After nine years, Microsoft has given up its fight against European Union regulators. Essentially, the EU says Microsoft is a monopoly, and as such should take certain measures to give consumers more options and open up its source code a tiny bit to enable interoperability with third party software.

Microsoft has decided not to appeal the latest EU court ruling, which means the company will fork over $705 million which had been sitting in an escrow account since since the fine was levied in 2004.

Other highlights of the agreement include:

• Microsoft will allow third party companies to license non-patented technology to ensure interoperability with Windows
• Companies will only have to pay a one-time €10,000 fee for that intellectual property, not an ongoing royalty
  

In return, the EU is removing its hit from Microsoft's head. In other words, no more fines against the company until the next time it tries to do something incredibly anti-competitive, like (hypothetically) engineering an operating system that plays well with Microsoft Office but not so well with competing software suites like OpenOffice.org.