Microsoft said on Monday it had been given extra time by the European Commission to respond to the threat of a $2 million-a-day fine over allegations that it has failed to comply with a landmark EU antitrust ruling. “We have been granted an extension to February 15,” a spokesman for the company said. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Microsoft is falling behind in meeting certain obligations under its antitrust agreement with the US government, the Bush administration said Monday.
Sheesh… One almost gets the impression that they are trying to use delay tactics or something. 🙂
Seriously — I fail to see why releasing something as mundane as the CIFS spec is so difficult for them.
The CIFS protocol has been almost completely reverse-engineered anyway by folks like the Samba project, and even if they had no formalized spec to begin with, the writing of a comm protocol specification is not that difficult. They have billions of dollars and thousands of people.
Near infinite resources, and they need more time!?
It’s a stall tactic, for what only bill g knows. Most likely his efforts to buy someone off is taking longer than usual.
How many chances….. how much time does Ms deserve NONE they deserve equal treatment ie. they should be treated like any other company. And if that were the case they would be in a whole heap of trouble all over the world. But they have a whole lot of hush money thats the difference.
They want to pay back, but they just don’t have time! They are too busy with trying to reduce the memory footprint and correct the bugs in Vista…
So fines are only proposed to MS? It sounds like authorities are politely asking whether MS would like to pay some fines soon. WTF? Is this supposed to be punishment?
There’s nothing like adding an additional intellectual property burden to the process, is there?
The code isn’t what is being asked for — the EU only wants the specifications on which the code is based, or to which the code must conform.
The whole idea of asking for the docs is to have a description of the processes and protocols involved which are INDEPENDENT of any one specific implementation.
Hopefully the Powers That Be on the EU side of this are technically astute enough to realize that this is not an acceptable response.