European Extortion!!

So, the senile people at European Union are at it again. Earlier they slapped Microsoft with a fine of $613 million just because they bundled Windows Media Player for free with their Windows operating system and their competitors had problems selling their stinky stuff(read RealPlayer from RealNetworks). They ordered Microsoft to ship a version of Windows without Media Player software(the choice of which version goes on a PC depended on the vendor selling them, like Dell, HP etc. and thus it still wasn’t in the hand of the end-user) and share code with competitors which will allow them to integrate their media playing softwares better with Windows. That done, European Union is now demanding that Microsoft open up the inner workings of Windows & document it and license it to competitors. They’ve till January 25th to respond or EU will be fining them upto $2.37 million per day if Microsoft doesn’t nod its head in agreement, reported Yahoo! News. If that’s not enough, the good old EU said that its also looking into what royalties Microsoft will charge from the companies that will license the information on inner workings of Windows, and if EU was not happy with the what Microsoft demands, there’ll be more trouble for Microsoft!! :eyebrow: What’s EU? A goddamned Socialismo??? :boxed:

You really gotta admire the nerve of some people. They’ve the guts to tell you on what you can put in your product and what not(even its not illegal) and then they say that you’ve to tell the competition how your stuff works & you’ll charge them licensing fees what they’ll fix!! This is just gone beyond being ludicrous!!

I mean, what the damn one needs to know more about Windows inner workings to make a Media Player software(this issue started with it, right?)? Aren’t there a whole load of media playing softwares in the market that run on Windows? Don’t they do the job fine? I don’t know if this is about making something else to run on Windows(it maybe by the sounds of it), but if its just for media playing softwares, then this is really really ridiculous!! :tdown: