European Regulators Extend Review of Microsoft Proposal

European regulators gave Microsoft Corp.’s supporters and competitors an extra week to respond to the company’s plan to give away some proprietary information on the inner workings of its Windows operating system.

“Some of the people we were consulting asked for extra time, and we saw no reason not to give it to them,” said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the European Commission, the antitrust regulator for the 25-nation European Union.

Companies opposing Microsoft, including IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Nokia, have until Friday to reply, Todd said. The original deadline was June 24.

EU regulators in March 2004 ordered Microsoft, whose software runs more than 90% of the world’s personal computers, to license information about the inner workings of its Windows operating system to competitors. The company is appealing the ruling at the Luxembourg-based European Court of First Instance, the EU’s second-highest court.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft on June 6 proposed giving away some proprietary information on its Windows operating system to avert as much as $5 million a day in EU antitrust fines. But the company is resisting EU pressure to let makers of open source products such as Linux use the data.