The EU crashes Microsoft’s party

A couple weeks ago, the EU slapped Microsoft with a $1.35B fine, less than a week after Microsoft had made a big fanfare about their new "open" policies.

Todd over at Napera asks,

Certainly the terms Microsoft has been offering companies since the EU decision in October 2007 are extremely reasonable. Given Microsoft’s new open protocol documentation and their patent pledge for open source developers, what’s not to like?

I haven’t seen any pundits or commentators in the US defending the EU decision. If they are, what are their substantive points?
Napera Networks » The EU crashes Microsoft’s party

Hmm. Let me see if I can shed some light...

First of all, Microsoft wants you to believe that open source developers are all a bunch of hobbyists creating code for no pay. Their recent pledge is to not sue open source developers developing non-commercial systems.

Boy, what a deal that is... Microsoft gets all this open source development for free, right? And they can still charge anybody who dares to compete with them commercially? Great deal--for Microsoft.

The reality is, a great number of open source developers engage in commercial activity. Many successful open source projects are backed by commercial companies. OpenOffice.org, JBoss, SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP, the list goes on. By definition, open source means you can use and redistribute software for any reason, including commercial activity--by excluding commercial entities from patent protection, Microsoft is making a marketing play without making any real concession.

Their real agenda here is to give the illusion of openness so they can get their OOXML format approved as an open standard, without giving up any control over the format. Never mind that they were part of the committee developing the ODF standard and didn't bother to contribute. Microsoft has no interest in working with other companies to develop an open standard--they want to be proclaimed the standard so they can demand "reasonable royalties" from everyone else, and all the rest of this is just marketing spin to try to put one past the EU, who so far have managed to see through all this bull.

Secondly, Microsoft seems to think the only healthy software marketplace is one that revolves around it. It got where it is by using all sorts of unethical, hardball business practices to drive its competition out of business. This is classic anti-competitive behavior, and is the reason it's been the target of so many actions.

Microsoft has built a large ecosystem of developers and service providers all gathered around the MS stack. Yet you look at the stack and there's not all that much vibrant activity, at least not compared to the open source bazaar. Take content management systems as an example. In the Microsoft world, you've got Sharepoint. You've got a couple of ASP.net open source projects like Dot Net Nuke. And that's about it.

On the open source side, you've got overwhelming choice, and some of them quite great. Instead of one size fits all, you can go shopping for just the features you need, and get it all for a great price--free, if you have the technical ability to make them work. Joomla, Drupal, Plone, MediaWiki, Typo3, Postnuke, Word Press, Serendipity, several hundred different options for you to choose from. Which looks like a more vibrant marketplace, with more competition and more choice?

Ah, but then you ask about standards--isn't it great that Microsoft makes it so simple for you to do what you need to do? You don't have to make all those choices. Soviet bakeries were so much better than American supermarkets, too, huh?

Oh, but wait. Who invented http, rss, the world wide web, email, the spreadsheet, the database, the word processor, or anything else we use our computers for? Hint: not Microsoft. And the first few things in that list were created in universities and other open source, collaborative environments.

Finally, to speak directly to the EU's decision, how does letting Microsoft get away with their monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior help the EU in any way? By protecting their software industry from Microsoft, they're fostering an environment that can lead to a much more competitive, fertile ground to grow their own software industry.

No other industry (other than possibly the utility companies and the railroads) have had a single company that so dominates the industry like Microsoft dominates software. How can that be a good thing? I know from personal experience a half a dozen companies that Microsoft crushed, and for the most part their technology with them. This mono-culture of software has led to all the trouble with spyware and botnets and through them, spam. I don't think we're better off with our Redmond overlords.

I for one was happy to hear about the EU's decision, glad they were able to stand up against monopolistic practices and do something to actually help their software industry thrive.