European Commissioner denies Microsoft vendetta

The European Commissioner in the front line of Europe's battle with Microsoft has said she is not 'pursuing a vendetta' against the company. Nellie Kroes, Europe's Competition Commissioner was replying to a letter published in the Financial Times from a Microsoft business partner who accused the EU Commission of 'playing games' with the software giant. 'Far from pursuing a vendetta against Microsoft, the Commission's actions are guided by the desire to create the most innovation-friendly business climate in Europe to the ultimate benefit of European consumers,' Kroes wrote in response, to the same paper. ...more

The 19 states vow to continue the MS case

Whatever administration the US Presidential elections may deliver, the 19 states partnering the Justice Department in the MS anti-trust case will continue their fight. According to a report in the LA Times, the state law enforcement officials are determined to continue their two-year effort against Microsoft's position. "The states are committed to litigate this to conclusion," said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. ...more

E-mail money around the world

A British company is launching a service for people to e-mail money around the world. London-based earthport will test the system with a trial in Hong Kong - which is expected to go live in mid January - and plans to expand to other countries, including Britain. The Guardian reports that the service features "e-wallets" of money, which recipients can use to shop online, put into bank accounts or e-mail onwards. ...more

New rural broadband trial

BT is to trial a new rural broadband initiative that could enable exchanges serving as few as 16 users. The trials will employ new broadband ADSL equipment to link users to BT's Internet networks, equipment which can be deployed in much smaller units than at present. The six-month trials will be carried out in conjunction with various 'sponsors - regional development agencies, local authorities and IT consultancies, who will contribute ?7000 towards the project. ...more

IBM turns Cloudscape open source

IBM is to hand over the code to the Cloudscape Java based database project to the open source community for free. The code is to be given to the Apache Software Foundation to be developed as an open source project named Derby IBM says that the Cloudscape project - which runs to some half a million lines of code - is worth in the region of ?45 million. The project will be aimed at small businesses and point of sale applications `that don't require the sledgehammer of IBM's DB2 database management system. ...more