Microsoft to lose rights to Internet Explorer?

Wired has reported that the Wall Street Journal has reported that evidently the US government is considering forcing Microsoft to grant royalty-free licenses to Internet Explorer, thus opening the programming code to customers and computer makers. There are also reports that restrictions on Office and Windows 2000 server are bing looked at. Is it all just a bad case of chinese whispers? Isn't IE already free? How will granting royalty-free licenses to Internet Explorer open up the source code? And which version of Internet Explorer? In a climate where the browser war seems to have already been won, it seems a strange way to punish Microsoft. Microsoft started giving it's browser away a number of years ago, forcing Netscape to follow suit. Is this merely a way of forcing Microsoft to now follow Netscape in becoming Open Source? For a very amusing take on who should really be punished, and their method of punishment, check out Jon Rochmis' article. On an only slightly related topic, read about Judge Jackson's comments implying the computer industry is not embracing Linux, and that Linux won't last.