February 21, 2008, 1:04 PM — In a major turnaround for Microsoft,
the company Thursday promised "greater transparency" in its development
and business practices, outlining a new strategy to provide more access to APIs
and previously proprietary protocols for some of its major software products,
including Windows and Office.
The move, inspired by the ongoing antitrust case against Microsoft in the European
Union, shows the company finally acknowledging the significant impact open source
and open standards have had on the industry and the company's own business.
It also should mean the end of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux and
interoperability concerns surrounding Office 2007 file formats.
During a news conference with top executives Thursday, Microsoft said it is
implementing four new interoperability principles and actions across its business
products to ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support
for industry standards, and foster more open engagement with customers and the
industry, including open-source communities.
These steps are "important" and represent "significant change
in how we share information about our products and technologies," Microsoft
CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. "For the past 33 years, we have
shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the
world and helped build the industry, but today's announcement represents a significant
expansion toward even greater transparency."
Under increased global pressure, Microsoft has limped toward a more open development
policy for some time with strategies like the Open Specification Promise, which
it published in September 2006 as a pledge that it would not take any patent-enforcement
action against those who use certain technology APIs (application programming
interfaces). The company launched
an open-source Web site last year, a move that was notable for one of the
first official uses of the term "open source" by the company. Microsoft
previously would release APIs and code to developers and other companies through
something it called the Shared
Source Initiative rather than specifically calling its policy open source.
However, at the same time as it appeared to be more open, Microsoft continued
to make bold claims and threats against technologies like Linux that it said
violated many patents the company holds. While the open-source community mostly
scoffed at Microsoft's claims, some companies -- including Novell -- signed
specific deals with the vendor to protect customers from indemnification and
promote interoperability with Microsoft software.
Microsoft also continued to promote proprietary file formats it designed as
the default for Office 2007 -- Office Open XML (OOXML) -- in favor of another
file format, ODF (Open Document Format for XML), which already has been approved
as a global technology standard by the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO).
Microsoft submitted the OOXML specification to another standards body, Ecma
International, in November 2005 in an effort to have it fast-tracked through
the ISO. However, approval by the ISO has been stalled and the process riddled
with complaints that Microsoft is not acting in the transparent way typical
of an international standards process.
The announcements on Thursday don't affect the company's continued efforts to standardize OOXML, Ballmer said during the press conference.
Thursday's news includes broad, royalty-free publishing of APIs and the establishment
of an Open Source Interoperability Initiative to provide ongoing resources and
documentation to the community, and marks more commitment than the notoriously
proprietary software maker has ever shown toward embracing open standards and
open source.
Microsoft plans to publish on its Web site documentation for APIs and communications
protocols that are used by what it calls its "high-volume products."
Microsoft includes Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server
2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint
Server 2007 -- as well as their future versions -- under this umbrella. Microsoft
will not require developers to license or pay royalties for this information,
the company said.
