The meaningfulness of the 2004 ruling is at stake here. So far no one has bought a license to see Microsoft's technical documentation. There is a danger that this side of the case could be rendered meaningless.

The commission has a very strong case, I think the strongest it's ever had.

The draft law does a good job in preserving and solidifying the country of origin principle for e-commerce, but it is not good news for offline publishers,

This has crucial implications for Linux on desktops.

For the last eight years, the commission has been extremely careful to follow every procedural rule to the letter. From a legal point of view, everything I know indicates the commission has been very correct.

Hes very good at pulling rabbits out of hats, but the rabbit disappears in the end.

In other words, exactly what the commission predicted would occur as a result of Microsoft's illegal bundling behavior has occurred: Real has been marginalized, ... The lesson is that the commission is right to have found Microsoft to have engaged in illegal conduct, but that it erred in taking so long to decide the case and in imposing an ineffective remedy.

In his final summing up he talked about ways forward by identifying the problems Microsoft must solve. That's not a plan.

The settlement strengthens the Commission's case. Real has already provided evidence for the case, and that record is complete and in Luxembourg.

They would dump millions of lines of code and finding what competitors need to interoperate would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even the most sophisticated software engineers would be lost.