Microsoft fined €9 million in Germany

European governments should make the use of openoffice mandatory.

That certainly would put a spin on "anticompetitive behavior."

Well I would agree with you but OpenOffice is not for profit whereas MS Office is. The difference between the two models is that one makes technical decisions based on financial feasibility not on technical capabilities. One will continuously fix bugs and patch security flaws where the other will until it is not financially feasible.

Also the fact that no one company controls open source projects, the idea of anti-competitive goes completely away. It is the equal opposite of anti-competitive. Gerardo is right, Governments should force the use of all public documents to be in OpenOffice format, I don't really care so much what they do internally but what the populous has access to should not cost you anything to be able to use, we all already pay way too much taxes to have the privilidge of living on a peice of land sitting on a watered down mud ball flying through space.

To even think that someone who needs to deal with the government whom we pay many of our hard earned dollars needs to go out and buy a 300.00+ USD product is ludicrous.

gerardo, db, you guys lost me at "Governments should force ..."
yeah, we clearly need even more legislature.

Isn't it pretty normal for suppliers to require resellers to sell at a set price?

M$ -(the $ means I'm cool)- should burn and die, and they are stupid, and yeah!!!!

(this message was posted using MS cough M$ IE6 on XP)

(I'm on the bandwagon too! Bonu$)

Not sure exactly what gerardo means by it but what I'm saying is.... when you visit any government website and there are documents to download (forms, press releases, what ever else) these files should be in a file format that does not force the citizens of that country to have to buy something just to view this content that these citizens have already paid for (through taxes).

The way you worded your statement implies that you put a gun at someone's head and say "Use OpenOffice Mofo or I'm gonna cap ur arse"... ;), like I said I don't care what the government uses internally that doesn't matter (or maybe it does a little), but citizens pay taxes which the gov. collects and pays public sector workers to produce documents and content, now as a citizen I have already paid for this why should I be forced to pay some more just to view what they already paid for and ontop of that they would have to upgrade this software every 2 to 4 years just so they can continue to view this content.

Imagine a day where your old, retired and really can`t waist money on luxury items and you need to fill out a government form for your pension, that means your 5 to 10 year old system would then need to be upgraded just to run the latest version of winbloat and on top of that a sparkling shiny new MS Office version 24... nope wait MS has made 12 versions of Office in about 20 years, that would mean this would be version 40, sorry for that mistake. Hmm I wonder how many millions people have paid for office over the years and how many billions in migration costs in half that time..... LOL

OpenOffice 1.0 docs work completely fine in version 3.0... and yes I mean fine like in pagination, formating, print layout, macros and font rendering. This may not be the case for ever but I`ll say this not one version of MS Office has been fully (pagination, formatting, print layouts, macros....) backwards compatible yet... saving as RTF does not count.

"Isn't it pretty normal for suppliers to require resellers to sell at a set price?"

I thought the R in MSRP stood for *recommended*, not *required*.

And I don't know where you are, Andy, but in the EU that behaviour is NOT normal. In fact, it will get manufacturers into BIG trouble (like it did MS), because it *IS* *ILLEGAL*.

Cheers,
Wol

R stands for "retail".
The whole translation is Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price