Loving Linux
Microsoft has announced a further mending of its ways, in order to “increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors,” according to its press release.
This will take the form of four new interoperability commandments to be applied to its high-volume business products:
- Thou shalt ensure open connections
- Thou shalt promote data portability
- Thou shalt enhance support for industry standards
- Thou shalt foster more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, revealed that interoperability across applications and services has become important, as enterprise architectures have become comprised of components from a number of sources.
“Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions,” said Ozzie.
The four commandments apply to the following 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.
Key specific actions include:
- Microsoft will publish on its Web site documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other Microsoft products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information.
- As an immediate next step, starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols
- Microsoft 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.
- Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.
A first glance, this appears to be a further gesture of appeasement towards the European Commission, which is still investigating Microsoft’s business practices, including interoperability.
However, the Commission yesterday indicated that it had heard it all before: “The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability,” it said. “Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today’s announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.”
On a more strategic level, products like the ASUS Eee PC and Elonex’s recently announced ONE laptop mean that there’s a good chance little Johnny’s first PC will run on Linux from now on and Microsoft wants to still be around in a generation’s time.
Of course it would help if Vista didn’t keep throwing little challenges at Microsoft. The latest one concerns the long-awaited Service Pack One (SP1), which many business users were waiting for before daring to upgrade from XP.
It seems SP1 stops a number of pieces of software from working, including some Bit Defender, Trend Micro and Zone Alarm security software. This would be less of a problem if normal users hadn’t started to be offered SP1 well ahead of the stated mid-March roll-out deadline.
