Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability

Wait a year by Animats · 2008-02-21 06:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

Re:Wait a year by Plug · 2008-02-21 06:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

Interesting how it happens a week before the ISO ballot resolution meeting on OOXML...
Re:Wait a year by kithrup · 2008-02-21 07:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

The interesting thing is that -- based on my own experiences -- writing that documentation will help internally at least as much as externally.

Need to rewrite something from scratch? Now you have a specification instead of having to scour the old code. Changed the code, and the behaviour has changed? Now you have a specification you can use as a reference, or -- if you put version numbers into the protocol or file format -- modify and go forward.

Undocumented code happens most places. Being forced to document it (either by internal policy or external court order :)) is painful, but still good.
Re:Wait a year by siyavash · 2008-02-21 07:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

You shouldn't hang the patenters, that would be treating the symptoms. Change the laws instead.
Re:Wait a year by poetmatt · 2008-02-21 07:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

Agreed. Even then, I think "minimal compliance" is a pretty significant phrase of its own. It's not "we made sure to be compliant", as most people do with standards, its "we're doing the absolute minimum to try to meet compliance". Enormous worlds of difference there.
I mean in lieu of having a monopoly should not be absence of business sense. I mean if Microsoft made good products, innovated, lead the market, didn't abuse market power and still had a monopoly, nobody would be complaining. There are tons of businesses like that worldwide.
Re:Wait a year by theshorn · 2008-02-21 07:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

The amount of work you guys have to do to comply with the EU is indicative of how un-open you have been, and is not something you get any points for whining about.

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I'd tell you I'm a solipsist, but what would be the point?
Re:Wait a year by illumin8 · 2008-02-21 07:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

While I can't really opine on the EU's regulations themselves for various reasons, I've been talking with people who are directly affected by them, and the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical. About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation on things that range from current file formats, to things that aren't even current technologies anymore.
Cry me a fucking river. The fact that your executive management has abused the industry for decades and made billions by holding back the technological progress being made in other areas of the computer industry with monopoly tactics of format lock-in, collusion with OEM partners, and outright racketeering does not make me sympathetic at all.

Microsoft should have provided the documentation years ago, when it was first ordered to by the DoJ and the EU. Now that they're finally getting their ass kicked by regulators that can't be bribed or bought out they are finally creating documentation, but only after kicking and screaming like a 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum.

You don't like it? Tough, find a job as a developer at any number of other companies that don't have unethical business practices. I hear Google is hiring.

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"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Re:Wait a year by LinuxDon · 2008-02-21 07:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

Quote: "I'd say (in my own opinion) that the EU regulations have basically turned Europe into a loss leader for us for the next several years."

What are you talking about? Providing decent documentation that should have been provided in the first place is now called a loss? A win for your customers should also be a win for your company, but apparently you don't see it that way.

It's still raining absurd amounts money for Microsoft. It's only a good thing to make a bit less and provide some proper documentation and interoperability that should have been provided in the first place!

And it's a damn shame Microsoft had to be forced by law and fines in order to do business in an ethical way.
Re:Wait a year by jbr439 · 2008-02-21 08:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's responses like these that make MSFT employees think we're all a bunch of fanatical morons. The MSFT employee apparently made a good faith effort to explain the situation as he understood it. Rather than call him names we should just appreciate the effort.
Re:Wait a year by multisync · 2008-02-21 08:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

that there are real, non-evil people down in the trenches making and supporting products at Microsoft is inconvenient to those slashdotters who prefer to hate the company as an evil monolith

Hardly. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no problem at all hating Microsoft as an "evil monolith," despite the fact that I'm sure there are many intelligent, hard-working "non-evil" people working there. One does not negate the other.

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I don't care why you're posting AC
Re:Wait a year by Big+Jojo · 2008-02-21 08:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

The documentation you're talking about is about how things are designed to work, not how they're implemented ... we had the former documented already ... This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk*, etc.

We have a failure to communicate here. There is no reasonable sense in which disk formats are not part of "how things are designed to work". If you didn't have that documented already, you didn't even have adequate internal documentation! If Microsoft's design methodology thinks otherwise, that's one source of this huge problem.
The classic buzzphrase for interface specifications is Formats and Protocols, since those are the root of all interoperability. Good design practices may well start from formats and protocols; at least, those are always managed carefully as versioned external interfaces to the next product version, to other vendors' products, and so on.
Re:Wait a year by hxnwix · 2008-02-21 08:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk* How is a third party supposed to read a file format without knowing about that file's on disk structure?

You guys could have written good specs and straightforward formats and saved yourselves endless grief. But no, you fucked yourself up the ass, created the excel 100k bug, invested god only knows how many man-centuries of work tending to BS obfuscated formats that you now must finally document. Tough cookie.
Re:Wait a year by lgw · 2008-02-21 08:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

Have you ever actually worked on a standards committee? "we're doing the absolute minimum to try to meet compliance" is the best you can possibly hope for. Most vendors comply with the smallest subset of the standards they can possibly get away with in the market, and sometimes not even that, and it's ususally the small companies that are the worst offencers (ad they're trying to save a buck).

I'm still pissed that no modern SATA hard drive will work with my SATA RAID controller built into my motherboard, because either SiliconImage or Tyan cut a corner somewhere on standards compliance. And just try mixing and matching fibre channel components within a fabric - nothing works together, and none of the vendors care. At least with SCSI you had a fighting chance.

--
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Wait a year by Hooya · 2008-02-21 08:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

Well, here's an easy win for ya. I pledge to sing praises of MS *if* MS works with the mod_ssl people to fix the force-response-1.0 issue with apache+mod_ssl and IE. And no it's not just for 4.0x versions of IE. The way I see it, the problem may be in mod_ssl (or it may be in IE) but the mod_ssl people have no way of figuring that out since IE is closed. MS, on the other hand, has access to both IE and mod_ssl. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if MS took those small, yet practical steps in making things interoperable?

Until that happens, I couldn't care less about the time MS spends in the mountains of documentation and years of man-hour spent in making said mountain, or the revenue lost in doing so. I'm sorry, but don't expect me to sympathize about lost revenue with a company that makes millions in the amount of time it takes me to stick that bit of configuration into one of my servers to make it work with the said corp's products in a hobbled and barely functioning way.

I just spent two months of going back and fourth with a client why despite the forced downgrade, we had enough hardware to handle the load. MS could have helped me out. It chooses not to. I could sing praises of MS. I choose not to.
Re:Wait a year by mugnyte · 2008-02-21 08:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

Actually, its the long history of MSFT's "embrace and extend" philosophy, making lock-in and format wars an unnecessary market, that prompts these cynical attitudes.

One has to remember that MS's philosophy for years was "we BUILT the friggin market, they should conform to US". They still seek to define a lot of the formats, protocols, etc for the innovation they see as their own. Did you see .NET on *nix when its was released? Should you have? Perhaps not, but when a school determines not to use MS for networked services because of a perceived lock in or aftermarket-only compatibility, MS sales will rush in to placate the decision makers instead of simply providing this out of the box. This hand-waving that occurs in these situations has been observed again and again (government acceptance programs, school purchase plans, lawsuits, format discussions, standard bodies, support chains, etc).

MS is fiercely competitive, and all decisions are coordinated to only give a nod to fostering a non-MS sale when forced. Otherwise, you better believe they act in concert to suggest that each MS piece is best served by another MS piece - and they make sure there is a solid piece in every slot that tech is needed. They want to continue to *define* the standards, not *conform* to them. This is the doorway towards innovation and thus competitive-advantage they repeat again and again in memos. You have to realize this first.

Even with this in mind, one can appreciate their tech and admire their smarts at times. But playing well with others has never been in their interest. This is not the fault of the good poster above and his tech team. It is a corporate top-down strategy that's worked for them, and will continue to be used.

No matter what they state is going to be "opened" or "published" they move onwards quickly.
Re:Wait a year by Schraegstrichpunkt · 2008-02-21 09:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

that there are real, non-evil people down in the trenches
I seriously doubt it. Microsoft is demonstrably a corrupt, evil company (see the irregularities wrt. the ISO OOXML debacle), and Microsoft couldn't do it without people who are willing to work there and support the company's actions. To still be a Microsoft employee today, you basically have to live under a rock, be totally gullible, be a sociopath, or be so incompetent that you can't get hired elsewhere (and thus don't have the luxury of ethics).

Every employee of Microsoft is responsible for supporting the company's actions. The only non-evil Microsoft employees today are former Microsoft employees.

--
http://outcampaign.org/
Re:Wait a year by Cederic · 2008-02-21 11:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never intended to be used by any third party. You keep mentioning this as though it means you're being treated unfairly.

We know they were never intended to be used by any third party. That's the fucking point. It would give a third party the ability to compete fairly with you.

You could argue that a company ought to be able to retain competitive advantage through trade secrets (such as internal APIs, etc). Had Microsoft not undertaken so many anti-competitive and illegal practices to prevent even disadvantaged (in API terms) competitors from participating in related markets the EU may even have allowed that argument.

Using an OS monopoly to help enforce a desktop software monopoly and using that to enforce vendor lock-in through file format obsfuscation is however what got you where you are. You built the monopoly using illegal means and seek to retain it through information hiding. Removing the competitive advantage derived from enhanced internal API knowledge is a valid and appropriate response by the EU.

Hell, your customers may benefit too. Now you're being forced to actually document your software perhaps you'll also engineer it to retain backwards compatibility with previous versions of your own software. It's well into the 21st century, this really shouldn't be so alien a concept.
Re:Wait a year by Your.Master · 2008-02-21 12:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

Name calling:
Just remember M$ lackey, what goes around comes around.. Also, the part where he doubted Microsoft employees were "allowed" to view slashdot was both astoundingly tinfoil hattish (Microsoft is, in fact, not North Korea), and an assault on his parent poster's integrity.

Of course he's entitled to provide his or her opinion, but the result is that the next person is entitled to respond to that opinion. It is, as you snark, called a dialog. And then we are in turn entitled to point out that the previous posters were entitled to their opinions. And any further responses we might get are entitled to their opinions. And so on and so forth.

But, you know, some opinions really do reflect poorly on greater communities. And some opinions are self-destructive. Why should any Microsoft employee *ever* open up about *anything* if said employee is just going to get flamed? Do we really want Microsoft to be even more closed off and uncommunicative?
Re:Wait a year by Z34107 · 2008-02-21 14:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

You guys could have written good specs and straightforward formats and saved yourselves endless grief.

They did. Let me hash out a few websites from the aforementioned blog

Excel had to run on a 20MHz computer with 1MB of memory. Files are binary; just write the data structures out to disk, and read from disk straight into memory. No computer would have had the power to open a large (or small!) XML-esque spreadsheet, for example, within the same business day.

They used existing Windows libraries (OLE, etc.) to make the resulting program smaller and faster. Complete documentation requires detailed explanation of database structures included with Windows 3.11, for example.

They're OLE compound documents. They're file systems within a file. You can't write a full-featured Word processor without being able to parse the Excel document that powers the chart it contains. Implementing this I'm sure was a few lines of code - I remember OLE being a part of Windows 3.11, just link with it and bam! magic happens - but try implementing this on your own.

Because writing an entire file could take upwards of a minute on old computers, even for relatively small files, only the changed data was appended to the end. This cut save times to ~1 second, but makes the file harder to parse.

They were small files. They took up little space on disk and in memory. They saved quickly. They loaded quickly. They were fuckin' magic on computers that had less memory and processing power than my TI-89 graphing calculator.

But, what were good design decisions for a Windows program are problematic for other people to implement. Boo hoo. And what assholes everyone was to the Microsoft poster, btw.

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DATABASE WOW WOW
Re:Wait a year by Schraegstrichpunkt · 2008-02-22 02:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

I have never worked for MS, but I have many friends who do, or have, and they are neither living under a rock, gullible, sociopathic, nor incompetent. They are ordinary, decent nerds who are not very concerned about Microsoft's business practices, and want a challenging job in software engineering working with other talented people.
I would classify "harming others because you don't care not to" as sociopathic. At minimum, it's quite selfish.

"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," as they say, and that more or less characterizes my friends.
Working for Microsoft, at minimum, constitutes doing nothing. I'm not sure what your point is.

Not to flame, but do you buy gasoline or eat meat?
I buy gasoline, and I don't like it, and I avoid it where I can. Your friends, if they're so smart, could easily get "a challenging job in software engineering working with other talented people" without supporting Microsoft's practices.

As for "bloodshed and death" being associated with eating meat, can I assume that you're talking about the bloodshed and death of the animals themselves? Humans must kill other life forms in order to survive, so on that front, I have no alternatives. Drawing a distinction between animals and plants (or worse, between red meat and fish) and even bacteria is arbitrary. My ethics aren't based upon the cuteness of the potential victim.

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http://outcampaign.org/

Re:Don't worry by Brian+Gordon · 2008-02-21 06:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's because of their history- Microsoft has never been transparent, and any interoperability they've promised has always turned into embrace, extend and extinguish.

Open Standards is the goal by xzvf · 2008-02-21 06:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Open Standards is the goal by illumin8 · 2008-02-21 07:56 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
I give it 2-3 years max before this happens. The reason is that Microsoft is losing the server market to better *nix competitors. Server 2008 will be a resounding failure. No business in their right mind is going to run a server operating system with a remote kill switch (WGA - Windows Genuin Dis advantage), which has already been accidentally triggered for thousands of Vista users.

Microsoft was able to keep their monopoly intact by promoting piracy of their own software (in the past) and getting informed IT users to "drink the kool-aid" with free downloads. Now that they've implemented draconian DRM and activation which is difficult to work around, they're losing their biggest market and mind-share: the enthusiasts that actually used to like Windows.

What I see happening now is that all of the people that were playing with Windows NT at home and building home networks and setting up domains back in the late 90's early 2000's are building Hackintoshes and using Leopard. They see how well Leopard performs on the exact same hardware compared to Vista and it is night and day.

I have a Leopard box at home on a quad-core Hackintosh and it is remarkably stable. I get full access to all 4GB of my RAM (no 32-bit limitations that only give me 3GB, and no signed driver BS like I get with 64-bit Vista). I have uptimes that measure in weeks instead of hours or days, and everything just fucking works.

Mark my words, Apple will be the next Microsoft. Whatever the "cool kids" are playing with on their hacked, modded, and customized home PCs will be the operating system of the future in business. It always goes in that cycle. First you get the technology elite to adopt your product, then they eventually tell enough business types (PHBs) how good it is, and enough of the PHBs will eventually listen and start adoption on a corporate level.

--
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon

If they were serious about the patent issue.... by 8282now · 2008-02-21 06:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Pledge by PPH · 2008-02-21 07:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Its what the PoTUS does at his inauguration when he says he'll uphold the Constitution.

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Have gnu, will travel.

As the saying goes by SpiceWare · 2008-02-21 07:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.

ITake anything Microsoft does with an extremely large grain of salt.

Re:Don't worry by AmaDaden · 2008-02-21 07:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

They will get bashed anyway.

I have a deep deep distrust and hatred of MS. But look at the history of IBM. As I understand it they went through the same thing back in the day. People HATED IBM venomously but in time as IBM changed their ways people stopped caring about what they did in the past. If MS can get their shit together and let FOSS people make compatible software with out a fight then most of the bashing might stop. After all it's in their best interest, if you can't beat 'em...

Re:Don't worry by sm62704 · 2008-02-21 07:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

They will get bashed anyway. Bashed if they do, bashed if they don't. They can't win.

yes they can. Instead of announcing yet again (and how many times have we heard it already?) that they were going to interoperate, they could shut the hell up and just DO IT. If they did that they'd get kudos from me.

But for a couple of trite but true old sayings -- once bitten, twice shy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Until I see some real actual interoperability I'm forced to believe that it's the same lie we've heard over and over again. I'll no more believe Microsoft's lies than I'll let Bighead in my house again.

--
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest

The crucial condition by MLCT · 2008-02-21 07:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is available on the condition that the uses are non-commercial:

It also promised not to sue open source developers for making that software available for non-commercial use. source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7257411.stm

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.

Open standards are needed, not this by forgoil · 2008-02-21 07:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

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...

Re:Don't worry by pak9rabid · 2008-02-21 07:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

Exactly..you can't just overlook decades of market abuse just because Microsoft promises a few things. Only an idiot would take their word on issues like this w/out a huge grain of salt given their past documented history.

Re:Pledge by illumin8 · 2008-02-21 07:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers

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"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon

Re:Major shift by penix1 · 2008-02-21 07:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

his 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.

Horse shit! "fundamental shift" would be more along the lines of GPLing Windows + Office. That is a fundamental shift. This is them trying to appear compliant with EU wishes. The "patent pledge" is incompatible with, and dangerous to, the GPL because it isn't binding on successive holders of the patent. When Microsoft decides to sell that patent, nothing guarantees the new holder won't go for broke. Again, if it was a "fundamental shift" then Microsoft would donate those patents like IBM did. They aren't doing that now are they...

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.

And just as likely to go the same way. TC is dead and I hope it stays that way. Anyone stupid enough to trust Microsoft in this deserves the spanking they are likely to get.

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This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.

Let's be blunt by Dracos · 2008-02-21 08:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

Re:Never trust a Klingon. by alextheseal · 2008-02-21 08:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

Can't read their doc as it's not published in a format that's interoperable: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/interoperability/docs/MicrosoftInteroperabilityAnnouncement.docx

Re:Don't worry by gstoddart · 2008-02-21 08:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

I have a deep deep distrust and hatred of MS. But look at the history of IBM. As I understand it they went through the same thing back in the day. People HATED IBM venomously but in time as IBM changed their ways people stopped caring about what they did in the past. If MS can get their shit together and let FOSS people make compatible software with out a fight then most of the bashing might stop. After all it's in their best interest, if you can't beat 'em...

Microsoft are going to have to change an awful lot before people are willing to trust them.

While they haven't made too many statements on the topic lately, it wasn't too long ago they were whining about a bunch of unspecified patents which Linux supposedly infringes on. They haven't suddenly become friendly to FOSS.

Opening some documents to try to stave off further legal woes in Europe does not a 'nice' Microsoft make. If they change their ways, and if they do it convincingly for a period of time, then people might start to think of them as less evil. But, I'm gonna need a little more time before I start thinking they have any of our interests at heart.

Cheers

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.

Re:Patent clause is for non-commercial only by rrohbeck · 2008-02-21 08:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

No - because they are retaining the rights to sue entities that use the information for commercial purposes. Here's the text:

5. Open Source Compatibility. Microsoft will covenant not to sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open Protocols.

I can smell a rat here. Would that mean the FOSS apps using their "Open Protocols" could not be distributed in commercial distros like RHEL or SLES/SLED? Would fully free distros like Fedora use them? Would they sue commercial outfits like Ubuntu?
Smells like an attempt at fragmenting FOSS space.

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thegodmovie.com - watch it

Re:Don't worry by Shotgun · 2008-02-21 08:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

Difference between IBM and Microsoft is that IBM actually had (and still has) a full portfolio. IBM offered a wide range of hardware and software that was of the utmost quality. Microsoft offers an office suite tied to a mediocre operating system that survives on the network effect, and that is still trying to catch up with basic multi-user and security standards that UNIX variants have had for years. They have recently tried to buy their way into other commodity markets, using monopoly cash from their lock-in tactics.

If Microsoft truly interoperates, they will be commoditized out of existence.

--
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba

Re:Don't worry by pyrbrand · 2008-02-21 08:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous. Even if a company wants to do something as vague as "be interoperable", there's both a lot of work and a lot of interpretation into what that means. Documenting APIs is a lot of work, even just determining which APIs to doc and which are internal implementation is hard. If you work at a software company that's been around for any period of time, think about all your code and what percentage of it is documented. At a place like Microsoft, that's had 30 years of products coming and going, pieces of which stick around for years for backwards compat reasons, yet no one has touched them since Windows 2.0, I think you'll realize the volume of work. Chances are, there's a lot of code you just have to "figure out" without any help every once and a while when you have to deal with it since there's no docs you can find and the people who wrote it or maintained it are no longer around.

Re:Don't worry by jcr · 2008-02-21 08:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

What's different about IBM and Microsoft is that IBM has lost their monopoly, and been through a change of top management. IBM didn't clean up their act until they had to, and neither will Microsoft.

-jcr

--
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."

Re:Don't worry by sm62704 · 2008-02-21 08:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

If comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous, it seems that a company saying IT WILL "just do" something are even more disingenuous.

Nobody said it was easy. Instead of saying "we're going to interoperate" they could do something; Documenting APIs are work, but you know, they're not in business for their health. The goddamned APIs should have been documented as the APIs themselves were written. You sound like the kid who won't clean his room for three months and then complains to his mom that cleaning his room is too much work but he wants his allowance anyway.

Microsoft won't even interoperate with itself, as my friend Mike mentioned to me in a bar. I'd loaned him a crossover cable, which didn't work, so he bought a router and some lan cables, which also didn't work.

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mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest

Re:Don't worry by MightyMartian · 2008-02-21 09:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

They're going to open up some formats, but they're going to be patent and license poisoned, so open source is going to be shut out. This is the forerunner to Microsoft suing potential major competitors like Samba and OO.org. Quite frankly, I hope the developers on these projects don't even download the specs, don't look at them, and tell any Microsoft rep showing up at their door to screw off. This is really very dangerous territory.

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The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.

Fool me twice...Won't get fooled again by PopeRatzo · 2008-02-21 10:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

How many times do you have to watch Microsoft pull the football away just as you're getting ready to kick the field goal? Some people just don't learn.

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You are welcome on my lawn.

Non Serviam by argent · 2008-02-21 11:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

iii. Open Source Compatibility. Microsoft will promise not to sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open Protocols. 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.

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.

Re:Don't worry by rtb61 · 2008-02-21 17:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

I provided that on an answer for a survey about my feelings about M$, I amended it though, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, OMFG I am so embarrassed those arseholes managed to fool me a lot more fucking times than twice.

M$ is of course a company, could I trust them in the future, sure, as soon as the current executive team is gone and along with them their malign, vile influence.

It is impossible to trust them, imagine, they launched a marketing exercise to target individual's who recommended Linux and attempted to smear them as religious zealots, terrorists, members of organised crime and that they were a cancer upon society. Seriously this is truly disgusting stuff, they set out to destroy the careers and reputations of IT professionals, because those professionals would dare to recommend an alternate product that was vastly superior and was a far better solution for the future.

Of course they did stop, but not because what they were doing was vile, offensive and basically criminal, they stopped, because it wasn't fucking working, really unbelievably sickening stuff. Now there was a class action law suit that went begging, slander on a mass scale via cooperative mass media venues. The reason it failed, it just infuriated those same IT Professionals, so rather than just recommended and use the alternate product, Linux, they became active supporters, promoters, coders, installers and distributors.

Whilst that same disgusting executive team remains, fuck em, they are a cancer upon the technological evolution of society and do genuinely, consistently, behave like the most corrupt of criminals.

--
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen

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Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability

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