Smoke and Mirrors: Microsoft Pledges Four ‘Interoperability Prinicples’
In a press release Thursday, Microsoft announced that it is taking significant steps to improve interoperability between its products and others. To that end, the software giant will publicly release over 30,000 pages of documentation outlining the inner workings of its high-volume software applications like Windows Vista, the .NET framework, Office 2007, SharePoint and Exchange server.
Additionally, Microsoft is pledging to adhere to four self-described "interoperability principles" which the company says will help foster more choice and flexibility among software developers.
The four principles, straight from the horse’s mouth:
1. Ensuring open connections
2. Promoting data portability
3. Enhancing support for industry standards, and
4. fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities
Sounds like an uncharacteristically altruistic move by Microsoft, doesn’t it? Consider the timing of the announcement: Next week is the ISO’s ballot resolution meeting to determine whether Microsoft’s OOXML office doc format becomes an ISO-certified standard.
Since the standards org’s stamp of approval means that governments and institutions will likely stick with MS Office rather than moving to OpenOffice or other free software alternatives — for which ISO-standardized document formats already exist — the vote is a really big deal up in Redmond.
Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail to get OOXML approved, even resorting to some widely-criticized shenanigans last year to try to influence the vote in its favor.
Then there’s this bit, also in the press release:
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.
By pledging more support for open data portability and by promising not to sue open-source developers over patents right now, five days before the ISO meeting begins, Microsoft is essentially playing the part of the perfect child a week before Christmas.
Certainly, opening up applications and data frameworks is a "good thing," whatever the reasoning behind the decision. As Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans pointed out in a blog post Thursday, many of Microsoft’s partners and developers stand to benefit from this (he also identifies some of the losers, Linux and IBM among them).
Also, consider the growing pool of web-based office app start-ups who will now be able to more easily import and export Microsoft Office docs into and out of their applications. They’re probably not crying in their free soup, either. But there are few who see this news as pure goodwill.
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