News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

A fine of $810 million sounds like a lot of money. That is what Microsoft was fined for anti-competitive conduct. The fine by the European Commission was upheld this week by the European Court of First Instance.

Microsoft has dropped two outstanding appeals of European antitrust rulings, following the deal struck with the European Commission at the beginning of this week, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

The recent fine levied on Microsoft by the European anti-trust authorities has reminded people just how dominant Microsoft is in the industry.

According to a letter seen by heise online, the German Federal Office of Justice last week launched summary proceedings against The SCO Group GmbH for "breaching regulations pertaining to the publication of its accounts." The proceedings were suspended after the imposed fine was paid. No information on the size of the fine is available.

I have been working on providing Microsoft Exchange capability for Akonadi on-and-off for a while.There is an emerging problem though: GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. My code is fine - it is "GPLv2 or later". The incompatibility is that Qt is released under GPLv2 (not "or later")

The European Commission fined Microsoft a massive €899 million (US$1.3 billion) for continued failure to honor the 2004 antitrust ruling against it, Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes said Wednesday.

Almost a month ago, on September 24th, fellow zdnet blogger Mary Jo Foley filed a report under the title: Microsoft: Windows and Linux offer same TCO in emerging markets ..........As she points out, this Microsoft conclusion comes from work done for Microsoft by a company called “Vital Wave Consulting”, so I thought I’d read the whole thing

It's wrong and unacceptable for Google to only liaise with Yahoo! but fine for Microsoft to buy Yahoo!, according to the Microsoft lobby