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Henry Bremridge wrote: > Article from the Wall Street Journal (free at the moment) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114679425235844561.html This URL relies on Flash > http://tinyurl.com/hrlre Whichever way, the page is covered in ads - make sure you browse in FireFox with AdBlock! If this was on a smaller scale, it would be comparable with some of the spats that occur in free software development. At the heart of the dispute is that the EU agrees that MS should produce a stable API (the manual being discussed) that others can use to build their own code. The manual / API must be clear, usable, unambiguous and above all reliable. No point making MS publish the manual only to let them change the API with the very next service pack. MS is correct to think that this is a lever to break apart the monopoly. There is, however, no reason for such an API to be the intellectual problem that MS try to claim it is. It makes me worry that there actually IS no internal API! "[EU] staff stressed they did not seek disclosure of the secret code itself -- just the so-called grammar rules that would let rivals' software communicate better with it." i.e. the manual is an API. An API does not have to declare the internal workings of the library, just provide approved access points to the opaque internals. The real sticking point, I suspect, is that MS don't want to have to maintain a stable API because they haven't had one internally. The second sticking point for MS is also clear: [The EU regulator] was adamant that companies that service and distribute the increasingly popular [GNU/]Linux computer operating system, including Red Hat, be able to use the programming manual Microsoft had been ordered to develop. Now that has *got* to hurt in Redmond. Note: The EU is not requiring that the libraries are released under a free software licence nor is it requiring that the API itself be freely distributable. It just has to have a licence that allows GPL or LGPL software (like Samba) to use the API. Proprietary code can have a public API, this isn't difficult. Even RMS would not believe that MS are about to release the entire Windows source code under the GNU GPL. It would be nice, but it isn't exactly a good bet right now. MS are simply being obstructive: "[The API] lacked any kind of heading or chapter organization, failed to define programming terms, and was so vast as to be more confusing than helpful." "[The API] featured gibberish text, chapters that didn't begin or end and links to Web sites that led nowhere." Just because blokes don't use manuals around the home, does not mean a software API manual can be made unreadable and unusable! That's the kind of manual that has to be read. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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