“Not only would this confound many of their critics, who see the decision to drop IE support as a retaliation against the new-found popularity of the Mac with the iPod generation, but it would give it a massive credibility boost with the free/open source community. “It would be too much to hope for the code to be made public domain and given away without any copyright restrictions, but it could at least get its highly-paid legal team to come up with a reasonably permissive licence that would let coders get their hands on the last supported version and keep it going,” Thompson writes. “If the company really wants to show that it has changed its approach to business it could take the radical step of placing the source code for the Mac version of IE into the hands of users.” It may be fined up to 2m euros (£1.36m $2.4m) a day if it does not comply,” Bill Thompson writes for BBC News.
“Microsoft is currently in trouble with the European authorities over its failure to give competitors access to details of its server software after a ruling in March 2004.
