Giant Software Maker Bows to European Commission and Will Grant Access to Server Protocols. Microsoft has decided to end its anti-trust fight with the European Commission and will sell its server software for minimal compensation. The decision to comply with a 2004 order by the commission will likely have an enormous impact on the $60 billion server marker. For the first time, Microsoft’s competitors will have a Giant Software Maker Bows to European Commission and Will Grant Access to Server Protocols.Microsoft has decided to end its anti-trust fight with the European Commission and will sell its server software for minimal compensation.The decision to comply with a 2004 order by the commission will likely have an enormous impact on the $60 billion server marker. For the first time, Microsoft’s competitors will have affordable access to the code needed to make their enterprise products fully interoperable with the company’s own. Under the agreement, software developers must now only pay a one-time fee of 10,000 euros, or $14,300, to gain access to Microsoft’s server protocols. Competitors that use Microsoft’s protocols in their own products will pay up 0.4 percent of sales to Microsoft. Microsoft had originally demanded 5.95 percent of sales as royalties.It wasn’t immediately clear how the ruling will affect U.S.-based competition, but since so many major software players are multi-national, the effect will be global. Microsoft hasn’t yet issued a statement on the ruling. Microsoft said it would make the server protocols available for purchase through its Web site, but the published link isn’t working yet. I’ll update this post a bit later and include a working link, as well as comments from the company. The decision to end the legal brawl with the Europeans may seem surprising, but in recent years Microsoft has shown increasing willingness to settle anti-trust-related claims out of court, says analyst Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft. Moreover, the company has proactively moved to avoid anti-trust conflicts. For example, says, Rosoff, there are no direct links between the company’s desktop search which is built into Vista and the Microsoft Live web search engine, although it probably would have been technically simple, he said. “A few years ago, Microsoft would have done that. But since Ballmer took over, the calculus has changed.”According to Rosoff, the decision to comply will give a boost to the SAMBA development community, which has long sought to simply the links between its open-source mail servers and Micorsoft’s mail servers. Technology Industry