In the continuing saga of the EU vs Microsoft, the "Court of First Instance" heard the response today from the defense for the original ruling against Microsoft. This time, the point was brought out that Microsoft is exaggerating on how much of their intellectual property could be "compromised" by being forced to release particular code, and how the interoperability that Microsoft provides is insufficient. On the fears Microsoft expressed of losing money due to "clone" software, they said:
Whelan said: "We are only talking about the rules of interaction between operating systems, no more than that. Rules of interaction refer to the structure of messages and reactions to such messages....Source code is the implementation of a specification and you can't create code from specifications."
There is no end in sight, and likely it will only get uglier. By the time the dust settles, the technology in question will be outmoded, and the entire argument may start over again.