Microsoft offers secret code

2006-01-26 11:24

Leigh Thomas

Brussels - US software giant Microsoft offered on Wednesday to make top-secret computer code available to competitors in order to meet the demands of EU regulators in a long-standing anti-trust dispute.

After eight years of conflict with the European Commission, the company sought to put to rest the main technical issues in the bitter standoff - but lawyers for competitors immediately dismissed the move as a "public relations ploy".

"We are announcing today that we will ... licence the Windows source code itself," said Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith, referring to the basic binary language underpinning the company's near-ubiquitous operating system.

"It does not lay to rest every issue that one might raise about compliance," he conceded.

In reaction, the commission said that it would "study" the announcement once it had the details and was "looking forward" to receiving a reply to a formal notice sent in December on the company's failure to comply with the ruling.

The EU competition watchdog fined the software group in March 2004 a record €497m for abusing its dominant market position.

It also called on Microsoft to market a version of its Windows operating system unbundled from its software Media Player and to divulge information about its operating system needed by manufacturers of rival products.

But the case has rumbled on as Microsoft and the commission disagreed over whether the group was doing enough to meet EU regulators' demands.

'Public relations ploy'

After several months of calm in the standoff, the EU executive turned up the pressure in December by threatening to slap a daily fine of up to two million euros on Microsoft for failing to comply with a ruling.

Lawyers involved in the case on behalf of Microsoft's competitors dismissed the latest move.

"It's merely, entirely and completely a public relations ploy to try to divert attention from the extremely strong case the commission has against Microsoft for failure to comply with the commission's decision," said lawyer Thomas Vinje, who has represented the US giant's rivals.

He said that Microsoft was in effect offering "millions of lines of code", which were "useless" to other programmers without a broader "roadmap" to interpret them, as the commission has demanded.

Another lawyer who had fought Microsoft in the case said that "it's as if they gave all the technical details of an Airbus without the blueprint".

Microsoft's Smith said that the company had provided as much as 12 000 pages of documentation in hope of satisfying EU regulators, but still the commission wanted more proof of compliance.

"The source code is the ultimate documentation," Smith said.

"It should have the answer to any questions that remain."

- AFP