Microsoft criticizes drafting of secret 'Cloud Manifesto'
Microsoft is criticizing the drafting of what it has characterized as a secret "Cloud Manifesto" that sets guidelines for interoperability among cloud-computing networks.
In a blog posting attributed to Steven Martin, Microsoft spilled the beans on a document it said has been drafted privately and that it was asked to sign without revisions.
"Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input," according to the post.
While the company fully supports the concept of drafting guidelines for interoperability in cloud computing, Microsoft said it was "admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development" of the document.
"To ensure that the work on such a project is open, transparent and complete, we feel strongly that any 'manifesto' should be created, from its inception, through an open mechanism like a Wiki, for public debate and comment, all available through a Creative Commons license," Martin wrote in the post. "After all, what we are really seeking are ideas that have been broadly developed, meet a test of open, logical review and reflect principles on which the broad community agrees. This would help avoid biases toward one technology over another, and expand the opportunities for innovation."
Historically when there are emerging industrywide trends in computing, companies building the technology to support them will get together and try to decide on certain agreed-upon technology and/or business-process standards to make things work smoothly.
These processes inevitably leave some people out of the early development process, said Steven O'Grady, an analyst with RedMonk.
"This is historically how standards evolve, how technical movements develop," he said. "It's generally a coalition of certain parties that have mutual interests. Unfortunately, they tend to be exclusionary."
Microsoft itself has been a part of one of these very public coalitions. The development of a set of technology specifications for interoperability of certain business processes under the umbrella Web Services, shortened to "WS," was largely overseen and driven by Microsoft and IBM, with other vendors feeling left out of that process.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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it's funny
Microsoft suddenly *wants* openness?Microsoft *supports* standards?
Don't be fooled. They're mainly just angry they didn't get to ask for exceptions for everything
This is the same company which could've adopted ODF (open document format), a perfectly good document standard which had already passed ISO standards, but instead railroaded ISO to have openxml approved despite mountains of problems.
This is also the same company which spurned following web standards until the absolute most recent version (which is 'more' standards compliant, but not all the way there), creating a situation where web developers basically had to make two sites to accomodate Microsoft's lack of interest in standards.
Microsoft exists only to leverage computing innovations in ways that monetize it for them and them only.
'Microsoft said it was
'Microsoft said it was "admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development" of the document.'Translation: Microsoft is angry that they weren't allowed to dictate the terms of "interoperability" in order to cut out most of the competition. Wah.clarifications
1. There are several flavors of Creative Commons licensing. Some are more open than others, the point being to tailor the licensing to your desires rather than defaulting to a restrictive licensing model.2. Microsoft is using a wide-open Creative Commons license for documentation of code released on www.codeplex.com, its community development site. This includes code written by Microsoft engineers on Microsoft time (likewise the documentation).
3. The Codeplex code itself is being licensed (in some cases at least) under the Microsoft Permisssive License/Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/dd162267.aspx. This is an open-source license as certified by the Open Source Initiative, though not a free-software license compatible with the GNU-GPL. That license was OSI-certified in 2007.