RSSMicrosoft's latest interoperability pledge: How free is 'open' now?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published February 22, 2008, 12:55 PM
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More calls on Microsoft to open up even more
The absence of any such mention was not lost on Red Hat chief counsel Michael Cunningham, in a response posted to his company's Web site yesterday afternoon.
"Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML," Cunningham wrote, "Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization's meeting next week in Geneva. Microsoft, please demonstrate implementation of an existing international open standard now rather than make press announcements about intentions of future standards support."
But Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove thought yesterday's announcement was about ODF, in a sense...for the way in which it skillfully omitted mention of it.
"With respect to ODF, it will be important to see what kind of plug ins are made available, how they may be deployed, and also how effective (or ineffective) those translators may be," Updegrove said yesterday, in a statement shared with BetaNews. "If they are not easy for individual Office users to install, or if their results are less than satisfactory, then this promise will sound hopeful but deliver little. I am disappointed that the press release does not, as I read it, indicate that Microsoft will ship Office with a 'save to' ODF option already installed. This means that ODF will continue to be virtually the only important document format that Office will not support 'out of the box."'
The fact that Microsoft's making any movement in this direction at all, Updegrove added, is an indication to him that "multiple market forces" -- which, he said, included the EC investigation and the popular uprising of ODF support -- "are pushing and pulling Microsoft in a direction that it would have been highly unlikely to travel otherwise."
Yesterday's statement from the European Commission apparently was intended to serve as a reminder to everyone, including Microsoft, that its definition of "interoperability" is deeper than the mere dissemination of APIs. It said its current investigations are focused on "the alleged illegal refusal by Microsoft to disclose sufficient interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and also in relation to the so called .NET Framework and on the question whether Microsoft's new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products."
Microsoft's APIs, as defined yesterday, provide open access by software with other software for the purposes of sharing information and functionality -- which is actually the way professional developers typically understand APIs and interoperability to work. But the legal definition is often fuzzier, as indicated by the EC's reminder yesterday that Microsoft needs to make its OOXML file format -- as opposed to Office 2007, the software which utilizes the format -- "sufficiently interoperable."
That would require not an API as Ballmer describes it but a plug-in as Updegrove describes it. Microsoft has said it is participating with open, community efforts to produce such plug-ins, though critics continue to question why the company doesn't just produce one on its own. Backers of Microsoft's efforts pose the counter-argument that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to ensure one-to-one correlation between its own format and every other one that comes along, whether or not it's an international standard.
Steve Ballmer will harm Microsoft more than any competitor. His belligerent and nasty attitude is becoming tiresome. He's in serious need of some anger management training.
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|He should be in serious need of a job, is what he should be.
Talk about an unprofessional public face. MSFT needs to seriously think about getting rid of him and doing some actual marketing.
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|And this will mean almost zilch to the average end user. However, developers get a bit of a perk from it... possibly.
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|Microsoft's philosophy is;
If you can't beat them, buy them;
If you can't buy them, dominate them..........
That's just plain good corporate thinking.....
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|I don't understand why MS is going through with this. They own the market and that's the standard. They can tell those losers to get lost. Give them a brick, and they want your house. Do you ever see a 51%+ shareholder's decision is ignore in a corporation?
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|The European Union has ordered them to be more open or face the possibility of being unable to distribute their products within the EU. That's why.
Please read the article next time.
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|Microsoft aka SkyNet will soon see humans as a threat, and you know what will happen then.
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|[via Jason Brooks of eWeek]:
Unlike those Office binary format specifications, which are covered under Microsoft's we-pledge-not-to-sue-you Open Specification Promise, the Windows Server and Communication protocols are covered under a different, somewhat twisty promise that reminds me of the scene from Pulp Fiction where Vincent lays out for Jules the rules surrounding Amsterdam hash bars:
______ Me: Okay, so tell me again about the Windows protocols.
______ Microsoft: Okay, watcha wanna know?
______ Me: Open-source apps can interoperate with Windows now, right?
______ Microsoft: Yeah, it's legal, but it ain't 100 percent legal. I mean, you can't just develop an open-source app that interoperates with Windows and start using it or selling it. I mean, we want you to use these protocols, but only in certain designated ways.
______ Me: Example?
______ Microsoft: Yeah, it breaks down like this, okay, it's legal to develop open-source software with the Windows protocols, it's legal to distribute those apps, but only for noncommercial purposes.... If you pay for our as-yet-undisclosed patent license, it's legal to sell or use those apps, but but, that doesn't matter, because ... get a load of this, we have no intent to sue people who infringe on these patents.... But we might change our minds.
So where does that leave open-source developers who wish to build products that work well with Windows?
If I were developing open-source software, or if I were looking to build a business on open-source software, and if I allowed my applications to become entwined with Microsoft's 30,000 pages of no doubt very useful specifications, I'd feel (to use another Pulp Fiction reference) like Marvin, riding along with Vincent and Jules, with Vincent's handgun waving around casually in my face.
And you remember what happened to Marvin.
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|Wow...so...
As long as the software developed using it stays Free and Open Source, it's Okay, but the second someone tries to make money off of MSFT's tools, well... Not so much?
Huh. Sounds damn near perfect to me.
Pleases the FOSS crowd and keeps others from leeching off of MSFT tools.
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|Fundamentally I am not sure what MS is afraid of. Most users don't care; they just want to be able to open documents and send them to associates.
How can this be BAD for them? People use MS and Office for reasons other than they "have to". MS offers lots of functionality and businesses know they can get it done and support it.
If they get the bonus of being able to not worry about document formats that is a plus, not a minus.
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|Time has come for Microsoft to s*** its business strategy again. Competition is, IMHO, the weight in their balance making such position change.
Good for us, mere mortal consumers? I'd tentatively say yes... but time will tell better.
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|I wouldn't believe a word Microsoft says, and their promises aren't worth the paper they're written on. They have never allowed themselves to be competed with fairly in the past (because they would inevitably lose) and why would they do that now when they have a boat anchor called Vista?
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