Microsoft Pulls Out of UN Talks

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Microsoft Pulls Out of UN Talks

By John Markoff
08/25/04 9:22 AM PT

In an e-mail message sent Monday to two officials of the UN
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 UN/Cefact for business
reasons, and this serves as notification of our immediate
withdrawal from all UN/Cefact activities."

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft has
withdrawn from a United Nations software standards group for
commerce, citing "business reasons."

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

Advocates of proprietary and open approaches to software
technology Relevant Products/Services from Intel Enterprise
Solutions standards had clashed within the organization,
which is known as the UN Center for Trade Facilitation and
Electronic Business, or UN/Cefact.

Microsoft's Open-Source Opposition

Microsoft opposes the use of open source Latest News about
open source software, which is freely shared. But
Microsoft's withdrawal on Monday was apparently not directly
related to the earlier controversy, according to several
industry representatives.

Instead, they said, it was 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 UN
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 UN/Cefact for business
reasons, and this serves as notification of our immediate
withdrawal from all UN/Cefact activities."

Intellectual Property Claims

Two people in the group said that several U.S. and European
companies were concerned about intellectual property rights
guidelines within the group. The guidelines would force
corporations that contribute technology to indemnify the
world body against potential challenges involving
intellectual property claims.

In May, the general counsel for SAP (NYSE: SAP) Latest News
about SAP announced that the German business software
company would suspend all participation in the organization
until the intellectual property issues had been settled.

The UN group became embroiled in an industry squabble early
this year over an open standard for commerce known as ebXML.

The UN standard, which was backed by some U.S. companies and
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 set of standards.

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

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