Analysis: The European Commission began investigating whether Microsoft had abused its dominant market position following a complaint from Sun Microsystems in December 1998.
Sun maintained Microsoft was not providing the information about communications protocols it needed to get its servers to communicate with PCs running the Windows operating system.
As a result, it said it was not able to compete fairly with Microsoft, who had an unfair advantage selling its server software to Sun competitors.
A commission investigation found that Sun was not the only company having problems getting this information and it was part of a wider strategy to keep competitors out of the market.
In 2000, the anti-trust investigation was expanded to look at Microsoft's tying of Windows Media Player to the Windows 2000 operating system. The commission felt as Media Player was embedded in Windows, consumer choice was diminished.
Following a five-year investigation, the commission reached its decision in April 2004 that Microsoft had violated the EU treaty's competition rules by abusing its near monopoly in the PC operating system market.
It imposed a record fine of €497.2 million on the company and sought two main remedies.
Microsoft had to provide the information that would allow competitors to get their software to talk to Windows and it would have to make available versions of Windows that did not have Media Player embedded.
In June 2004, Microsoft announced it would appeal that decision and the first hearings of that case will take place at the European Court of First Instance on April 24th next. Last December, the commission issued a statement of objections against Microsoft for what it said was its failure to comply with the 2004 decision. Microsoft responded with yesterday's announcement of a source code licensing program, but the commission seems unimpressed by the move.
In a statement following the announcement, the commission said it would study what Microsoft was offering carefully once it received the full details. It still expects to receive, no later than February 15th, a reply from Microsoft to its statement of objections from last December. The statement adds that "the commission sent the statement of objections because of Microsoft's failure to disclose complete and accurate interface documentation to allow non-Microsoft servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers".
This was despite its obligation to do so under the terms of the commission's March 2004 decision that Microsoft was abusing its dominant market position.
The statement added that the decision on whether Microsoft is compliant with the 2004 decision rests with the commission.
Software industry sources say there is unlikely to be a rush by competitors to license the source code. If developers have seen the source code under licence, they may be open to copyright infringement actions should they develop products which Microsoft feels use copies of its code.
