AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
Nobody is buying it. Well. Employees, maybe. Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters.
Seeing some news during the usual "surfing" the Internet, I had a wonderful conversation with Ioakim, which transformed into a growing concern about "what happens with the interoperability"? Just before 1 month, at NTUA a Meeting on Interoperability was held with the support of the Greek Microsoft Innovation Centre in cooperation with the Greek Interoperability Center and Oracle Greece.
"...'This case is over and interoperability won. The European Court made clear that interoperability information should not be kept secret and the agreement shows that Microsoft saw no way to continue its obstruction of interoperability in this area. This establishes a standard which everyone will have to meet from now on,' summarizes Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)..."
In 2004 the European Commission found Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse in the IT marketplace and demanded that complete interoperability information be made available to competitors. Microsoft objected to this decision and was overruled in September 2007 by the European Court of First Instance (CFI). The CFI found Microsoft guilty of deliberate obstruction of interoperability and upheld the obligation for Microsoft to share its protocol information.
The EU Commission and Microsoft have settled the browser choice issue, and the Commission will continue to monitor interoperability issues, with Microsoft posting a new and "improved" set of documents today about interoperability.
Everybody's talking about Microsoft - the hot topics are interoperability, exclusion, standards, and the doubts of a Red Had and the European Union about their alleged about-turn.
Over two years ago, Microsoft and Novell signed an interoperability deal. Part of this agreement was a patent deal that suggested that Linux infringed on Microsoft's IP. Since then, Microsoft has signed a number more of these deals with various companies, but the Novell one is still the most famous.