Microsoft News Tracker

Yesterday Microsoft unveiled what they termed as “a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability“. Specifically:

Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
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The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.

The gory details are available by following the link but the net is that Microsoft is doing the following (my comments in italics):

• Has now published on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license.
• Will publish documentation for Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume products.
• Will “indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates. To assist those interested in considering a patent license, Microsoft will make available a list of specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol.” Actually, that they assert cover each protocol. This used to be a great mystery.
• “Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. … Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.” Microsoft wants cash if your business is using open source software that implements what they feel are their protocols.
• “When Microsoft supports a standard in a high-volume product, it will work with other major implementers of the standard toward achieving robust, consistent and interoperable implementations.” It would be even better if they committed to support some basic open standards, particularly in Internet Explorer.
• “Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.”

It’s easy to denigrate this as yet another Microsoft interoperability pledge, but on the face of it there are significant improvements in this announcement including the open publication of the documentation and the covenant not to sue non-profit developers. Still the devil is in the details and this initiative is clearly less than what open source competitors want so it is a bit early to claim it as a breakthrough.

As for the intended audience of this announcement, it seems clear that it is an attempt to placate antitrust regulators around the world and particularly in the European Union. Microsoft’s tardiness in providing interoperability information got them spanked in both the recent US and EU antitrust cases and this seems to be a peace offering. Unsurprisingly, the initial EU reaction is just as equivocal as mine.