RSSMicrosoft's latest interoperability pledge: How free is 'open' now?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published February 22, 2008, 12:55 PM
No move by Microsoft to share information with its competitors will ever be taken at face value, and certainly yesterday's new Interoperability Principle will come under very close scrutiny. Is this the opening of the floodgates the EC has been demanding?
In incremental, measured, if slow steps, Microsoft has made some efforts to comply with directives from the European Commission to make its software and protocols more interoperable with products from other manufacturers. Yesterday, the company surrendered one more boundary between its interoperability policy and the EC's dream situation, making a huge chunk of the information it published in response to the EC's order available to developers free of charge.
"We're announcing that developers will not need to take a license, or pay a royalty, or other fee to access any of that information," revealed CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday (according to Microsoft's transcript). "As an immediate first step to apply the principles today we're publishing to the Web over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a 4D trade secret license. In addition, protocol documents for additional products like Office 2007 will be published in the upcoming months."
The company's newly published Interoperability Principle spells out the terms to which Ballmer referred: "Microsoft will publish its documentation for these Open Protocols and Open APIs on its website so that all developers will have the benefit of this technical information in a manner that takes advantage of the nature of open discussion on the web. Microsoft will not require developers to obtain a license, or to pay a royalty or other fee, to have access to all this information."
But free access, the Principle makes clear, does not mean free use. While Microsoft will no longer charge fees or royalties for parties seeking information on how to make their software interoperable, it may yet charge royalties for the way others use that information.
"Some of Microsoft's Open Protocols are covered by patents," reads the Principle. "Microsoft will indicate on its website 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 developers in clearly understanding whether or not Microsoft patents may apply to any of the protocols, Microsoft will make available a list of the specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol."
The use of APIs to access those protocols, however, will not require a license, even if the service with which software is communicating is itself protected by Microsoft patents. So the company is making it clear, interoperability will not require licenses or incur fees, but like operability (building a product using a design inspired by Microsoft's patented IP) may very well.
The Principle does specify the products to which it applies: "Windows Vista including the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of these products." Previous editions of those products were not listed.
But while Ballmer and others referred to Office 2007 interoperability yesterday, there actually was no mention of Open Document Format, the basis of competing applications suites and the first such format to receive international standardization. Microsoft did open up access -- or at least, open it up somewhat more -- to its principal current products, so it did specify the "to what" part of the change argument, to borrow Rep. Barbara Jordan's famous phrase once again. But it did not specify the "from what."
Thus the status of an ODF plug-in for Office 2007 was not clarified yesterday, even though some got the impression that's what Ballmer was referring to.
Next: More calls on Microsoft to open up even more...
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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