Microsoft licences set for Fair Trading hearing

IT director's organisation Certus has given its full backing to a campaign to haul Microsoft up in front of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) over its licensing policy.

The campaign is being championed by The Infrastructure Forum (TIF) but David Taylor, president of Certus, said: "Everyone I have spoken to at Certus is 100 per cent behind tif on this one. It's good that they've drawn attention to this problem in such a public way."

He said it is time for software vendors in general to reassess how they dealt with end users. "In this case IT directors feel they are being blackmailed," he added.

Taylor's comments follow a public letter written by tif - an association of large corporate IT users - to Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt urging an OFT review of Microsoft's pricing.

Microsoft is attempting to move away from a model where users buy software outright to one where users are encouraged to pay an ongoing rental fee.

tif said the changes would set its members back nearly £1bn in extra costs. It thinks the changes could be anti-competitive because of the virtual monopoly Microsoft enjoys in the desktop operating systems arena.