News Comment All comments on news story: Microsoft Is Yielding in European Antitrust Fight It's a reply to comment: Ballmer has his Kroes and eats it ... by: pinniped  This part strikes me as unnecessary and dangerous: "These protocols are trade secrets, not patents. If competitors want more information than those trade secrets, they must license Microsoft’s patents, paying a royalty of 0.4 percent of the competing product’s sales." 1. The EU does not currently recognize software patents, so the part about patents is bullshit. This is more of MS demonstrating that it is "protecting its patents" and slowly building up a case to attack Free Software with patents (at least in the USA). 2. Anyone can pay the US Patent Office to read through any granted patents. Why should people pay Ballmer for "more information than those trade secrets"? More BS from MS. It looks suspiciously like MS wins again (even though it at least looks like they don't own the EU courts as they do the US courts). Oh well. As Shakespeare once penned: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
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