Monday’s big not-really-news was Microsoft’s acceptance of the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling governing sharing of information about workgroup server protocols with third-party developers. Microsoft also agreed to lower the royalty rate for the information. It’s a big concession by Microsoft — but a big ’so what?’ from the enterprise open source community.

InformationWeek’s Open Source blog may have headlined it best: Microsoft Bows To The EU, Open Source Shrugs . The post also gives a good roundup of the issues.

But the best quote may have come in ZDNet’s Open Source blog . Citing no benefit and a change in patent licensing, OpenOffice.org marketing lead John McCreesh said: “the EU has laboured for three years to produce this particular ridiculous mouse.”

In the same ZDNet post, Optaros developer Dave Gynn made a more specific request, noting while the decision opens up internal protocols “we’re not writing code to that level. We need web service APIs, not protocol at the network transport level.”

Will Microsoft ever accept the open source agenda? Stay tuned for the next round.

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This entry was posted by Ryck on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Enterprise open source, Licensing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.