microsoft a further â¬280.5 millionÂ for the delays,Â a ruling Microsoft appealedÂ in October. Last week, the Commission signalled that the protocol information Microsoft had provided was not innovative enough to justify its price. Microsoft created a similar licensing program in the U.S., in response to an antitrust ruling there. That program has so far attracted 27 licensees. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International. ECMA's General Assembly voted by 20-1 in favor of the standard at a meeting in Zurich on Thursday afternoon, and will now submit the format to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for its approval. The vote against came from a representative of IBM Corp. A standardized document format will make it easier for competing software companies to develop products that can interoperate with one another and to edit the same documents. Products meeting the standard could find favor with governments, or other organizations concerned about interoperability. Interoperability is vital for the preservation of archive information, according to Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at ECMA. The British Library archives electronic documents, but must deal with whatever format they arrive in. The development of interoperable software tools will make that work easier. "The level of precision in this standard is unprecedented," Farquhar said. The standard runs to several thousand pages. To help developers digest the standard, the committee has published a 14-page white paper explaining it. "The committee put a lot of effort into making the document accessible," Farquhar said. That accessibility is important if Microsoft is to win developers over to its document format, as the company faces competition in the standards industry just as it does in the software market. A rival document format,Â OpenDocument Format (ODF), has already won approval from ISO, and was published as an ISO standard last month. ODF is used by office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, and has gained the support of other companies, including IBM. Government officials in France and the U.S. commonwealth of Massachusetts have recommended adoption of ODF as a government standard. ISO approval "is a critical factor for governments," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance, a body that promotes the OpenDocument Format. Microsoft's general manager for interoperability and XML (Extensible Markup Language) architecture, Jean Paoli, agrees that "some public institutions prefer standards that are ISO-certified." There are still several hurdles to overcome before Microsoft can obtain ISO approval. ECMA has asked that the standard be fast-tracked, a process to which national standards bodies now have about 30 days to object. If no one objects, then ISO Subcommittee 34 will spend five or six months examining comments on the standard received from the national standards bodies, and only then will the ISO's Joint Technical Committee 1 vote on the standard.
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) said it has clarified its software licensing policies to address a new trend in microprocessors and to keep the pressure on its rivals.
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Released to manufacturing Microsoft this morning released Service Pack 1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturers.â¦
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Microsoft has agreed to comply with the European Commission's 2004 anti-monopoly ruling against it, Brussels says.
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Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document format from international standards body ECMA International.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Microsoft teams Linux distributor to craft a single sign-on system for mixed Windows/Linux networks.
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(InfoWorld) - As Windows VistaÂ appeared in computer stores worldwide, Microsoft said Tuesday that part of the design of the new operating system is the work of the European Commission. "Following discussions with European Commission, Microsoft committed to make a number of changes to the Windows Vista operating system prior to release," the software maker said in a statement, pointing to three functions of the operating system: security, search, and fixed document formats. Windows Security Center (WSC), which looks like a dashboard, gives the user an overview of what security software is running on the system and the status of checks and upgrades of firewalls and antispyware protection. Rival security software firms and the Commission suspected this could give WSC an unfair advantage. Microsoft said it agreed to develop a new set of APIsÂ for release in the first service pack, scheduled for later this year, which can be invoked by third-party security programs to turn off the alerts presented by WSC. Similarly, PatchGuard -- software that protects against the modification of the kernel of the operating system -- has been added to Vista. Some security vendors have in the past made modifications to the kernel as part of the implementation of their security software. PatchGuard prevents such modifications in the 64-bit version. Microsoft is now working with vendors to develop new kernel-level APIs that will provide programmatic access to the kernel to address this issue, Microsoft said. The APIs will be available in Windows Vista 64 with the first service pack, scheduled for later this year. Regarding search, Microsoft has changed the way default settings are made for Internet search within both Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). "These changes now ensure for users that they are able -- through a series of windows and options -- to make a clear, conscious, and open decision on their default search provider. Furthermore, users will retain at all times the ability to change this and all further defaults in the operating system at will," Microsoft said. Microsoft's own fixed document format software is known as XPS. "In response to the Commission's concerns, the company has made fundamental changes to the licensing structure of the XPS fixed-format technology and has committed to submit the technology to an international standards body for adoption as an open industry standard," Microsoft said. The XPS standard will be made available under licensing terms that do not exclude any industry or licensing model including the GPL (general public license), it said. "In response to Commissioner Kroes' letter of March 2006, Microsoft created a singleÂ API so that independent software developers can create applications to allow users to save documents in XPS or other formats, such as Adobe's PDF," Microsoft said. Microsoft said it has also disclosed through a licensing program the relevant information to enable the implementation of XPS technology on competing client and server operating systems. Microsoft has also responded to a further Commission demand to submit XPS (as well as future extensions) to a standards-setting body. Microsoft will submit XPS to the Ecma International. Microsoft said it will also enable the implementation of XPS under an open-source business model (GPL) through use of a covenant not to sue -- a model that Microsoft has applied to Web services and open XMLÂ  document formats and that has, it said, "been welcomed by the open-source community." European customers and OEMs will be able to buy a version of Vista that has Microsoft's Media Player stripped out. This unbundled version of the operating system complies with the 2004 European antitrust ruling, which ordered the company to offer two separate versions of both the home and professional versions of the operating system. "In compliance with the European Commission's decision of March 2004, home and professional editions of Windows Vista without Media Player functionality will be released in Europe on the same schedule as the Windows Vista general availability launch," Microsoft said. These are called the 'N' versions -- denoting "no media player," the company said.
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Microsoft is offering a new subscription model to small businesses that will allow them to use the company's software for less cost than the currently available licensing model.
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Microsoft and Turbolinux, a Tokyo-based Linux distributor, are cozying up with a patent cross-licensing deal and agreement to work more closely together, the companies said Tuesday.For users, one of the most significant elements to the deal is a pledge to work on a single sign-on system that will allow log-on to Windows-based and Turbolinux-based machines with one set of credentials.At present Windows and Turbolinux machines on a mixed network can&#39;t access a common authentication database, but their deal should change this, said Noriko Otake, a spokeswoman for Turbolinux in Tokyo.To further this work and other cross-platform projects, the two companies have also entered into a patent cross-licensing deal, specific details of which were not disclosed.Interoperability testing of single sign-on and other future projects will take place at Microsoft&#39;s offices in Beijing. Turbolinux is active worldwide but has its strongest footprint in Japan and China.Turbolinux will also add&#160;Microsoft&#39;s Live Search&#160;service to its desktop operating system.The deal expands cooperation between the two companies that is intended to remove some of the hassles of using Linux, said Otake. Earlier this year Turbolinux added Windows Media Player to its platform, allowing users access to the large amount of content online encoded in that format, and the company has also been working on support for the Open XML document format.Turbolinux also said it will participate in the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, a Microsoft-sponsored community of software and hardware vendors.For Microsoft the deal is the latest in a string of over 200 patent-licensing agreements signed since it launched an intellectual property licensing program in late 2003. Last week the company announced a similar deal with Japanese digital imaging vendor Olympus Corp., and previous agreements have included Novell,&#160;Fuji Xerox, Linspire, Kenwood, LG Electronics, Nortel Networks,&#160;and Samsung Electronics.&#160;
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Microsoft is ready to comply with demands that it alters its Windows software in line with the ruling from the European Commission.
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NOVEMBER 22, 2004  - The US Air Force last week announced an enterprisewide software licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp.
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Developers of open-source Samba software will find their work a little easier thanks to an agreement with Microsoft, signed Thursday, that will give them access to previously secret data on how the Windows operating system works.Microsoft was compelled to make this information available following a March 24, 2004, European Commission antitrust ruling against the company. In July 2006, the EU fined Microsoft &#8364;280.5 million ($338.6 million at that time) for failing to provide documentation on Windows protocols to its rivals.&#160;Microsoft lost an appeal of that decision&#160;in September, setting the stage for the deal.The deal was signed with a nonprofit group called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, (PFIF) which negotiated on behalf of the Samba team because Samba is not represented by a corporate entity. PFIF will pay a one-time fee of &#8364;10,000 and, in return, will be able to allow open-source developers, including the Samba team, to access the documents.Developers will have to sign nondisclosure agreements and will not be allowed to redistribute Microsoft&#39;s documentation, but they will be able to write open-source software that implements the Windows protocols. The deal will also clarify which patents Microsoft believes are related to this technology, making it easier for open-source developers to avoid patent violations.Antitrust rulings forced Microsoft to set up protocol-licensing programs in the past, including the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program) and the WSPP (Work Group Server Protocol Program), but these efforts were not compatible with open-source software licenses.That is apparently not a problem with the PFIF agreement.&quot;They&#39;re giving us all the documentation to make everything work,&quot; said Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba. &quot;We will have no more excuses to suck &#8230; if we don&#39;t have something, we won&#39;t be able to say it&#39;s not our fault, we don&#39;t know how to do it.&quot;Samba is an open-source version of the file-and-print software used by Windows. It is a standard component of the Linux and Unix operating systems, allowing these systems to share data and work alongside Windows clients.But development of Samba has traditionally been back-breaking work. Developers would analyze network traffic to try and glean how Windows was working and then build their software based on that knowledge -- a process called reverse-engineering.With the new agreement, developers will have access to Microsoft&#39;s own protocol specifications and will be able to build their software based on those documents, Allison said. That, in turn, will accelerate the team&#39;s development of its next generation of software, which will implement the new Sever Message Block 2.0 protocol used by Windows Vista.Though the deal was reached on Thursday, developers were still waiting for the final technical aspects of the document hand-over to be settled, Allison said. He expects to get his hands on the technical specifications fairly soon. &quot;I&#39;m guessing that for my Christmas vacation I&#39;ll have some enjoyable things to read,&quot; he said.
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As part of a European antitrust settlement, Microsoft will supply protocol documentation to developers of the open-source software.
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Microsoft Corp  ended three  years of resistance on Monday, finally agreeing to comply with  a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission.
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Microsoft has agreed finally to take steps to comply with the European Commission's landmark 2004 antitrust decision against it, the EU's executive arm said on Monday.
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Microsoft Corp. will allow governments around the world that use its software to have controlled access to the source code for its pervasive Microsoft Office 2003 desktop offerings for the first time.