Microsoft bails out

by Claudia Sonea

After years of legal battle with EU Competition Commission, on Monday Microsoft dropped and agreed to share software information with rivals in order to make programs to operate on Windows. The largest software company in the world will smooth access to the open source developers who according to the EU are the only virtual alternative users have and also confirmed that will not appeal anymore a EU Court of First Instance decision on September 17 that rejected its objection to the 2004 order gave by European Commission finding it guilty of monopoly abuse. The settlement is the result of negotiations between EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during a period of three weeks. Kroes declared that the company will no longer monopolize 95 percent share of all desktop operating system; there will be only a one-time fee of 10000 euros to any software developer, including those operating open source systems like Lynux. Also developers like IBM Corp or and Sun Microsystems Inc that sell software based on Lynux will pay a worldwide patent fee of 0.4 percent of revenues for Microsoft's data. This differs from the initial demands of Microsoft that demanded a percentage of future sales and the original rate for patent fee was 5.95 percent. Moreover, it will charge now for only 31 server protocols instead of 154 originally offered for protocol. EU Competition Commissionier also stated that Vista version might pose problems due to the Internet search, integrated security software, digital rights management tools for copyright protection. Shane Coughlan of the Free Software Foundation Europe although admits to be a big change for Microsoft, prefers to wait and see how will everything go in practice. Nevertheless, this change had added 34 cents at the company's shares. Stay connected and find out if the trust will pay the fine of 497 millions euros and comply to the 2004 EU decisions until the end.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_hi_te/eu_microsoft;_ylt=ArZFhb6TYFSgRDoWBhkZJj.s0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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