Shoutbox

In reference to your poor attempt at sayimg MS is purposefully NOT keeping up to date:

Microsoft on Monday withdrew from a United Nations software standards group for commerce, citing "business reasons."

Earlier this year, Microsoft's participation had created controversy within the group, which is attempting to define standards for creating a new generation of Internet services to automate buying and selling through networks of computers.

Advocates of proprietary and open approaches to software technology standards had clashed within the organization, which is known as the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, or U.N./Cefact. Microsoft, a maker of proprietary software, opposes the use of open-source software, which is freely shared.

But Microsoft's withdrawal on Monday apparently was not directly related to the earlier controversy, according to several industry representatives. Rather, they said, it stemmed from a set of thorny issues over control of intellectual property that is being contributed to the standards-setting effort.

In an e-mail message sent Monday to two officials of the U.N. standards group, Dave Welsh, a Microsoft program manager, wrote: "Microsoft regularly evaluates its standards participation and its available resources for effective participation. Unfortunately, for now, we have made the decision to stop participating in U.N./Cefact for business reasons and this serves as notification of our immediate withdrawal from all U.N./Cefact activities."

The e-mail message also noted that previous Microsoft contributions to the group were not bound by the negotiations taking place over the control of intellectual property.

Microsoft executives declined to comment on the message, but a company representative said that the decision to withdraw was a "question of priorities" and that the focus of the standards body was moving away from Microsoft's expertise.

Various U.N./Cefact officials also refused comment or did not return phone calls.

Two people who participate in the standards group said that several U.S. and European companies were concerned about guidelines regarding intellectual property rights that are in effect within the group. The guidelines would force corporations that contribute technology to indemnify the United Nations against potential challenges involving intellectual-property claims.

At a meeting of the U.N. group in May, the general counsel for SAP, the German business software company, announced that his company would suspend all participation in the organization until the intellectual-property issues had been settled.

The dispute parallels issues raised in a lawsuit brought in the United States by the SCO Group, a software company, against IBM. SCO has accused IBM of illegally placing software owned by SCO into the Linux open-source operating system.

Earlier this year, the United Nations group became embroiled in an industry squabble over an open standard for commerce known as ebXML. The United Nations standard, which was backed by some American companies and which has been widely adopted in Asia and Europe and by the Pentagon, competes in some ways with a joint Microsoft-IBM effort to establish a different set of standards.

The dispute became public in February, when some members of the United Nations organization complained that Microsoft was financing the group's activities in an effort to persuade the organization to adopt its software.

At the time, Microsoft disputed the charges and said that it had made only "modest" contributions to the organization.

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