Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability
A large number of readers are submitting the news that Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others including specifically the FOSS world. The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft. The announcement comes in the context of the release of 30,000 pages of API documentation for Microsoft Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 — and a listing of patents that apply to these technologies, and a pledge not to sue open source developers who use the APIs. InfoWorld summarizes by saying that Microsoft "promised greater transparency in its development and business practices." Fortune is blunter, saying "Microsoft declares truce in open source war." Here's Microsoft's FAQ on the open source interop initiative.
Captain Richard M. Stallman: They're animals.
Captain Torvalds: Richard, there is an historic opportunity here.
Captain Richard M. Stallman: Don't believe them. Don't trust them.
Captain Torvalds: They're dying.
Captain Richard M. Stallman: Let them die!
They will get bashed anyway. Bashed if they do, bashed if they don't. They can't win.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Wait a year. If, a year from now, it turns out this is real, then pay attention. More likely, there will be minimal compliance with EU competition regulations, just as there was in the last two Microsoft antitrust cases.
i don't see what the big deal is... so they are gong to add more docs to MSDN?
Speechless
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What is a "pledge?" Is it anything like a legally binding agreement, or is it like when you promise to do something while looking at a flag?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
What we need is for them to work with open standards so we can integrate a few Windows boxes into mixed environment without every other system having to create hack jobs to speak to them. Just because they make API's available just means the workarounds to integrate their world with Linux/Unix/whatever can be supported and the risk of failure is reduced. I'm tired of making compromises to have a heterogeneous environment.
Wouldn't it be better for them to in a sense "escrow" those patents w/ an external body like the open patents.org people?
That would indeed show their good faith in allowing TRUE interoperability. As opposed to this, "really we promise we won't beat you THIS time...."
Just my $0.02.
I believe it's called "Rope a dope" :
I'll even link it for you : Google rope a dope"
"Rope-a-dope is also commonly used to describe strategies in areas other than boxing, where one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, and then becomes the eventual victor. Lying on the ropes had been, and still is, considered a "sin" in boxing, exposing a fighter to punishment because he cannot move away from his opponent."
Just saying "will publish APIs" is rather useless - MSDN already has thousands of pages of fantastic documentation for APIs. Which new ones will they be publishing? Exports that are considered volatile across versions? Better ways to make shell extensions? Newer custom controls? Ways to plug your own storage engine into SQL Server? Need some specifics, please!
So which projects would most benefit from having these APIs? WINE, of course. Maybe also mail clients and Samba. Anything else?
Microsoft has been "interoperable" since day one. It's just quite picky who it "interoperates" with. :)
Hopefully we'll see official support of mono in the same manner as moonlight / silverlight.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
This is Microsoft publishing all it's APIs along with a list of the patents they claim protect their protocols.
Free for open source developers BUT anybody who commercializes interoperability (OpenOffice, Samba, Mono, C#, Moonlight) will have to pay.
By publishing their protocols and then associating them with their patents they are throwing down the patent troll gauntlet - it is totally incompatible to the GPL and other open/free licenses (BSD).
One good aspect is it will give the patent busters an opportunity to start challenging all of Microsoft's phoney baloney patent portfolio.
Yup - Microsoft is at it again with a whole new play card - if only they could direct their evil into trully productive channels.
Oh well.
Ed
Who wants to bet a lot of the pages look like:
"This page left intentionally blank"
Wait a year or so, and see if makes sense at all, or just all talk for politicians and business people to feel better.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
This is more than just a releasing of API's, but a fundamental shift of Microsoft in how it views open source. Beyond releasing documentation, they are taking on the expensive task of redefining some of the core development practices so that they are better aligned with open source software initiatives. I'd expect it will take some time for the true weight of this policy change to have large practical effects, but this is just as big as the trustworthy computing initiative that Microsoft underwent in the early part of the decade.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
ITake anything Microsoft does with an extremely large grain of salt.
Look out for flying chairs in Redmond.
Of course this means a pledge to not sue open source developers, unless you create something that generates considerable amounts of revenue or threatens the market stranglehold of one of their products.
If you reject the Microsoft "buy-out" attempts...THEN they may sue you.
I'd dare say they are acting like a white blood cell, treating Open Source as an invasion, a cyst. They are just rewriting anti-viral code to adapt, embrace, and extinguish.
Extinguishing, however, could merely be creating boards or bodies and sitting on them and dictating HOW and WHERE Open Source can "enjoy" freedom.
However, they could be writing co-existence code *for now*, with the intent to create a WHOLE NEW ms platform which will be so far ahead of current products as to keep Linux relegated to pre-2010 or pre-2015...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
'nuff said.
No - because they are retaining the rights to sue entities that use the information for commercial purposes. Here's the text:
This announcement is just marketing spin on what the EU was about to require.
More
I cant believe this Microsoft becoming more friendly to Open Source whats next a Microsoft linux distro??... Guess that they are admitting that Open Source is making huge dents in their armour.... Well this can only be good to linux hopefully start opening up avenues to better gaming and other proprietory issues that they've been running into in the past...
...we were being patent-trolled by Balmer. One would have to be insane to buy this.
Caveat Utilitor
Basically, Microsoft pledges not to sue if you use the API. Then once people start using it, they say, "Sorry, we didn't mean it. We sue you now." The doctrines of estoppel would prevent them from successfully suing you, as they are estopped by their pledge. You can't be held liable for their change.
Of course, anyone can sue anyone for anything any time in our legal system, so it may be no great comfort to know that they won't succeed if they sue you. They know they can bankrupt you with legal fees, at least for however long they can drag out appeals (which can be longer than you can go without the money).
...with hell freezing over and all.
Palm trees and 8
Perhaps it's my 20 some-odd years using their technologies and watching their company, or my 10 or so years working professionally with technology and being personally (usually negatively) affected by the companies actions but, does anyone actually believe them?
Doesn't this just seem more smoke and mirrors than anything else?
It seems to me that they're just giving lip service to get everyone's guard down and get the EU off their backs.
"We're all fuzzy warm now!"
"Oh good. [sigh of relief]"
"HAHA Just kidding! We're suing everyone using OSS now that all that anti-trust stuff is gone!"
Besides, how many times has this company spun things around or just blatantly lied to our faces?
I for one, am not convinced of their sincerity.
Promise not to sue (which may be broken any day) => not GPL compatibility.
So, nothing important, this is the same old Microsoft, they probably mean "pseudo open source" developers, those who are silly enough to use Microsoft's "Open source" licenses. No gift for those evil guys who use the GPL...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
If they want to use it commercially then they get sued. This type of news, coupled with yesterdays student IDE give-away is cast iron indication MS is worried by the FOSS world - of course they are attempting to defeat them with these measures while still securing their commercial revenue streams - having their cake and eating it.
I am sceptical if it will work though - the commercial business end of the spectrum have previously shown themselves more likely to make the shift away from MS products - it is the home market that is much more entrenched.
Why would you want to work with MS solutions? Shouldn't *they* adhere to open standards? This makes no sense at all, and must obviously come from a legal world and not a developer world. To explain myself: It is not up to everyone else to work well together with Microsoft, it is up to Microsoft to support open standards. Take Exchange for instance, any client, following the standards, should be able to connect to it, not having to know that it is special magic Microsoft stuff inside. See how nice that works? Everything should work according to that model...
As a former Microsoft employee (worked on dev tools the entire time), I speak from personal experience when I say I never encountered a problem accessing any internet site from inside Microsoft's Redmond campus. The most annoying thing MS's IT department did was push down various updates to your machine and automatically reboot your machine after displaying a box for abot 30 minutes, but since we (at least in product development) were all admins on our box it wasn't difficult to repeatedly kill all of their processes on start-up so you could safely run long series of tests without worrying about some UI popping up to interfere with the tests or the machine being rebooted in the middle of the run.
Software Inventor
I understand Estoppel and I think you are dead spot on about that. However, I am concerned over the fine lines of what they really are promising to cover vs this patent pledge. They can make all this jazz about how they cover everything (public statements) and only cover the API's to be used in a locked format and not when things are modified, for example. This would be the same problems that occurred with the Samba protocol information....where "sure, we'll give out the info...for 10 thousand dollars". Aka its technically legal, but its still abuse of the legal system.
Don't think that just because Estoppel is enforceable that there aren't ways to weasel around it with legalease. Keep your skeptic hat on, especially even a year or two from now.
It's a trap. Any of it that's not a trap is what the EU is forcing them to do against their will. The rest is a trap. There is nothing for anyone to gain from doing business of any kind with Microsoft. You will pay and pay and pay and your business will suffer from lost productivity.
And make it the fucking Amazon.
I just spent ten mins grokking the documentation linked from the MS press release page. There's plenty of protocol documentation, but none that I can see relating to Exchange, as mentioned in TFA. I'm looking for protocols such as the MAPI RPC and EAS sync protocols. Everything I can see published relates to protocols implemented in the base OS (which makes sense, since the court action was in relation to the OS, not other MS applications such as SQLServer and Exchange). If anyone can point me to any non-OS doc published as part of this disgorging, please do. btw, this step was inevitable imho : MS was made to write all the protocol documentation by the EU some time ago. Initially they attempted to control access to it tightly with licensing and special legal agreements, but clearly they were going to be napsterized eventually -- these documents, once they exist, will get out to the wide audience one way or another. So simply publishing them saves years of RIAA-style nonsense where developers are sued for having seen these magic documents while working on one project, then go work on some 'non kosher' project later. Better to publish and be damned.
"a pledge not to sue open source developers who use the APIs"
"Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols."
davecb5620@gmail.com
Outside of mind bogglingly huge government fines, which MS seems willing to endure, there's no business reason for MS to actually want interoperability with anything or anyone. If they publish their API's, they open the door for competitors to make inroads, and possibly expose themselves to legal risk based on their past behavior. Once win32 software can run at least as well outside of Windows as it does on Windows, then Windows becomes irrelevant: that's their biggest fear. Their second fear is FOSS developers competing and winning against their products and their partners'.
Any API or documentation that MS publishes has been internally determined to have low or no risk to them. If they published everything, there would be a completely FOSS Windows clone started within months, and the outcome would be similar to how Linux overcame the commercial Unix flavors.
This action, like so many before, is a meaningless charade to make them appear cooperative.
No, I can assure you, it IS minimal.
Being part of an organisation doesn't always give you insight into it. Sometimes it makes you blind to it.
"open source developers will be able to use the documentation to develop implementations of these protocols without paying for a patent license", Brad Smith
.. and we will monetize from .. all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology", Steve Ballmer
Companies that subsequently engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft", Brad Smith.
"with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights", Brad Smith
"We have valuable intellectual property in our patents
davecb5620@gmail.com
You're a HERETIC! Where's my pitchfork, stake and torch?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Linux Microsoft interoperability Meeting:
Torvalds: Bill, lets get some interoperability between various products, particularly linux and microsoft, it will be beneficial to the industry.
Gates: Sure that sounds great Linus.
Later that day..
Engineer at MS: Bill, how did your interoperability meeting go?
Gates: Great, Torvalds agrees that MS office should be able to handle all the document formats with MS Office Suite.
Spot the odd one out:
Bears sh?t in the woods.
The Pope is a Catholic.
Night follows day.
Microsoft decides it really wants to play nice with the other kids.
Microsoft dumps a pile of incomprehensible drivel to assuage legalistas and promulgate its hegemony.
I doubt it is THE key motivating factor, but I bet they took into consideration the fact that many (or at least some) of the *nix community would take advantage of the new information "for non-commercial use". My understanding is that this fits most people's usage (on slashdot). We don't sell "our" software. And once this is done, we CAN'T sell our software (without a big lawsuit).
M$'s biggest fear isn't that "free" software will take over. They know it never will. They are afraid it grows to the point that commercial software will be developed large scale for it in the business world. *nix will never take over Windows as long as a large portion of the applications are not built for general consumption (even in the business world). Don't get me wrong, I think most of the applications are functionally better (in a homogenius setting), but they are designed by Geeks, mostly for Geeks. They don't have the polish that businesses expect. Everything *seems* cheap quality, even if it is great. Trolltech has come a long ways in providing your more average developer the ability to produce "polished" applications quickly on *nix (yes and others). Borland even tried to approach the issue with Kylix (another rant for another time). But their idea was spot on.
Once you have quality applications that are commerically polished running on *nix systems they can compete in whole with Windows, until then it is a niche market. This has been a SLOW process since most of the community is based around some sort of open source ideaology (which also compete against any new commercial startups), plus many developers are trying to make things work for them, not put out a massively commercial application that first year sys admins can install / use just by looking at the prompts during the install.
Right now *nix is a pita for M$, but not a large threat to their marketshare as a whole.
If you had the commercial software options on *nix now that you have on Windows, *nix would be a threat to their whole market. What is probably the only way to get there?...increase in commercial software production for *nix. What is the best way to stop that? Help out the developers enough to make things work well and make the current userbase happy (better interoperability), get the existing software tied into the APIs and push development.
Then even if we wind up with a great platform polished in more areas, it is very hard for companies be sucessful with it commercially. (I know I'll get flamed for this but...) The standard OSS models for earning a living are great, but I think they can not (at least in the next 10 years) support the same number of developers as the current closed source models. Which from a pure numbers standpoint, hurts adoption. (Personally I've worked on 2 OSS projects a good bit, but I have been unable to find any way to make a living or even any income off of it, I can think of 20 or so applications off the top of my head I could make money off of for developing and selling close sourced).
If this hurts *nix commercial dev. in the long run it is a huge win for M$. That said, I can see some of you not caring as you are OSS fanatics (unable to consider the fact it does have many drawbacks as a whole). You will feel that if it hurts commercial development then its probably a good thing since that is what keeps the *nix platform as good as it is.
My personal take is that closed source software is not going to disappear as a business model, and until the OSS community realizes that, they will continue to hold *nix back as an afterthought to the computing market as a whole (at least in the US). That being said, I also don't think OSS is going to disappear, and closed source software companies (and platform devs like MS) realize that. Whether it will matter on a whole in the industry depends on how each model handles coexisting. A move like this tells me that M$ might potentially be ahead in the learning curve on this issue (after learning the hard way so far) with plans to
Shouldn't those already be documented (preferably before they're released)? Yes, I've worked at places that didn't document file formats and with people who claimed they didn't need to document their code because it was "self-documenting" but I figured a large firm like Microsoft would be more regimented than that.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It's getting too thick.
commentModeration++;
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Let me translate what you've just said:
.NET.
1) Microsoft's formats and protocols are so nonstandard that they can't just point to an existing standard and say "we implement that standard, with the following one or two exceptions because, hey, we're Microsoft and love to embrace and extend".
2) Microsoft's development is so disorganized that they don't have any documentation on hand for their formats and in order to keep compatibility with existing stuff they have to just keep hacking and testing until things appear to work.
3) Both (1) and (2) apply not only to old formats and protocols but also to newly created code such as Vista and
If what you're saying is true, why would *anyone* trust Microsoft software for *anything* beyond hobbyist uses?
As much as Slashdoters love to bash Microsoft's quality record, I have a really hard time believing that Microsoft is that bad. And *if* what you're saying is true, then Microsoft *at last* has the documentation it should have had from day one, so the EU has actually *saved* Microsoft a lot of development costs in random hacking. Microsoft thus owes the EU a big favour.
What would be a truly sincere support of interoperability and open standards? For one, full support of OpenDocument.
http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/02/21/red-hat-statement-on-microsoft-announcement/
I wanted an Xbox 360 and was about to buy one before Microsoft started spreading their patent FUD about a year and a half ago. I was visiting RedHat's NYC offices the day that Microsoft threatened to file lawsuits against open-source technologies; that was the day that I decided that my Wii was enough for this console generation and I stopped buying Microsoft products.
Now, I see that blu-ray has won and I need a blu-ray player for my 50" HDTV. Microsoft now wants to put out a blu-ray player for the 360 and seems to be backing away from their patent and lawsuit FUD against open source. Aside from holding a grudge at the past FUD and threat of a lawsuit, I was tempted to drop my personal boycott of Microsoft products, until I actually read the Microsoft 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."
My read on this is that Microsoft wants me to pay a licensing fee if I use Samba (for example). PS3 it is! Sony gets the sale and Microsoft can _STILL_ go about their business without my hard-earned $$$.
Here: http://blog.mycintosh.com/blog_pics/open_ms_gross.jpg
I just heard Tom Robertson, Microsoft's GM of Interoperability and something else, say that Windows is already "a totally open platform" as evidenced by the large number of applications that currently run on Windows. What a joke.
My ass.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"They will get bashed anyway. Bashed if they do, bashed if they don't. They can't win."
Personally, I'd rather bash them if they do, than bash them if they don't. It's a LOT more fun that way.
I have no doubt that Microsoft staff is quite busy working at all times. The Microsoft press release makes the company leadership's intentions clear:
"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."
And...
"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 reasonable and non-discriminatory terms."
Sounds a lot like the SCO mantra to me. "We own the patents, so pay up on the royalty fees and we won't sue you" (Microsoft, February 21, 2008). Given that all of your work is for the benefit of those who are willing to pay Microsoft for the "patent royalty fees," without a judge's decision on whether the patent is valid, is this not the very definition of minimal? If Microsoft is going to have a covenant to not sue open-source developers, what happens to those who don't pay for the Microsoft patent licenses? Do they still get sued? Are they still under threat to be sued? This looks like an evil Microsoft ploy to make $$$ on the backs of open-source developers and end users.
As for the comparisons of Microsoft to the Open-Source benevolent IBM, I would mention that IBM (Sun Microsystems and others) have donated countless patents to the open-source community. This is NOT what Microsoft is doing and Microsoft should NOT be given the same sweetheart treatment that the IBMs (or Sun Microsystems) of the world have earned through their contributions to the open-source community.
How can you win when you always play a losing hand? They are "bashed if they do" because they're treating intelligent critics as if they're idiots.
Those in-the-know KNOW there is a catch and it's a pretty big catch too: those who use patent-encumbered APIs in FOSS applications will be left alone...until someone uses that FOSS commercially, and then all bets are off and MSFT will be after their protection money again. Those who most want MSFT to provide PROPER interoperability know what a standard is. Barfing out tens of thousands of pages of API specs does not a standard make. A standard is not driven by a single vendor. A standard is vetted by a standards body. A standard is IMPLEMENTABLE (what MSFT has released is a core-dump; nobody's going to be able to provide the kind of interoperability provided by MSFT's native implementations without a monumental investment of time and money to adequately understand what is in the APIs).
This was done because the EU, and even the US DOJ actions of the past, are increasingly forcing their hand, and they've "opened the kimono" under carefully crafted terms that appease regulators (that aren't savvy enough to know what meaningful interoperability entails) yet still ensure MSFT retains the leverage afforded by its market dominance. They're hoping that by sharing in the way they have, and releasing free developer tools and open source (but not Free in the GPL sense) OOXML implementations it will prove enticing enough for FOSS developers to implement something encumbered by MSFT.
Does MSFT really think we are THAT stupid? Do they really think that Free software is still about a bunch of small-time hippies that do it "just for fun"? Sorry, but the likes of IBM and Google are huge corporate backers of Free software projects--it isn't all hippie-geek love or some CS student's hobby anymore. These contributors are not going to want their work encumbered by a MSFT terms and conditions.
There is one interesting double-edged sword in this "MSFT truce": we will have a better idea than ever about what MSFT patents are threatening FOSS. On one hand, having MSFT IP so highly visible is one way they can defend their patents; it is more difficult to plead ignorance. On the other hand, the FOSS community knows which patents to work around in their own applications, and knows which patents to try to have invalidated in court, without pouring over the whole patent database.
Of course, it's always great to see MSFT being more open with information, and some of it might make an interesting read, so it isn't all bad. However this will ultimately do nothing at all to foster real interoperability; whatever benefits realised by the availability of information will be negated by making legal reverse engineering more difficult and by introducing tainted IP into FOSS.
...kept a promise?
How many times have they promised to not integrate something into their OS or other products to support third party vendors, and within a year put the third parties out of business with new, integrated features? The first example I always think of is the TCP/IP stack[1] but there are lots and lots of others.
[1] Most people today probably assume MS invented it, but for a long time they refused to support it, prefering other network stacks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Putting aside for a second my conviction that this is either a) lip service to get the EC/EU off their back, b) a super smart plan to somehow fuck naive developers over, or c) can't it be both? -
One of my biggest pet peeves as an Apple dude is that my work environment runs Exchange Server, and our IT guys won't turn on IMAP support. That means that I can't use my preferred email client, Apple Mail, to check my work mail, because Apple only supports Exchange in POP3 mode. I see that Microsoft included Exchange Server 2007 in the list of APIs/protocols they're going to release into the wild. Is it reasonable to hope / expect that mail clients like Mail, Thunderbird, etc will now be able to work smoothly with Exchange / MAPI? We've been asking for this for years.
Won't somebody rid me of this troublesome Entourage?
Woopsy, I meant that Mail only supports Exchange in IMAP mode.
Well, for the individuals who think Microsoft has changed, I present to you This Article. (Tiny'd-> http://tinyurl.com/32zpet ). Note from the article : "That said, Microsoft may continue to play verbal hardball with commercial open source competitors that don't license the company's intellectual property. It's not like Microsoft is suddenly going to espouse the virtues of completely free software. "This is in no way removing the issue of patents in the context of infringement," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft VP of intellectual property and licensing, said in an interview. Though a changing technology world is important, part of the new landscape has also been shaped by court systems in the United States and Europe. The European Union has recently stepped up and opened new anti-trust investigations into Microsoft's business practices, while a recent decision in the long-running U.S. anti-trust case found that Microsoft still wasn't being open enough with its communications protocols.
Much of the discussion during Microsoft's press conference announcing the new strategy focused on the company's legal requirements in relation to anti-trust scrutiny. "The interoperability principles and actions announced today reflect a changed legal landscape for Microsoft and the information technology industry," Brad Smith, Microsoft's top attorney, said on the call. For its part, the European Union took a skeptical eye to Microsoft's announcements."
So yeah, what was that about my possibly being wrong about them meeting the "minimum standards" again? Seems like as I suspected, the minimum to stay legal in the face of abusing the law. What was that about "cheap companies" and "barely meeting standards", again?
Fortunately software patents have no validity in Europe. I can also just imagine the response by the EU to an attempt to force patent licencing of these protocols.
Makes me chuckle anyway.
Translation: open source programs that interoperate with Microsoft products will serve as a free software development arm for Microsoft. No matter what open source license they use, Microsoft's submarine patents will make them equivalent to shareware.
Non Serviam. I'll use open APIs, not "shareware" ones from Microsoft.
who is dumb enough to roll it inside the walls?
for all those old RS-232 cables.
Anyone else cynical enough to think this might be another last ditch effort to get Vista out there? I notice that nothing before 2007 is included, and Vista is prominent....
First SQL_gal, now OpenSourceSlut...
+5 Interesting? Just so no one from across the pond gets the wrong idea, parent is joking. I went through elementary school refusing to "pledge alliegance" to a piece of cloth, and schools (at least in my area) don't even have the kids do it any more.
This is just a trick for they to get national votes for the crappy OOXML.
MS is going to use this as marketing for the countries to vote yes.
Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking.
If Microsoft starts now (and doesn't screw up along the way) they can probably be considered a good guy by the FOSS community some time around 2040 or so.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
On the flipside, Microsoft is offering some pretty good Unix interoperability suport in Vista/Server 2008 as well.
They give you a full POSIX environment, CSH, KSH, BASH, and gcc plus X11. It is an optional component, but free to install.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
I hope we're reaching that last point there.
Do you remember just a few days ago a company that infringed the GPL was complaining that the original authors weren't accepting a settlement after they started complying? The reason was obvious, if the only punishment of operating illegally is to be forced to operate legally, it would be in the bests interests of every corporation to infringe until caught.
Although the situation is clearly different, there are a lot of parallels here. Essentially, MSFT didn't act as expected until punishment was imminent, setting a precedent that its ok be a thorn in the hind of interoperability until the very last day. There is due punishment unpaid, but I don't think any action must the taken besides simply not trusting MSFT to pacifically comply in the future... because they won't.
But... the future refused to change.
Re: The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft.
Actually, I believe the impetus is ISO standards acceptance.
We would never see this day without the European Commisions sticking to their principals.
It's too bad the U.S.A. can't get the hint. Oh yeah, I forgot... moneyed institutions have more "free speech" and "political will" than regular people in the great USoA. Corporations are considered the same as "people" here. It seems like I read a term in the dictionary once, about a form of government where corporations have unequal decision making power, over individuals, in all government policies and decisions. Oh yeah, now I remember! I think it was "fascism"! Where else have I heard that word used for a government....?
In other news, hell has reported significant progress with global warming issue. All-time record low temperatures seem to keep up. Retiried archenemy and currently hell spokesman, mr Baal dismissed planned ski resorts in hell as mere speculation.
I love how the MS website talks about Server 2008's interoperability with Unix/Linux and points out that it supports telnet. Ummm... WTF? I remember a big push back in 1998 to get everyone on the Linux system I was using to start using SSH so they could disable telnet. How many distros are left that still come with telnetd enabled (or even present, for that matter)?
You are exactly right. There is no software freedom in these requirements. This may not be true for all open source, but free software absolutely can not use these terms.
They basically say "The EU made us do it" in the document. So Microsoft sat back and said to themselves "How can we make money from open source." And this initiative spells out the result in detail. Boo, I say, boo.
Man what a piece of drivel.
If you as a company don't even have the documentation in house that describes your protocols, you don't have any excuse for whining when a government forces you to spend time and money to create this documentation. Furthermore, I don't believe you at all. A company as large as Microsoft must have internal documentation for its own staff.
This distinction cannot be made if the results are to be published under a FOSS license. The OSI Open Source Definition and the Debian Free Software Guidelines both forbid discrimination against certain fields of endeavour. Microsoft obviously does discriminate against commercial use. Likewise, the FSF's Free Software Definition requires availability for commercial use. Nothing produced under the terms this agreement can be integrated in anything under a license complying these definitions.
At best, it could be what the FSF calls semi-free software, like what PGP, Scilab, Angband or MAME are.
...."Have you mooed today?"...
.... are taken by Ballmer and Gates.
All the nice chaps at MS are not providing direction to the company in the ways we know (which include breaking the law btw).
Most people would have problems making business with somebody they know is dishonest, but in Slashdot there is always a MS apologist willing to overlook a company with a record littered with illegal, immoral and abusive business practices.
You should keep in mind that people relate to MS as a monolith, all those nice chaps in MS just follow orders from the top brass, which is intent in dominating the industry by underhanded means if necessary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The enormous majority of other companies don't.
So your point is completely useless frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I think you quoted the most important lines of this announcement.
wtf.n0x.org
Yes, because only then will people such as me have either lost interest or died.
I've watched them since Bill first sold MS DOS, and I'm likely to keep telling people about the tricks MS have played in the past, and therefore what they're going to do in the future if they get their way. They won't change until it's temporarily to their advantage, such as when the fines become so large that they have to avoid them (keep it up EU!)
Borg:"Lawsuits are irrelevant. GPL3 is irrelevant. DRM is good. We understand security... Alert! MS are assimilating us!
Well said, WebCowboy!
Especially the 2nd and last paragraphs "Those in-the-know KNOW there is a catch..." and "...by introducing tainted IP into FOSS"
Borg:"Lawsuits are irrelevant. GPL3 is irrelevant. DRM is good. We understand security... Alert! MS are assimilating us!
qwerty
Yeah, that surprised me too.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
SoilGreen Classic: the choice of the people that never tastes quite the same.
I find it ironic that the video summary of their big interoperability push only runs on Windows.
To be perfectly fair, this sounds like a half-decent compromise.
"You're free to use our work, and use it to benefit whatever you happen to be doing. However, if you want to make money off of it, we want a piece of the pie"
The GPL's nice and all, but do you honestly think that Microsoft are going to adopt something that liberal? It actually *does* have a considerable chance of hurting them. This legislation, on the other hand, will probably help them catch up to Apple, who have somehow managed to jump into the lead in terms of standards-compliance.
If you've ever coded for one of Apple's platforms, you'll see that it's an....interesting experience. Lots of "standards" are supported, but in a "but only when you embed it in one of our proprietary container formats" sort of way. I won't argue OS X is a damn good platform to develop for, but it's also pretty easy to see that Apple doesn't completely "get it" when it comes to properly adopting standards or interacting with and supporting their developers.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
There is nothing fair or decent about ceding the point of a valid patent to Microsoft by paying their royalty fees. The validity of Microsoft's patents and their application are questions for the courts to decide, not Microsoft.
Take network file sharing as an example. I'm sure Microsoft dislikes the fact that I can host a Windows file share on my Linux box over SMB using Samba. The fact remains that no matter how many patents Microsoft puts out on its implementation of Windows file-sharing, any reasonable judge would render those patents invalid. Further, NFS could be judged as prior art to SMB.
Take Microsoft Office's Excel, Word, and PowerPoint file formats as another example. Let's say that I'm an open-source programmer who wants to make a free contribution to the computing community. I use the information that Microsoft has published to add a "Save As" Open Document Format (ODF) feature and release my implementation and source code to the community for free under the GPL version 2. Now, you're the CIO at either a private or government organization that wants all of your users (Windows, Mac, Linux) to be able to share Office documents, so you adopt this open-source format conversion software that I wrote and released for free. Under Microsoft's terms, even though I donated my ODF "Save-As" feature to the community, the organization that uses my free work still needs to pay Microsoft a licensing fee. Why? Because they're using Office? THEY ALREADY PAID FOR THE OFFICE LICENSE!!! Because they're saving documents using ODF? It's an open standard! Because they're using the "Save-As" ODF feature? It's a free and open-source implementation! No judge would give Microsoft monetary relief from an organization, for a feature that is given away for free, especially since that the organization already licensed the Office software.
I see how both Samba and ODF are in competition with Windows File Sharing and MS Office's internal file formats and I say, don't pay the Microsoft royalties, LET THEM COMPETE and let the courts sort it out.
"in Slashdot there is always a MS apologist willing to overlook a company with a record littered with illegal, immoral and abusive business practices." If you think that MS are the only, or even the worst, offenders in the IT industry for illegal, immoral and abusive business practices then you are either very young or are wearing IBM tinted glasses.
product? I still wonder, why on earth they have to "write the docs" now. I mean, if I write some application, and don't do heavy documentation from the beginning, I mostly get lost half of the way not knowing what I'm doing anymore. So how is it possible to write a whole OS and not have the docs for at least the interfaces? Are they inventing new ones every time they need one?
Wait! People are still using Microsoft?
Man, it's been so long I forgot what Microsoft was like...