In December, the EU sternly lectured Microsoft that the company had not been sufficiently forthcoming in providing technical information to competitors, in response to the EU's antitrust decree, and threatened to start fining the company 2 million Euros per day.

A couple of days ago Microsoft said, loosely translated: "Okay - we give up trying to figure out exactly how to make you happy. So we will simply reveal the basic source code. Then everyone can see everything." This would be an add-on to a previous offer to provide 12,000 pages of technical documentation and 500 hours of technical support to companies that wish to implement its server interoperability protocols.

Surely the EU is happy now? Actually, no, the Competition Commissoner said: "Normally speaking, the source code is not the ultimate documentation of anything, which is precisely the reason why programmers are required to provide comprehensive documentation to go along with their source code."

The EU is studying things. The Free Software Foundation is outraged, since access to the source code would only help people write programs that interact with Microsoft code rather than programs that replace code. Heaven knows what the competitors are saying.

The only question really is what the EU will think of next. I suggest they charge Microsoft with a new offense, entitled Malicious Compliance -- "You dastards! You did even more than we asked, just to deprive us of any rationale to prosecute you! That is intolerable insolence!"

posted by James DeLong @ 3:32 PM | International

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