"A lengthy interview on Groklaw discusses the EU's case against Microsoft. The case is supported by Opera, Google, Mozilla, ECIS, and the Free Software Foundation Europe.
The EU has demanded that users are offered a 'ballot screen' to make it easier for users to select other browsers.
Microsoft has responded by implementing the ballot screen as a web page inside IE.
While this may nominally satisfy EU's demand, it is unlikely to satisfy users who prefer other browsers. In order to select another browser, users must be running IE.
Also, users will be shown security warnings when choosing from the ballot. Microsoft's ability to charge patent fees in Europe is also discussed: why are they allowed to charge patent fees where software patents are not recognized?"...Slashdot
The devil is in the details
"So the bottom line is, to be very frank, we believe that Microsoft has found a way of accomodating the Commission's suggestion of a ballot screen in a way that just won't, in any significant way, work. Whereas, they're, as far as we can tell, rejecting an alternative which they themselves have used in other contexts and which we think very clearly will work much more effectively."
"Another point that I think is very important to emphasize, another serious devil in the details, one might say, is that under Microsoft's proposal, Internet Explorer will remain active on the machine, fully present, unless the user, having chosen an alternative browser, actively goes through a process to turn it off. Now, our view would be, if you look at what this is supposed to be all about, how it's really supposed to work, and what the ultimate result is supposed to be, it seems to us that it would be rather natural to provide that if a user chooses an alternative browser, that Internet Explorer is automatically turned off. If a user wishes to choose Internet Explorer, he or she is perfectly free to do so; if a user wishes to choose an alternative browser as his or her default and to have Internet Explorer as an additional browser, he or she is perfectly free under the ballot screen that we propose to do so."
"So we believe Microsoft's proposal has been designed to be ineffective and to insure that Internet Explorer's advantages from the time will remain in place."
Interview with ECIS's Thomas Vinje and Ashwin van Rooijen - Updated - @ Groklaw
Friday, October 09 2009 @ 01:17 PM EDT