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Microsoft Opens its Box of Secrets|
- By CXOtoday Staff, Feb 22, 2008 1850 hrs IST
- Tags : Microsoft Opens its Box of Secrets
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In a bid to change the company's image and increase the openness of its products, Microsoft has made a number of changes to its technology and business practices. These alterations in Microsoft's attitude towards its product licensing could lead to greater interoperability, opportunity, and choice for developers, partners, customers, and competitors.
Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products:
* Ensuring open connections
* Promoting data portability
* Enhancing support for industry standards
* Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
"These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, "This announcement represents a significant expansion toward greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity, and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies."
According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, the company's announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information sharing.
"Customers need all their vendors, including 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, "By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers."
The interoperability principles and actions would apply to 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.
Highlights of the specific actions Microsoft is taking to implement its new interoperability principles are:
* 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.
* Starting immediately, Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program (MCPP). Protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume products covered by these principles, will be published in the upcoming months.
* 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". To assist those interested in considering a patent license, Microsoft will make available a list of specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol.
* Microsoft is also providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
* It has also promised that whenever it supports a standard in a high-volume product, it will work with other major implementers of the standard toward achieving robust, consistent, and interoperable implementations across a broad range of widely deployed products.
* Microsoft will document for the development community how it supports such standards, including those Microsoft extensions that affect interoperability with other implementations of these standards. This documentation will be published on Microsoft's Web site and it will be accessible without a license, royalty or other fee. These actions will allow third-party developers implementing standards to understand how a standard is used in a Microsoft product and foster improved interoperability for customers. Microsoft will make available a list of any of its patents that cover any of these extensions, and will make available patent licenses on, according to Microsoft, "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory" terms.
* New APIs for the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 will be published. These will enable developers to plug in additional document formats users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.
* Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products, this initiative will provide resources, facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.
* An ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open source communities will be created through an online Interoperability Forum. In addition, a Document Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between widely deployed formats.
The Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, an advisory organization established in 2006 and consisting mainly of chief information and technology officers from more than 40 companies and government bodies around the world, will help guide Microsoft in its work under these principles and actions.
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