A plan by Japan, China and South Korea to develop an operating system alternative to Microsoft's Windows software could raise concerns over fair competition, Microsoft said Friday.
Japan, the world's second-largest economy, made a proposal at an Asian economic summit this week to build an inexpensive and trustworthy open-source operating system that would be based on a system such as Linux, which can be copied and modified freely.
"We'd like to see the market decide who the winners are in the software industry," said Tom Robertson, Microsoft's Tokyo-based director for government affairs in Asia.
Microsoft prefers competition between software applications to be determined in the free markets rather than by government agencies. "Governments should not be in the position to decide who the winners are," Robertson said.
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