A version of Windows minus the company’s Media Player will begin shipping to Europe next week.
The release of special editions of the Windows XP operating system will happen on June 15th. These versions will not contain the Windows Media Player, a condition of the software company’s compliance with the European Commission’s antitrust ruling against it.
The EU recently approved a Microsoft proposal on terms to comply with the anti-competition ruling. That proposal came in the last hours of a deadline that could have seen Microsoft fined about $5 million USD per day for not complying with the ruling.
Microsoft agreed to sell the unbundled version of Windows. However, the details of the ruling did not compel Microsoft to sell it at a lower price. On another point, Microsoft managed to get the EU to agree that the company only had to share certain parts of its source code and protocols with a designated group of global vendors.
And interest in the unbundled version may be very mild, as computer manufacturers could choose not to use a limited version of Windows with their products.
That agreement excluded developers of open source software from participating in the code share until after an appeal of the antitrust ruling can be heard by the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. Microsoft hopes to get the ruling thrown out, but the court won’t hear the case until next year at the earliest.
The exclusion of open source developers from seeing interoperability code did not sit well with some in Europe.
“The proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a Free Software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software,” said Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe.
“As Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market, the Microsoft proposal translates to: Of course we will give you the specifications – unless you happen to be a serious competitor of ours, that is.”
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
