Microsoft Signs Up 1st Licensee for Code
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By AOIFE WHITE BRUSSELS, Belgium - Under threat of new multimillion fines, Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that it had signed up its first licensee for a scheme EU regulators told it to set up three years ago to share code that helps servers work with the Windows operating platform.
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Corporate licences make for happy software vendors
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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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Microsoft is working to make its volume licensing programs simpler for business customers.
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In a major boost for CodeGear's development tools, the company has been awarded a contract by the Russian Federal Agency of Education to provide 1 million seat licenses of its Delphi and C++Builder products.CodeGear's software will be used as part of the Russian government's strategy to bolster computer science and IT education in an economy that has been driven by oil and gas exploration, said CodeGear CEO Jim Douglas. U.S. and Russian software vendors are creating a software bundle to be distributed at universities and secondary schools throughout Russia, he said. The arrangement also features software from other vendors, such as Corel, Douglas said. "For us, it's one of the largest deals that we've done in [the] Europe, Middle East, Africa region as a company," Douglas said.The entire deal is part of a Russian federal initiative called the National State Project of High-Grade Education. The total value of the deal is worth $100 million, but CodeGear would not say what its share of that pie will be.Both Delphi and Delphi for .Net will be provided along with C++Builder. The total number of licenses distributed for the three products will reach 1 million.Delphi is focused on native, compiled Windows application development on the desktop. Asked if the deal represents a revival for Delphi, which had been a Borland Software product, Douglas acknowledged that this might be the perception. "From our perspective, [Delphi has] never been diminished," he said.While Microsoft is pushing enterprise-level application development, sectors like engineering and science seek native, compiled applications, Douglas said. "This [deal] is just a continued indicator of Delphi in that segment," he said. CodeGear with the deal is focusing on client-server desktop applications.CodeGear, Douglas said, does not compete much with Microsoft's Visual Studio platform anymore. Microsoft's focus is on .Net and managed code, while CodeGear is centered on the native compiled space, although it does have .Net capabilities.CodeGear's offering in the managed code space is its JBuilder product for Java application development in the enterprise, Douglas said.CodeGear, meanwhile, is making product plans for the year that include adding Unicode capabilities for internationalization to Delphi and C++Builder. This will be included in the 2008 versions of the products due out in the first half of this year.Also planned are language enhancements for Delphi and a second release of CodeGear's Delphi for PHP, which will identified as version 1.1 and be more robust, Douglas said.CodeGear was spun out of Borland about a year ago to focus on development tools. But CodeGear still is owned by Borland, which now concentrates on the application lifecycle management space. Plans still call for CodeGear to become a separate, independent company.
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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 Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Tuesday agreed to require only a single license for server software that runs on computers powered by a new generation of chips
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The British National Health Service (NHS) has signed a massive software licensing deal with Microsoft. The deal will ultimately save the NHS $625 million in licensing fees, as well as requiring that Microsoft
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Microsoft on Monday debuted an almost-finished version of the first service pack for its Windows Server 2003 software, and like October&#39;s SP2 for the desktop Windows XP OS, stressed security in the update.
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As part of a European antitrust settlement, Microsoft will supply Windows protocol documentation to developers of the open-source software.
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The first part of Microsoft's new Expression Studio for Web site development adheres to standards while making CSS and XML drag-and-drop easy.
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Microsoft quietly delivered a first private beta release of Windows Server &quot;R2&quot; to the first of about 1,000 testers Wednesday, company officials confirmed Friday.
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Microsoft Corp. plans to hold its first-ever conference for Microsoft Office software developers, the company announced Monday.
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It's the start of a new era for the company that once argued that giving away the keys to its protocols would somehow reveal the secret of Windows itself: Microsoft has made its first obligatory agreement with a key open source provider.
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This article is the first in a new, regular series of articles and interviews with top Microsoft program managers. Our goal is to give you a close-up, helpful and informative look at things
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Microsoft says it is making the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming operating system available for public download.
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NOVEMBER 22, 2004  - The US Air Force last week announced an enterprisewide software licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp.