Microsoft Blog - Profiling the EU trustee on Microsoft compliance
Who is Neil Barrett, and what's his point of view? Both of those questions became particularly interesting yesterday when he was appointed as the independent trustee to advise the European Commission on Microsoft's compliance with the commission's March 2004 antitrust ruling. As it turns out, there's no shortage of written material for people trying to answer them. A British college professor and computer security expert, Barrett has testified in court cases, commented frequently for news articles, authored several books, and written regular columns for publications including IT Week and silicon.com. (Here's his online bio.) His latest book is Traces of Guilt, pictured here. As noted in the announcement of his appointment, Barrett was chosen by the European Commission from a list of several names submitted by Microsoft as candidates for the position. As pointed out by the International Herald Tribune, however, Barrett has been blunt in his statements about the company, at least once. In this 2001 silicon.com article, he was quoted as criticizing an effort by Microsoft to keep security experts from publicly sharing some key information about vulnerabilities in its software. According to the silicon.com article, the company said it didn't want hackers leveraging the information to exploit the vulnerabilities, but Barrett said the company was in a position to use the situation to its financial advantage. Neil Barrett said:"Microsoft will attempt to control access to vital information, which means they can sell it at any price they want to. To me that's a monopolistic situation." Assuming the quote is accurately portrayed in the story, it's notable because a key issue in the European antitrust case is the extent to which Microsoft will make a different type of technical information, workgroup server protocols, available to rivals in the computer server market, including open-source projects.
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