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Microsoft's draft licence, step by step

• Tags:
• Antitrust,
• EU

Ingrid Marson and Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 18 Mar 2005 18:10 GMT

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You mentioned those. Just how high are they?
Well, if you're the one applying for a licence, Microsoft has proposed a royalty fee of 5 percent of your company's net revenue obtained from a software product that has used Microsoft's file and print protocols, and 2.5 percent if the protocols are used for an embedded product. The minimum royalty per server product sold or distributed is $80 (£42), with a maximum royalty of $1900. There is no minimum royalty payable for embedded products.

For the user and group administration protocols, Microsoft has split these into two categories: those that provide functionality equivalent to Microsoft's Domain Controller, which includes authentication, authorisation and the management of access to network resources such as applications and printers; and those that provide functionality equivalent to Microsoft's Global Catalog, which provides directory services.

Companies that use Microsoft's Domain Controller protocols for their product must pay a per-user royalty fee of $1.90 for every server sold. Companies that use Global Catalog protocols must pay a per-user royalty fee of $0.15 for every server sold. The minimum per-server royalty fee is $100, while the maximum is $600. If companies implement both Domain Controller and Global Catalog functionality they must pay royalties for both protocols.

That's a lot of money. Is Microsoft strapped for cash?
Well, in the 12 months to July 2004, it was making $100m a day.

And now it's looking to make more money for breaking the law? So surely Microsoft must be flush enough to give the open source guys a break? Do they have to pay royalties too?
No.

Well that's good, right?
Not really. The licence specifically excludes open source. Section 2.4 states: "The licenses granted in Section 2.1(a) do not include any license right, power or other authority to subject Licensed Server Implementations or derivative works thereof in whole or in part to any of the terms of any other license that requires such Licensed Server Implementations or derivative works thereof to be disclosed or distributed in source code form."

And this is the same Microsoft whose chairman Bill Gates recently lectured the industry that boosting interoperability "will be the only way for companies to make customers' lives easier"?
The very same.

OK, so what if I reverse engineer the protocols?
The licence does have a provision for 'independent software' which basically says that software entirely developed without any reference to Microsoft confidential information by those who have not had access to Microsoft confidential information for at least a year prior to development, is not covered by the licence.

That's nice of them.
Yes.

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