Perplexed and Bewildered!!

[cousinlucky]

I read an opinion this morning about the European Union's lawsuit against Microsoft and I do not know which is the correct way to think about it. If the E.U. wants Microsoft to offer a new version of their operating system without the Media Player I can fathom that. What I can not understand is why the E.U. insists that Microsoft provide its competitors with the code to the Microsoft operating systems.

What has one thing got to do with the other?
Can a " Court " force a company to divulge its operating code?

[carlosponti]

I didn't understand that ruling either. That would similar to asking General motors to publish the engineering specs about how to make one of their cars available.

Frankly since Linux offers so much preloaded software I am not bothered my Windows having IE or Media Player pre-loaded however they should have a way to un-install it. Also they should make a standard and let the media players of the world meet that standard instead of Microsoft setting the standard with their media player.

[Freston]

I understand. But if you've had a software company making and selling media players you'd be a bit worried about MS pre-installing their own media player, yet not letting you figure out how embed your media player in the WinOS. You'd be not really competitive, and MS is monopolizing the market. Once again. *cough*Netscape*cough* .doc and .xls formats are getting (indirectly) outlawed for many governmental bodies in Europe.



There are strict laws on monopoly in Europe.

[fingal]

I don't think anyone's asking MS to 'open source' their operating system! Just to provide a version of Windows with no media player if people ask for that.

Here's a link to a BBC news article. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong.

As far as I can tell this ruling is about preventing companies from 'locking out' other organisations from shipping their own media players with a given operating system.

[cousinlucky]

Years ago one of the things my Kerio Firewall discovered within my Windows XP os was all of the " call home " programs in the media player. This caused me way back then to purchase and install Nero.

I'll bet that if microsoft does make an os without its media player just for the European market that os will probably not run anyone's media player.

I do not care for Microsoft; but I also do not care for repressive government.

[fingal]

I was never very impressed with Window's media player anyway. It does the job etc., but so do plenty of other players and they are open source.

I believe there were issues with Realplayer 'phoning home' in earlier versions, until some clever person spotted this happening. That's why I like open source software: knowledgeable people can read the code and see what's going on.

I can play all my media files using a combination of XMMS, mplayer, Realplayer and Xine... And a lot of codecs!

[hazel]

I seem to remember a Microsoft spokesman once saying, "Our stuff works best with our stuff." In other words, there are all kinds of wrinkles in the Windows api that outsiders don't know about and that prevent their programs from working optimally. I think this is the kind of thing the court wants them to reveal, not the inner workings of Windows.

[rcgreen]

I really don't care about the media player aspect of the case,
but the more important part has to do with the Windows
undocumented APIs and networking protocols. It has been suspected
for a long time that they are trying to sabotage SAMBA by constantly
changing things in their protocols. If they want to be treated as
equals in networking, they can't use secret undocumented protocols.

Obviously, they want a world in which, if you have one Microsoft
computer in your office, you will have to have nothing but Microsoft,
because Microsoft refuses to network smoothly with any other OS.
Where I work, we have Microsoft, IBM mainframe, IBM unix, Solaris
and Apple machines, and they must be capable of sharing files.
We don't want one vendor to act immature and make life hard for us.