The Microsoft antitrust settlement, if approved, would be a potential death blow to open source and free software interoperability with Microsoft products. See this analysis by Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell of the Samba project.
I asked Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, to explain why there’s such worry in the free software community. He noted that that the settlement document was changing somewhat under pressure from state attorneys general, but replied this way based on what the foundation had seen:
The settlement in paragraphs III.D and E says that Microsoft mustdocument its APIs within reasonable time, for ISVs, “for the solepurpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product.””Sole” is the critical word. Not, that is, to allow a competingNon-Microsoft “operating system product” to interoperate with Windows*applications*. This is designed to make it possible for Microsoft todeny information to developers of GNU/Linux software like WINE thatallows Windows apps to run on non-Microsoft OSs. Even if theinformation could be used for both purposes, the inclusion of the word”sole” creates an argument Microsoft can make to the Court that theuse of the information to make Windows app binaries run unmodified onGNU/Linux/X systems through WINE or equivalent is a misuse of itsproprietary information that the settlement requires it to release”solely” for other purposes.
III. I(5) says that “an ISV, IHV, IAP, ICP, or OEM may be required to
grant to Microsoft on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms a license
to any intellectual property rights it may have relating to the
exercise of their options or alternatives provided by this Final
Judgment; the scope of such license shall be no broader than is
necessary to insure that Microsoft can provide such options or
alternatives.” Microsoft will use this to argue that code under the
GPL must be licensed to it on non-GPL terms, so they can use the code
in their own programs without having to GPL their programs.The draft settlement also uses RAND to describe the terms on which
Microsoft must provide the information about APIs required for release
under the agreement. But RAND terms, if those involve “reasonable”
payments to Microsoft for API information, can exclude a large
proportion of the world’s free software developers.We will argue to the Justice Department and the Court that the
settlement should require Microsoft to release the API and other
technical documentation freely and without limitation, to allow anyone
to write programs that interoperate with Windows, and to allow Windows
apps to execute under non-Windows OSs.