More details about Google’s offer to the European cloud consortium CISPE have emerged. The company reportedly had millions of euros to spare to ‘support innovation in open cloud ecosystems.’ In reality, it would be a veiled attempt to have the group continue their long-running lawsuit against Microsoft, although Google denies that these matters are related.
Google is said to have promised 100 million euros in credits for Google Distributed Cloud, spread over five years, to CISPE members. This means that the companies could have purchased software to run Kubernetes workloads. Furthermore, Google promised each CISPE member (in July there were 27, now 36) 100,000 euros under a ‘Members Innovation Fund’.
The Register writes that the total sum in this fund would be up to 4 million. It claims to have seen the presentation that Amit Zavery, then vice president of Google Cloud Platform, gave to the consortium members. As a bonus, Google also reportedly wanted to throw in an additional 10 million euros for ‘participating and membership resources,’ whatever that means.
Continuing the lawsuit
The condition for paying the money was that CISPE would remain ‘unrestricted in its ability to promote and advance the Fair Software Licensing Principles‘. Supposedly meaning that CISPE would continue its long-running lawsuit against Microsoft over unfair business practices. Google denies that the two cases are related.
The group brought the case before European judges because Microsoft makes running its own software in cloud environments of other companies (such as Google Cloud and AWS) much more expensive than running it in Azure, which belongs to Microsoft itself. According to CISPE at the time, that constituted unfair competition because potential customers would choose Azure over competitors’ services for this reason.
No monitoring for two years
Ultimately, the consortium backtracked because Microsoft made ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse.’ For two years, Microsoft will not pay unannounced visits to the European cloud companies to check whether they comply with all software licenses properly.
In exchange for withdrawing the case, Microsoft also promised to make a voluntary contribution of between 10 and 30 million euros to CISPE and make the company’s services more widely available to local cloud infrastructures. Now that CISPE has backed down, Google Cloud itself has filed a complaint with the European Commission over Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices.