Microsoft fined by the EU
The welcome news came yesterday that Microsoft is being fined 2 million Euros a day, backdated to December 2005, for failing to comply with a Commission order to document its network protocols. Despite all the time since then, Microsoft has blatantly failed to produce documentation. Why should we care? Two reasons spring to mind. First, and whether we believe Microsoft’s excuses or not, they have been flexing their monopoly power to keep competitors out of the market. No one is asking them to reveal sensitive information – the issue is their specific implementation of otherwise-public standards for letting computers talk to one another. Second, if Microsoft are telling the truth, they are incompetent software developers.
Microsoft commented to the press last week that 300 engineers are currently working “day and night” to fulfill the request of the public authorities.
“If we are to believe Microsoft’s numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering,” comments Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. “For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.”
(Thanks to GrokLaw for the info.)
pax et bonum
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