Stories by Paul Meller

European IT and telecom ministers called for the introduction of open standards and interoperability in government procurement of IT on Monday, sparking applause from the industry.

Software developer and political lobbyist Florian Mueller weighed in on the European Commission's investigation of monopoly abuse claims against IBM, accusing the computing giant of deserting the interests of the open-source software community.

Should teenagers who illegally download music, films and the like in their bedrooms be treated like criminal gangs counterfeiting everything from life-saving drugs to Gucci handbags?

The European Parliament demanded Wednesday that the European Commission open up secret negotiations about an anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to the public.

The U.S., Europe and other countries are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the Internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.

The European Commission has approved Hewlett-Packard's US$2.7 billion takeover of 3Com without attaching conditions, the Commission announced on Friday.

The European Commission granted Oracle an unconditional approval to take over Sun Microsystems on Thursday, following a controversial and drawn out examination of the deal.The deal still awaits approval in other jurisdictions, including Russia and China, but approval in the European Union is a big step forward for a deal hailed by some as transformational for the entire software industry, and by others as the killer of one of the most successful open source programs in the world, the MySQL database.

Google is pushing for the creation of an E.U. group to look at security and privacy policy, the company's top privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, said Tuesday.

Microsoft announced plans to cut the length of time it stores IP addresses of Web searchers using its Bing search engine from 18 months to six in a bid to improve its privacy track record.

With the European Commission seen as virtually certain to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in just a week, those campaigning to prevent the deal encompassing Sun's MySQL database unit have shifted their efforts to regulators in Russia and China.

Microsoft's successful settlement of its antitrust issues with the European Commission was welcomed by the software company's foes and friends alike Wednesday, with many hailing the moment as a turning point for the computer industry.

Oracle's latest commitments designed to address the European Commission's concerns regarding its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the MySQL database are paper thin, and even if they were confirmed they wouldn't safeguard MySQL's future, said Florian Mueller, an outspoken critic of the deal, on Monday.

Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems seems set for regulatory clearance in the European Union. The companies' latest promises to safeguard competition in the market for database software, make the Commission optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, it said Monday.

Oracle is expected to portray its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and more specifically of Sun's MySQL unit, as a procompetitive move necessary to balance the might of Microsoft in the low end database market during a two-day hearing in Brussels that opened Thursday.

Secretive international trade negotiations intended to clamp down on counterfeiting risk undermining the openness and innovation-friendly nature of the Internet, said EuroISPA, a trade group representing Europe's Internet service providers (ISPs), on Monday.