Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

Member of EU Parliament asks if Microsoft should be excluded from public procurement

By Pamela Jones et al.

A member of the EU Parliament, Heidi Rühle, representative of the Green Party, has presented a question regarding whether or not Microsoft should be considered as having failed to fulfill the conditions to participate in public procurement procedures in Europe, as laid out in Article 93(b) and (c) of Financial Regulation. Here's her web page, in German, telling about it. One computer translation of one paragraph:

Here the question arises whether Microsoft can be excluded in the future from all advertisements of public jobs - no matter, whether it concerns new software for the public library of a town or the mechanism of a database for a federal authority.

Here's Heise's coverage in German, and happily for us in the US, here's the form [PDF] in English. Heise says the EU Commission has six weeks to respond in writing to such a question from a member of Parliament.

Of course, if the EU Commission wants to find a way to avoid such a penalty, no doubt it can do so. We saw how creative rule-bending/creating can be in the ISO. But the very fact that this question is being placed on the table is remarkable in itself, don't you think? Something significant has shifted in Microsoft's universe. And if they are afraid to make such a move, due to the ubiquity of Microsoft software and their dependence upon it, might that alone not inspire some deep thoughts about the wisdom of doing something about that vulnerability?

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 10, 2008 (boomark / email).