SaaS Journal

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), the front organization for IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, RealNetworks, Opera as well as other companies on the Redmond enemies list, has become a party to the European Commission's latest antitrust complaint against Microsoft.

ECIS, which has a lot of practice harrying Microsoft, especially with the EC, joins the Mozilla Foundation, Google and the Free Software Foundation Europe in sticking its two cents in the EC's tying case against Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which it bundles with the Windows operating system.

Opera, the Scandinavian browser company, brought the original 2007 complaint and of course Google has its Chrome interests and Mozilla its Firefox interests.

ECIS claims in a statement that "By tying OE to the Windows desktop monopoly, by using proprietary IE standards and making Internet applications and content dependent on other Microsoft proprietary technologies such as Silverlight and .NET, Microsoft seeks to establish itself as gatekeeper to the Internet."

Of course IE's position in Europe is not quite as dominant as Microsoft's enemies make out and Windows users aren't locked into using Microsoft's browser but that's not the point.

Microsoft, by the way, has just gotten an extra week to answer the EC's statement of objections. The new deadline, an extension of an extension, is now April 28. Unfortunately it probably doesn't matter what it says.

Microsoft may be required to offer other people's browser and pay a fine.