This week, Microsoft CTO and MSDN guru Ray Ozzie announced the release of SSE, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS. The SSE spec promises to turn basic, one-way RSS information feeds into two-way feeds with shared information. So, instead of just sharing a subscription, others can modify that subscription and everyone will be able to see, and of course modify, any changes.

From the FAQ:

From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.

SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.

SSE also includes such features as per-item change history to keep track of versioning conflicts, and tombstones, which will keep deletions and changes up-to-date for all feed participants.

In another smart move, the team decided to release the SSE specification under the creative commons license, which is the license under which the original RSS spec was released.

We know that the core Microsoft XML development community has been rather progressive all along, but does this open-friendly stance of late signal some sort of sea change within Microsoft? Are they (as a company) placing more importance in open development environments? They already own something like 90 percent of the desktop software market, so maybe they are just feeling a little bit of holiday generosity.