Re: [Fsfe-uk] MS EU anti-trust licences need to be Free, not RAND

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 12:33, James Heald wrote:
> I suggest that there is a need for an urgent all-Europe campaign that 
> the protocols should *not* made available RAND, but that the measures 
> can only have any chance of being an effective remedy if the protocols 
> are released Public Domain, no strings attached.

I'm not sure PD is necessarily a requirement. I would have thought
necessarily ability would be  to implement the spec. without
restriction, either copyright, EULA, patent or otherwise. 

> Cf, for example, the outcome of the US antitrust remedies, where 
> developers on WINE to avoid any chance glimpse of the MS documents for 
> fear that they might be tainted by the license conditions.

A good example might be the Kerberos ticket thing in Windows - I believe
that is fully documented and freely available; albeit under an EULA that
prohibits you implementing it in free software. 

As I understand the process though, the EU will be proposing various
remedies to Microsoft this week, for a final decision in April. I'm not
sure how we might be able to influence that at this stage. 

Cheers,

Alex.