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.

Comments

Pledge

[Peter Trepan]

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?

Re:Pledge

[sm62704]

Dude, you must not be American (lucky you). Here they teach pledges in grade school, so I'll try to enlighten.

A "pledge" is a promise one makes under threat or other coercion that one has no want or need to actually follow. They've outlawed corporal punishment here since I went to school with Fred and Barney, but you were forced to recite the pledge or go to the principal's office and be caned.

Today if you don't recite the pledge they expel you, unless you go to school in the inner city in which case they don't even give a shit if you bring a gun, unless you shoot it at one of the staff.

Schoolchildren use the pledge to learn parody, as in

I pledge alliegance to the fag
In the principal's orifice in a married can
One notion, under Gold, invisible, with libber trees and just ass for owls.

When the President of the US is sworn in to office, the Constitution says he must pledge to uphold the Constitution. Although every President has taken this pledge, none have as yet actually done anything whatever to uphold said Constitution.

Pledge is also the brand name of some stuff your mom sprays on the end tables before she wipes your nasty fingerprints off.

I personally pledge to not hit "submit" with this comment. Oops...

Re:Wait a year

[ashridah]

I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.

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.

That's an astronomical amount of man hours for it to be 'minimal compliance'. We're producing the documentation we're required to produce, at great expense to us. I can't comment on other areas we're being regulated in, however, but it's probably going to take us years to make up the amount of time we've lost in revenue from Europe.

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. I'm not even convinced that the documentation is going to actually be useful to anyone (See Joel Spolsky's commentary on the matter, for instance, and he helped write that code!)

Reading Slashdot from Microsoft

[JoshHeitzman]

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.