Microsoft is implementing four new business practices to increase openness of its products to drive greater interoperability and opportunity for developers. This includes releasing documentation that used to be covered under trade secret agreements.

“These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. “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. 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.”

The steps are:

1. ensuring open connections
2. promoting data portability
3. enhancing support for industry standards
4. fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities

Microsoft will publish documentation over the next few months for the APIs used throughout its high-volume products. Microsoft will indicate which of these protocols are covered under patents and allow use of them for non-commercial applications, as well as allow cheap royalties on the patents for commercial applications.

Microsoft will also be making many changes to its Office suite, developing new APIs to allow developers to plug in different file formats. Customers will also be able to change the “default” format for Office applications.

The open source community gets a vote of confidence from this. Microsoft has promised to take no legal action against open source developers for creating custom non-commercial programs.

Microsoft is 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.

This is another step up for Microsoft in my opinion. I think the software giant is starting to listen to what people want, instead of telling people what they are going to want. What I don’t want to see is developers and programs to start conforming to the newly available standards “just to make things work”. Outlook for instance, uses many “tricks” to accomplish certain things. I hope that this doesn’t start a wave of other email programs starting to use the same trick. Instead, we should all make an effort to be more conforming to industry wide standards

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Entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 8:13 am under Microsoft.

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