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

Never trust a Klingon.

[croddy]

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!

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[morgan_greywolf]

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! Captain Bill Gates: Admeeral, there is a very old Klingon proverb. Do you know it? Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Captain Richard M. Stallman: GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATES!!!!

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[siyavash]

I don't think they are dieing though. ;)

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[alextheseal]

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:Never trust a Klingon.

[Teun]

At least OO renders it reasonably :)

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[z0M6]

Admiral steve ballmer: FIRE ZE CHAIRS!

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[KwKSilver]

Paid your .docx patent tax yet? Mmm-hmmm. Got a receipt? I thought not! =\

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[idontgno]

Of course he has the receipt; it's filed with his $699 SCO Linux license receipt.

(I'm gonna refrain from paraphrasing the rest of the troll quote, something about smoking roosters and making tea.)

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[MickDownUnder]

It's just a zip file containing XML, try opeening it with a archive utility...

Looks something like this...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<w:document xmlns:ve="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships" xmlns:m="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/math" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:wp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/wordprocessingDrawing" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main" xmlns:wne="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2006/wordml">
<w:body>
<w:p w:rsidR="00FC386E" w:rsidRPr="00C36F7C" w:rsidRDefault="00FC386E" w:rsidP="008506E1">
<w:r w:rsidRPr="00C36F7C">
<w:rPr>
<w:b/>
<w:sz w:val="24"/>
<w:szCs w:val="24"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t>Announcement Overview</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r w:rsidRPr="00C36F7C">
<w:rPr>
<w:b/>
<w:sz w:val="24"/>
<w:szCs w:val="24"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t>Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:p w:rsidR="00FC386E" w:rsidRPr="00C36F7C" w:rsidRDefault="00FC386E" w:rsidP="008506E1">
<w:r w:rsidRPr="00C36F7C">
<w:rPr>
<w:i/>
<w:sz w:val="20"/>
<w:szCs w:val="20"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t>New Interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:p w:rsidR="00FC386E" w:rsidRPr="00360CFD" w:rsidRDefault="00FC386E" w:rsidP="008506E1">
<w:r w:rsidRPr="00360CFD">
<w:rPr>
<w:bCs/>
<w:sz w:val="20"/>
<w:szCs w:val="20"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t xml:space="preserve">Microsoft is making a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices that will increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community of developers, partners, customers, and competitors. </w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:p w:rsidR="00FC386E" w:rsidRPr="00360CFD" w:rsidRDefault="00FC386E" w:rsidP="008506E1">
<w:r w:rsidRPr="00360CFD">
<w:rPr>
<w:bCs/>
<w:sz w:val="20"/>
<w:szCs w:val="20"/>
</w:rPr>
<w:t xml:space="preserve">Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding across its high-volume business products Windows Vista (including the

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[Calinous]

Wow, very helpful

Re:Never trust a Klingon.

[MickDownUnder]

Yes it was, wasn't it.

Wait a year

[Animats]

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

[Plug]

Interesting how it happens a week before the ISO ballot resolution meeting on OOXML...

Re:Wait a year

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy who patents PD controllers for animating human figures.

http://www.animats.com/
Our technology for high-quality ragdolls is patented. This broad patent covers most spring/damper character simulation systems. If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent.

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!)

Re:Wait a year

[kithrup]

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

[siyavash]

You shouldn't hang the patenters, that would be treating the symptoms. Change the laws instead.

Re:Wait a year

[poetmatt]

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

[doktor-hladnjak]

Microsoft is the largest software company in the world. Believe it or not, there are a LOT of geeks there and a LOT of them read slashdot.

Of course, 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 whose only faces are those of Ballmer and Gates.

Re:Wait a year

[noidentity]

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

Will you? I'm not assured.

Re:Wait a year

[theshorn]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[CastrTroy]

There's already laws against shooting people. Doesn't stop it from happening. Patent law also says that patents can't be obvious. It doesn't stop obvious things from being patented.

Re:Wait a year

[illumin8]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[ashridah]

The documentation you're talking about is about how things are designed to work, not how they're implemented. There's a difference between the two, and we had the former documented already, it's part of our development processes. That's not what the EU asked us to produce. We've got design specs and feature specs, etc already. The feature doesn't get built without those.

This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk*, etc. I would argue that we don't need that information unless we're writing an importer, particularly since for a lot of things, our constraints have changed completely, so knowing how we did it in the past is of historical value at best. Joel points that out as well.

Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort (That's how Netscape got to where it is now, by throwing away code, Joel mentions that too in some of his older articles.)

Re:Wait a year

[rhizome]

the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical.

This speaks more to the corner Microsoft has painted itself into, rather than to the amount of openness or compliance achieved. A drowning person has to work in order to be able to breathe air, but this doesn't mean that they've left the water. By all accounts Linux (as well as other forms of Unix) is sitting on the beach in the open air, waiting for any and all comers to speak to it. That Microsoft is so far away from this is an apt metaphor for the distance Microsoft has to travel in order to make valuable connections to what is already open and operating well. I do agree that this development is a bit of a truce called by Microsoft, but it's tantamount to them saying they'll drop the sword while still having a derringer in their sock. It's not enough.

Re:Wait a year

[CastrTroy]

Also, wouldn't they already have documents on file formats and APIs? What kind of operation are they running that they don't even have API docs handy? Sure some work may need to be done to clean them up for external use, but I hardly doubt that they would be working from scratch on most of these documents.

Re:Wait a year

[LinuxDon]

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

[Froqen]

We are talking about network protocols where there is one server implementation and one client implementation. So long as it worked, it didn't matter much to do formal documentation. There is an ocean of a difference between the scant internal documentation and what Microsoft reverse engineered out of source and on the wire behavior that is now up on MSDN.

Re:Wait a year

[jbr439]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

(and I don't know if I buy that a MS employee of any kind is allowed to read Slashdot) I kind of doubt theres anything official preventing Microsoft employees from visiting Slashdot, what surprises me is that they'd want to at all, given the anti-Microsoft environment Slashdot is famous for.

I don't find any of it shocking, Microsoft wants to do business in Europe so once their lawyers couldn't put it off anymore they abided by the EU's ruling. Microsoft is a company thats out to make profit, not to do evil things just because its fun.

Re:Wait a year

[Foofoobar]

If the work is so important and you really mean it, then open source it. Put it under the GPL and not a 'shared source' license. This promise to sue means nothing. The shared source means less. Promises get broken and shared source means you own my changes and improvements turning me into a free employee rather than those changes being able to be used by the community at large and even by you, the company and product developers to improve your product.

Microsoft is only going halfway when previously they have shown they are willing to do anything they have to do to crush and destroy the open source community. It's like offering to shake our hand over an open pit of alligators rather than just jumping across to say hello.

Re:Wait a year

[ashridah]

Also, wouldn't they already have documents on file formats and APIs? What kind of operation are they running that they don't even have API docs handy? Sure some work may need to be done to clean them up for external use, but I hardly doubt that they would be working from scratch on most of these documents.

For what it's worth, we have those. The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.

There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.

Re:Wait a year

[Phurge]

"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." When you're talking about companies without unethical business practices, I think Google is the only one hiring. Through Intelligence (and luck/timing) they have a place at the top table without using unethical business practices (which cannot be said about that overpriced design firm named after a fruit)

Re:Wait a year

[alexgieg]

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

Well, it is possible that Microsoft is becoming a better company. After all, if IBM, of all corporations, could do so (and those old enough, or interested enough in the history of technology, know what I'm talking about), Microsoft most certainly can do so too. But most people will keep their skepticism up for as long as it takes for concrete demonstrations of good behavior to become the norm, rather than the exception.

Please note however that I don't think Microsoft will keep being "the evil neighbor" forever. Sooner or later it'll have to adapt to the advances of the free software movement and start working in synergy, rather than in conflict, with it. It's simply mathematically unavoidable: hundreds of thousands of free software developers will at some point aggregate more man-hours of development into at least one free software alternative to each Microsoft product, and sometimes to more than one, than Microsoft could surpass with its hundreds or thousands of developers. In many fields this hasn't happened yet, and there Microsoft softwares stand out. But at some point it will happen, and there's no way around it. So, once it happens, Microsoft will be forced to either change, or to be left behind. There'll be no third alternative.

This move, thus, seems to imply this change in posture might be happening, so to speak, before the natural deadline, rather than at it. But then, it's perfectly possible that Microsoft's management still hasn't grasped that this is the case and there's no routing around it. I'm not holding my breath. But I surely hope I'm wrong, and it turns out to be an actual change for the better. If I am, it'll surely be a win-win situation for everyone.

In any case, give it time and keep doing "The Right Thing(TM)", and the skepticism will fade accordingly and eventually disappear. Don't do it, and it'll happen some years down the line anyway. In either case, the future of software development is bright.

Re:Wait a year

[multisync]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.


If it costs a bunch of money to produce and you don't get any money back for having produced, yeah, that's what they call a loss in the business world. You lose money. Loss vs. gain, not loss vs. win.

Re:Wait a year

[Shotgun]

No, if the company had learned to engineer a product properly, they wouldn't have to lose all that production time...

Here's a hint, you don't code and release a product, then turn around and write the spec for it.

Re:Wait a year

[mysticgoat]

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".

Sort of like spending the extra effort to identify where in the HTML box model there is enough ambiguity that Microsoft can do things differently than everyone else, and still claim to meet the standard?

I mean, that must have taken a lot more study than just looking at how all the other browsers were implementing the standard, and doing the same thing.

Re:Wait a year

[Big Jojo]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be in the minority then... I am often hesitant to mention that I worked for Microsoft for seven years. Not because I ever did anything I'm ashamed of (I wrote C++ compiler ISO/ANSI compliance code, fergawds sake), but because people get so damned uppity and assume that I'm either (a) some idiot who can't write code worth a damn, or (b) some kind of evil genius out to dominate the world through the software industry. How I can simultaneously be a bumbling incompetent and an evil genius is somewhat baffling to me, but there you have it -- people are irrational, and when you threaten their religion (FOSS, to some), they get more so.

FOSS advocates are human, and it's human nature to paint your opponent as absolutely evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's a mistake, and a sign of immaturity, but it's human.

So mostly these days, as I work on Linux-based Java projects, I just tell people that I worked for a number of years at a "major software company in the Northwest." That's true enough...

Re:Wait a year

[hxnwix]

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

[alextheseal]

I've heard that documentation is easier to maintain if you write it as you write the code. Perhaps that can be your model in the future. Document and publish as you write and not years later.

Re:Wait a year

[lgw]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[gbjbaanb]

About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation Well, thank f**k for that. God knows you guys have written enough .NET nonsense over the last couple of years to make us poor developers' heads spin as we try to understand what the next framework technology preview might do for us and whether its any good or just some overengineered crud someone thought would be a good idea at some time.

Microsoft used to be a great company for developers - MSDN was excellent resource that actually told us what we needed to know, how to do things and what effects it would have. Last year I couldn't find anything because every index item returned a Windows CE result, now I can't do anything becuase I only get .NET references. Some of us do have to work with some "legacy" MS products, Our major customer is still running an app written with VC6, its only a few years old and yet... totally obsolete and forgotten about by MS.

Thank goodness you're stopping the mad rush to develop all kinds of stuff we'll never use and get back to the basics you should have been doing in the first place.

Re:Wait a year

[ratboy666]

What I find truly fascinating is that it is taking this much effort...

I have never worked for Microsoft, but I have been on staff for Philips in the early '80s, writing software for dedicated word processors. Philips had a department that was dedicated to keeping track of source code, file formats, documentation, to levels required by government (and other) regulation.

Basically, all formats are documented and accessible. I have worked at SUN Microsystems -- same deal. There is a PILE of documentation available for most things. Also, SUN published specifications on a regular basis (NFS, NIS, etc.). It may be more difficult to dig up "ancient history" on OpenOffice (or even impossible) especially as compared to Solaris. But at least the core stuff was documented.

The proof is, of course, in the pudding -- Solaris was successfully open-sourced (which means that ALL copyrights in the source base needed to be traced).

Now you are telling me that Microsoft, with such a high government usage is going to take years to recover from what it should have already had?

Whether the documentation is of ANY use is quite irrelevant. It would be trivial for SUN to supply this information for recent OpenOffice, NFS, NIS, NIS+, Solaris; and they are not even in a monopoly position. It just makes good engineering sense. Are you telling me that Microsoft is THAT badly fucked up?

Re:Wait a year

[Znork]

Of course, that there are real, non-evil people down in the trenches making and supporting products

The ole 'only following orders' excuse, eh?

Really tho, I think most people know and acknowledge that. It just makes little difference as it's not those non-evil people making the actual decisions that affect everyone else. To those losing their jobs as their companies get killed by anticompetetive practices it doesn't really help that much (obviously) that there were nice people at Microsoft. To those getting downsized as corporate expenditure on software made the business unprofitable it doesn't help either. Nor to those who can't access their banks, can't use products they've bought, etc, etc, etc.

I'd suggest that the nice guys in the trenches, if they want to demonstrate their good will, ensure that the evil guys are the first one over the top the next time. And that they get shot in the back repeatedly just in case the enemy doesn't do the job right.

Re:Wait a year

[Hooya]

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

[mugnyte]

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

[poetmatt]

Standards committee: I'm actually applying to join like 4 relevant to my job. I really look forward to it both in terms of increasing my knowledge and getting some real world insight. However, no two standards committees are alike. I don't think I'd be able to relate the ones I want to join (not computer related) versus computer related and/or technical.

I do understand the cost saving aspects, but if the bar is so low for compliance you raise it. Of course the vendors groan at that too. I agree usually the large companies see the light and do well better than compliance, but this is Microsoft. You have to fundamentally change your business view in such a situation. They have essentially defined their own business model and quality is not a part of their equation.

Have you worked on a standards committee? I don't mean that as an insult, but please clarify so that I can understand better what I am missing either partially or completely.

About your motherboard, I am moderately sympathetic I suppose, but what is stopping you from switching motherboards? It's not like they're the most expensive part of a PC system, even for a quality mobo. I believe it's called "influencing with your dollar", aka taking your business away from the non-compliant company and giving it to the compliant one...of course being a consumer in and of itself sucks all the same

Re:Wait a year

[ashridah]

Yeah, except you're not doing your history here. We already handed over what we had, which was copious amounts in it's own right, a year or two back.

The EU basically rejected it saying it wasn't enough, under their new, arbitrarily chosen, "standards". The documentation they've requested (and as Joel is pointing out) isn't going to help anyone, and producing it is just going to make things painful for everyone (not just us).

The documentation we had was already usable for most government procuring processes, and doesn't require any of these things to be documented the way that the EU is requesting.

Keep in mind that what we (and sun, and philips) needed to provide when bidding for contracts would have been compliance documentation, not down to the byte documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never intended to be used by any third party. We also have our own internal documentation processes, and a lot of that's going into what we've been asked to produce, as well, but obviously, it needs to be reworked to be appropriate, we can't just hand over a copy of the documentation version control tree to everyone, it wouldn't satisfy the requirements, and it'd include more than would be necessary, or useful.

Now, keep in mind that I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, or that it shouldn't be documented, but I'm pretty sure that the end result will be documentation that no-one has a need for, and it won't be usable to level whatever humps are in the playing field.

Re:Wait a year

[Hooya]

> Now, sure, we still post profits thanks to asia and america,

So you admit those in Asia and America are being charged extra to cover the expenses of the consequences of unethical business practices elsewhere?

Re:Wait a year

[epine]

If it costs a bunch of money to produce and you don't get any money back for having produced, yeah, that's what they call a loss in the business world. You lose money. Loss vs. gain, not loss vs. win. Zing. The original point went right over your head.

You have an eager customer who wants to make a huge purchase. Customer is concerned about documentation over the longer time frame. In order to close the sale, your salesdrone mutters the reassurance "the documentation will be provided in due time". Profit!

Documentation never arrives. "Oh, well, we've changed the product again, there's really no point in documenting what you purchased back then." Unilateral disavowal of implied sales promise. Double profit!

Knock, knock. Who's there? Aunty. Aunty who? Aunty Trust. We'd like our documentation finally.

"Uh, do we have to, like that would be expensive, and it would cut into profits we already declared. Hey, it's not like we promised this in the first place, but if you *really* insist, I guess we'll do it, just to keep you happy."

That's how business works. A loss leader is finally making good on an obligation you tried for all the world to forget you'd made.

Meanwhile, the corporation got to play the game about how fabulously wealthy and profitable and powerful it has always been, and beat the street, and chuff a lot of executive parachutes.

Then when these forgotten/hidden/disavowed liabilities finally come to roost, the hard-headed CEO declares "but we're not making a profit!"

Translation: "creating this mess vested my predecessor's options, fixing this mess won't vest my own".

In the investment world this same practice is known as an RRSP/401k. You owe the tax, but you don't pay. You get to keep all the money and pretend it's your own. Until later. Then you have to give some back. But meanwhile, you benefit from the pretense. You legally get to keep the profits earned by investing the tax portion that wasn't exactly yours in the first place.

When I get old, I'll be happy to call the tax cut that comes out of my RRSP withdrawals a "loss leader" while fantasizing that I'm a captain of industry.

Re:Wait a year

[dwater]

"elsewhere"?

The unethical business practices are unethical everywhere.

Re:Wait a year

[Dadoo]

Like you, I believe this is a ploy by Microsoft to get some good publicity. Then it occurred to me: does it really matter? Do people really think that, if Microsoft fully documents all their protocols, open source developers will create tools to talk to them?

Take, for example, Exchange and Outlook. They've dominated the email market for close to ten years now. If you listen to people who say they'd like to switch their email to open source, but can't, the reason they usually give is they need Outlook's calendar capability. Open Source has all the necessary tools (Cyrus/Courier/IMAPd/Thunderbird/Pine/etc.) to perform all the same functions, *except* the calendar. Why is that still the case, after ten years? Does everyone think that, if Microsoft opens their file formats and protocols, that will all change?

Just asking...

Re:Wait a year

[dwater]

"other product groups"? Is that what you're calling Google these days?

Re:Wait a year

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[lysse]

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.

Oh good. :)

Re:Wait a year

[starfishsystems]

Yep, Microsoft sure has a lot of work to do in order to clean up its act.

And why is that? Because Microsoft can't just make up its own rules. I know it must come as a shock to you, but not to the rest of us.

Poor Microsoft. You make it sound almost like you were disadvantaged in some way.

Re:Wait a year

[Mongoose Disciple]

No offense, but did you actually read the thread to this point? From your post I have to conclude that the answer is no.

Also: Not that I was talking about loss leaders, but I don't think that term means what you think it means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Re:Wait a year

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

it's probably going to take us years to make up the amount of time we've lost in revenue from Europe.

And it's going to take everyone else decades to recover from what we've lost in revenue because we had to deal with the company you support.

You're supporting a company that apparently manipulates a balloting process, views developers as pawns and one-night stands, is pretty much trying to replace the OLPC (an educational platform) with Windows laptops (which have nothing to do with education), and does many, many other evil things. You're indirectly supporting the Gates Foundation, which looks like it's going to be as good for science as Microsoft has been for software.

Microsoft couldn't do it without its employees, i.e. you. You're enabling Microsoft, and in my view, you are partly responsible for its continued ability to wreak havoc on the world. Don't you feel like a sociopath?

Re:Wait a year

[Hatta]

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.

Such as?

Re:Wait a year

[guruevi]

And I think there we have the main problem with Microsoft's coding and intercompatibility issues.

This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk* - You could just give the design specs and from there on any decent programmer can derive what the end result will look like. If you say: bold text is going to be enclosed with >bold< tags and then we'll use a gzip routine on the document before saving to disk (as should be in the design spec) is the same as saying: to open a file, gunzip it and all text you see with >bold< tags is supposed to be bold. That is of course if you implemented according to design. If somebody outsourced the development to an Indian company (or a bad programmer) and they made shortcuts so that it 'looks' similar to what the design specs are but it doesn't work according to design specs then you have issues in your quality control. You have a documentation issue if your design specs don't get augmented for changes down the road. All-in-all it just comes down to good documentation and programming standards.

Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort - And that's also a big mistake, everybody is just writing patches to the 20 year old code from programmers that nobody even knows if they're still alive for current security and feature upgrades. Of course it's faster to do (initial release), it's going to be slower to troubleshoot, execute and find security holes in it. Look at the Linux kernel. 2.4 and 2.6 were big rewrites from their predecessors and daily parts of still get rewritten if something better comes along. All-in-all they have a more stable base.

Re:Wait a year

[poetmatt]

Hmm, where to start. How about UL, or the company that holds the monopoly on Ethernet? There were other products before it's day. I can name those two off the top of my head.

There are plenty in businesses that are not mainstream that still hold to said principles. If I recall a lot of product manufacturers hold monopolies on parts and continually improve them and not use it as fee extraction.

Re:Wait a year

[TimedArt]

--- quote ---
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.
--- end ---

So... leave the hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, but stop taking money from the bank when the other players aren't looking?

Re:Wait a year

[poetmatt]

Just an FYI, not all monopolies are bad. Period. The US has a history of monopolies that abuse it and there have been wide implications. I'm not saying all monopolies are good, usually when one comes around is a pretty good indication of something going way wrong in economics at any level. However, natural monopolies can be unavoidable at times.

In an optimal situation, what can you do if you and your only competitor's difference between products is that they use lower quality alternatives in china for xyz product and your own are hand-made and of a discernably higher quality? If they only buy yours, is that your fault?

I don't really get where you're going with the comment. I would say break up any and all monopolies and/or hardcore regulate them. However, don't be disillusioned that just because someone controls the market it implies the abuse. I would watch with a magnifying glass so to speak, though.

Re:Wait a year

[cp.tar]

There is some irony there, given that Microsoft (as a group of people) is probably a lot less unfriendly towards open source than open source is towards Microsoft.

Maybe that's because Microsoft has worked much harder to antagonize open source than open source developers tried to antagonize Microsoft.
Wine, Samba et al. are clear examples of open source trying to interoperate with Microsoft's products.
I can't think of many examples of Microsoft trying to interoperate with anyone.

Microsoft can only hate open source for what it is.
Open source people can hate Microsoft not only for what it is, but also for what it does.

JFTR, someone else already pointed out that even this interoperability attempt is published in a .docx document.
I don't call that an interoperability attempt; I call it spitting in my face.

Remember: it's the "suits" who make the business strategy decisions and the press releases, NOT the "little people" writing the code.

But you can't say the little people don't know about that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that the suits are responsible. But the Microsoft label is tainted, and thus the innocent suffer.
I see here that some people don't feel comfortable even saying that once upon a time they worked for Microsoft. Granted, that's mostly in front of FOSS fanboys, but the name is still tainted. FUD cuts both ways.

So when the name becomes so tainted that people start refusing to work for or with them on principle, maybe the suits start making different decisions.

Re:Wait a year

[Bert64]

Well, surely it would have been good practice to actually document formats/protocols/specs/etc *before* you implement...
You create a spec of what you need, then you implement it and adjust the spec if you really need to... That way the code gets written more efficiently, you dont end up writing a big chunk of code than having to rewrite it again because its fundamentally incompatible with something you later found out you need but hadn't thought of while writing it.
And you could at least document as you go along, it makes maintaining the code a lot easier in future, especially if different people will be expected to read it.

Re:Wait a year

[Cederic]

Hmm. I recently joined a new company. They're also still hiring.

They're also reknowned across the country for their ethical business practices. The company owners insisted that this be the case. There are external ethics audits, educational papers and case studies, and consumer/customer surveys that consistently applaud the ethical stance of my new employer.

Not that I joined them for this reason - they offered me the right job for my circumstances so I took it. But it is nice (and admittedly very unusual) to be doing things because they're the right thing to do, not because they're the most profitable thing to do.

(Yes, we do make money. Which is also nice.)

No, I don't work for Google.

Re:Wait a year

[Bert64]

Most microsoft protocols/formats are only intended to be used with one program, or one server / one client, and look at the problems it makes them:

Entourage (OSX outlook equivalent) cannot talk natively to exchange, it hooks over the web interface.
MS Publisher cannot read/write word documents properly, importing sometimes works, exporting rarely does, its import/export is vastly inferior to openoffice actually.

Had they been documented properly internally, they would have been able to implement them in other products much more easily.

Re:Wait a year

[Cederic]

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

[Teun]

I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.
Hmm, a bit late with documentation are we?

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 any more.
Why only now? At least for internal use there should be ample documentation.
And 'translating' that documentation into a public format should not be too hard.
All providing there was some sort of documentation in the first place...

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.
Quite clearly your practises are not exactly transparent, I can hardly imagine a world leader in this industry is SO behind in documentation!
What would have happened when the BSA would have come into the door and requested proof of compliance with various licensing schemes, you'd need 6 months to inventarise what you are running?

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!)
Yeah, that's what Microsoft is known for, legal 'compliance' in such a skewed way that another legal order is necessary to get things minimally right.
Bah!

But I can imagine the problems, first the legal team has to issue a list of issues that need addressing, then the management needs to establish which department is responsible for what section.
When the different departments start their work it'll need constant supervision from the legal team to see the criteria are met.
And then there's Balmer who really wants nothing to be documented unless it's useless.
Being between a stone and a hard place...

Re:Wait a year

[geschild]

If you point out the name-calling in the GP's statement, I'll take your statement seriously.

More to the point, who are you trying to kid? We are all a bunch of fanatical morons. Why else would we frequent /.? :D

And on topic: just because an MS employee thinks MS is doing a great job at providing documentation, anyone is entitled to provide his or her opinion on that effort in response. It's called dialog and it's what you open yourself up to once you make a comment on a public site.

Re:Wait a year

[Phurge]

So either you joined a monastery or a company based in Scandinavia?

Re:Wait a year

[Legume]

So what you're saying is that before Microsoft can get on with business in Europe they are required to spend some of the money they made from their illegal monopoly practises there? Wow, that's so unfair!

As for pouring time and effort into producing vast amounts of documentation that is of no real use to anyone, I thought Microsoft was a big fan .

Re:Wait a year

[Bert64]

Actually there are lots of open source applications which can do shared calendaring, and there has been for years. (rpc.cmsd, ical, caldav).
The problem is that you have to migrated *everything* at once...
Exchange won't talk any kind of standard protocols for anything but mail.
Outlook won't talk any standard protocols for anything but mail.
If you want to migrate you have to switch all your clients and servers at once, you cant switch them gradually. Also you lose all you're data, because exchange doesn't store the data in a format that can easily be converted to any of the standard formats used by other apps.
If people could migrate gradually and with less disruption, a lot more people would migrate away from exchange.

Re:Wait a year

[Cederic]

Or a UK based financial company that qualifies for a .coop domain.

(Which I now have as my work email address. Which is nice :)

Re:Wait a year

[ratboy666]

"Keep in mind that what we (and sun, and philips) needed to provide when bidding for contracts would have been compliance documentation, not down to the byte documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never intended to be used by any third party."

The excuse that the documentation is in "the wrong format or detail level" is a bit absurd -- it SHOULD have been used to design produce the product, and SHOULD have been used to document the product. If the "feedback" loop would allow the documentation and product to vary wildly (it is no longer useful), then the documentation CANNOT be of use internally, either. There SHOULD be a process in place to audit this -- if there isn't, would you not get a BIG FLAG to do some serious process improvement on your ISO 9000 audit?

I guess it could be ignored, but maintenance costs would go up EXPONENTIALLY. After all, new developers have to learn... I guess by the "use the source, Luke" method.

Re:Wait a year

[Phurge]

So my hunch was correct. I would fallen off my chair if you said you were working for a US company.

Re:Wait a year

[multisync]

FOSS advocates are human, and it's human nature to paint your opponent as absolutely evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's a mistake, and a sign of immaturity, but it's human.

For sure. When I told my brother-in-law I'm in to Linux, he said "isn't that like communism?" I'm sure we all know where he got that idea. Small minded people (and I'm talking about Balmer, not my brother-in-law) who are more worried about attacking the other side than doing a better job themselves will usually render themselves irrelevant, given enough time. The morons who prejudge you because you worked for Microsoft are no different than the morons who think FOSS is equivalent to communism.

And I don't care about the opinions of morons.

Re:Wait a year

[kerohazel]

Laws are not enough. There must be a system in place to enforce those laws.

If you shoot someone, there is a pretty good chance you will be caught, tried, convicted, and put in prison.

If you try to patent something obvious, the worst that can happen is that it is rejected. You can always keep trying until it gets through, and many people and organizations do just this. What we need is a deterrent for such activities... until we have that, you should not expect people to change, no matter how big of a douchebag they may be.

Re:Wait a year

[Your.Master]

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

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

> Keep in mind that what we (and sun, and philips) needed to provide when bidding for contracts would have been compliance documentation, not down to the byte documentation of internal APIs, memory structures and file formats that were never
> intended to be used by any third party.

If it's accessible from an on the wire protocol, then trust me it's available to be used by a third party. Not in ways you might like, but it's *definitely* available :-).

Jeremy.

Re:Wait a year

[Weirsbaski]

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.

Maybe it would've been easier for MS to not be a prick in the first place...

Re:Wait a year

[dedazo]

I'd love to hear where you work. Can you tell us please?

Re:Wait a year

[Goalie_Ca]

And it's employees like these that make us think that microsoft has its head up its ass.

Re:Wait a year

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reasonable sense in which disk formats are not part of "how things are designed to work".

If you read the Joel Splosky blog entry about this, it's actually somewhat reasonable (not entirely, but somewhat). MS Office formats have all the evolutionary warts of ~25 years of development. As Joel pointed out, there were two main concerns when determining how to design something...how fast was it and how much code did you have to write to do it. One of the tricks they used to get fast performance was to serialize internal data structures to disk, which are entirely in the realm of "how things are implemented" rather than "how things are designed." This ends up being quite a bit faster and even results in a somewhat more compact file size, two things that were a lot more important back in the early '80s. And since these products were never designed with an eye towards interoperability, this strategy made sense. Just wrap everything you need inside an API that makes sense and let a library worry about the on-disk format.

Now you take 25 years of this strategy, wrapping whatever feature you need inside an API that's responsible for accomplishing a task as fast as possible (which probably uses half a dozen older APIs of the same sort), and you've got what appears to be a complete mess (and is, if you're trying to implement a compatible product from scratch). New features are added that make Office files essentially mini file systems to facilitate embedding each format inside of every other format, and things get even worse. But internally, the APIs make sense, perform well and allow developers to implement new features with a minimal amount of pain.

Microsoft aren't the only ones who do this. Java, for example, has built-in serialization of objects to a format that would be very difficult to work with when you don't have the JVM at your disposal and, even then, you need the actual classes that were used to produce the serialized format in the first place in order to make things really simple. But the end result is a binary format that is fast to read/write from/to, is a reasonably-compact representation of the data and is dead-simple for a developer to use when the proper tools are available to him/her.

Re:Wait a year

[BeanThere]

The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.

I noted you carefully said "APIs we declared as internal" instead of "APIs that *are* internal. Are they really 100% internal only? Does it or does it not affect the ability of others to interoperate with MS software?

There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.

I don't understand, if some software is really not being used anymore, surely you can just delete it entirely? The only argument I can see not to delete, is if someone is in fact still using it. And if someone is in fact still using it, then sorry, it should be documented properly, heck, it should've been done from the start - how can anyone write and use software that isn't documented properly, are you telling me the biggest software company on the planet with massive revenues and billions in profits each quarter can't afford to even document their own software or isn't capable of documenting their own software? We're a tiny ISV and we document our software because we know it would be a disaster and cause our costs to balloon if we didn't.

Whether an API is internal or external, it's not useful without proper documentation (if you're lucky and have the source code then all you're left with is "source code *as* documentation" - if it's truly internal, fine, if it's not truly internal, it should be documented properly.)

I put forth that properly documenting your own software consistently for years would've SAVED the company a lot more money in the first place, than you're spending now to document it retroactively. In fact, that's not even my principle, that's a pretty standard thing in the industry. For each ten minutes you spend documenting immediately, you save hours down the line sometime in future. I suspect even Microsoft itself will benefit from this process, even if expensive now, because the investment pays off in the form of future development being more efficient. (No wonder Apple can produce new OS releases every 18 months but MS can no longer within 5 or 6 years.)

Sure, it sucks for you because you're documenting old stuff from other coders who in some cases have left, making it very difficult and painstaking and no doubt boring. But that doesn't change the fact that it's Microsoft's own fault, for either allowing a lazy coder initially, or not doing proper project planning leading the original coders to not have time to document in the first place.

Not documenting software properly WHEN IT IS WRITTEN doesn't save money, it just creates an externality in the future - you're basically pushing one of the costs of development into the future (and that future has arrived), and the future cost always balloons.

I always wondered why MS API documentation was so bad. Your commentary has given me at least a little additional insight into the matter, thanks.

Re:Wait a year

[CyberLife]

If I may, I believe the reason your attempts are being perceived as minimal is because that which you're doing is considered by many to be a normal, everyday thing. You're not being seen as doing anything special or unique. The only thing newsworthy is who's doing it, not what's being done.

Re:Wait a year

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I'd love to hear where you work. Can you tell us please?

What?

Was that an argument?

Re:Wait a year

[Z34107]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[beav007]

And we have a winner.

Surely Microsoft hasn't been operating for all these years without API documentation? With the staff turnover, new projects, interoperability between projects etc., I find it hard to believe that the coders would have to go back to the API source to figure out how it works. There must be internal documentation of the APIs in Microsoft somewhere.

And if there is that documentation in Microsoft somewhere, then why hasn't it been just a case of basic editing and formatting so that it can be published?

I guess, however, that if the API documentation isn't there, it would go a long way to explaining the quality of the software coming from Redmond...

Re:Wait a year

[drfreak]

Wow. Six months' time wasted on years worth of APIs. What a complete waste of time. :)

Did you ever think it might help you guys internally at Microsoft to be doing this as well?

Re:Wait a year

[dedazo]

Anyone with that toxic petulant demeanor of yours must work for some celestial entity that can do no wrong, so I'm just curious. I'm sure you also make your own clothes and manufacture your own food as well. Do you?

Re:Wait a year

[Allador]

I think you need to get some life perspective.

The word 'evil' isnt even relevant in the realm of the software industry.

Evil people cause human beings to die, or to be tortured, injured, etc. Evil is not a word to describe higly competitive (and highly effective) business execution.

It's just business man, no one has an obligation to make any given business succeed. At the worst, the founders/owners/investors may lose some time or money. But you know what? Thats life for a business owner. It's risky. Thats life.

To those losing their jobs as their companies get killed by anticompetetive practices it doesn't really help that much (obviously) that there were nice people at Microsoft. Give me a break. It's a business. Sometimes people lose jobs. Sometimes one company destroys another by being so much more successful that the other business is crowded out. This is regular life in the business world.

To those getting downsized as corporate expenditure on software made the business unprofitable it doesn't help either. If any business has to downsize staff because they're spending so much money on commercial software, and that makes them non-competitive in their market, then they're going to fail, and they deserve to. It means that the owners dont know how to run a business properly. And in any case, people get 'downsized' for much stupider reasons.

I'd suggest that the nice guys in the trenches, if they want to demonstrate their good will, ensure that the evil guys are the first one over the top the next time. And that they get shot in the back repeatedly just in case the enemy doesn't do the job right. Again, you seem to be confusing real harm like people dying (you speak of wars and trenches) with business, and jobs. The two are not the same. Business is not war. At worst, in business, people lose money. In war, people lose their lives.

If you cant tell the difference between the two, then you probably shouldnt be posting about it.

Re:Wait a year

[LandruBek]

False. 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. There's a lot of evil in the world and Microsoft does not make the top 20 list, and for some people, they're ethical enough. "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. If you call them evil, that's your business, but that is not the usual semantics. Not to flame, but do you buy gasoline or eat meat? That's arguably as evil if not more, with all the bloodshed and death associated with those commodities. Yet I don't call such consumers evil, and I myself eat meat.

Re:Wait a year

[vegiVamp]

Most, if not all, of the documents that you're required to produce, are things that any software vendor that expects to actually offer useful support to it's customers should have at hand anyway.

If you don't have that, well... let's just say it explains a lot about *why* MS products and support are perceived to suck as much as they are.

Additionally, that means that you shouldn't blame the EU for those "wasted" mandays, since in reality they're your own backlog of work that you couldn't be bothered to do for the last 20-odd years.

Now what annoys me the most, and may well be the most telling about the entire company's attitude, is that
  a) you see the writing of documentation as a useless, lossmaking activity
  b) you seem to think that "noncurrent technology" needs no longer be supported, regardless of how much customers are still using it

Re:Wait a year

[mrchaotica]

people get so damned uppity and assume that I'm either (a) some idiot who can't write code worth a damn, or (b) some kind of evil genius out to dominate the world through the software industry. How I can simultaneously be a bumbling incompetent and an evil genius is somewhat baffling to me

Obviously, if you think "[A] or [B]" means "[A] and [B] simultaneously," you fall into the former category!

Re:Wait a year

[wintermute000]

hear, hear

i hate MS as much as the next linux running CLI geek but you make some great points.

I work for a telco that is despised by most people here (australia... no prizes for guessing which one LOL) who then outsource me to an oil company (I'm actually on the network management team as a cisco tech) so I can sympathize with amy MS employees wrongly slandered by all those holier than thou smarmy replies.

Re:Wait a year

[shutdown -p now]

For what it's worth, we have those. The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.

Isn't that kinda the whole point? You claimed that e.g. CIFS is "internal API", but the EU judges disagreed. And theirs is the final word on the issue.

Re:Wait a year

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

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.

Re:Wait a year

[lhorn]

So the documentation did not exist until now?
Or it was never meant to be used outside your firm?
Explains a lot of behaviour from your programs.
Thank you for the excellent argument/information.

Re:Wait a year

[RevHawk]

Woah. Chill out.

We know he's an M$ employee, and obviously to most people on /. that makes him teh sux0r - but I doubt he's responsible for the company's direction and conduct!

He's nice enough to present what he knows...direct your anger at someone/something that deserves it.

Guess I'm new here.

Re:Wait a year

[Znork]

I think you need to get some linguistic perspective. There's been a certain inflation in the use of the word evil. Embodied in the fact that I wasn't even the one originally framing the discussion in those terms.

The two are not the same. Business is not war. At worst, in business, people lose money. In war, people lose their lives.

Oh, please. Get some glasses; you have to have an extremely myopic view of the impact of economy and business decisions on peoples lives to imagine that they don't kill people. Go take a peek at the conditions of previous communist countries to examine the impact on living conditions, economic resources and life expectancies caused by prevalent monopolies throughout the industry.

The illegitimate billions companies like Microsoft have extracted from the economy are billions not spent in other areas. Each monopoly-supported unproductive employee there is one not employed more gainfully elsewhere. This includes health-care, medical research, etc, etc, things that actually do impact peoples lives.

This is the fundamental excuse for the free market capitalistic economy; carefully maintained competition maximizes the total experienced wealth and well-being in the whole economy. Condoning anti-competetive practices undermines that fundamental excuse and creates real, palpable losses and suffering.

Re:Wait a year

[Hatta]

How about UL, or the company that holds the monopoly on Ethernet?

I don't know who UL is, and last I checked I could get an ethernet NIC from any number of manufacturers.

Re:Wait a year

[poetmatt]

Ethernet is a technology that is owned by a single company that developed the technology. They license it to the manufacturers to produce. The monopoly is higher up. The cause was that the other technologies (token/etc) were dropped or failed. What other alternatives are there for a physical interface for net access (whether internal or external) other than ethernet? I don't hear anyone complaining.
Also note: ethernet is licensed in an open fashion, people can do whatever they want with it. Have you ever heard of such with windows?

Re:Wait a year

[zaibazu]

Microsoft maybe won't make it to the top 20 in the worlds most evil things/entities/whatever, but easily into the top 5 of the most evil of the IT buisiness.

Re:Wait a year

[jbr439]

If you point out the name-calling in the GP's statement, I'll take your statement seriously.

The article I replied to addressed the MSFT employee as "M$ lackey". I've always considered "lackey" as a derogatory term and dictionary definitions of the word certainly seem to back up my interpretation.

And on topic: just because an MS employee thinks MS is doing a great job at providing documentation, anyone is entitled to provide his or her opinion on that effort in response. It's called dialog and it's what you open yourself up to once you make a comment on a public site.

There's a difference between a reasoned response backed up with some substance (as was posted by mugnyte) and what is basically an ad hominum attack.

BTW, for the record, I believe that past experience definitely suggests taking a wait and see attitude on this move by MSFT as that company has shown no love of OSS in the past; calling it or the GPL, a "cancer", a "virus", and "un-american" - and this by senior MSFT people such as Ballmer. However, that doesn't mean that we need to call every MSFT employee that submits a post a name (e.g. "lackey"). We should instead indeed engage them in dialog and indicate to them what our position is and why we have that position. We may not make a convert out of the MSFT employee but any third party fence-sitters are more likely to be converted by this approach rather than the approach taken by the post I responded to. An added bonus is that we don't provide free ammo for MSFT sales people to use to scare off potential switchers.

Re:Wait a year

[LandruBek]

"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.

I agree they are doing nothing; that was my point. They aren't being "evil," they're being (as you also point out) kind of selfish and kind of oafish. Parent is painting them black, and I'm trying to paint them gray. To paraphrase the quote, non-evil people can assist evil without themselves being actively evil.

...if they're so smart...

I never said they were so smart. I said they are ordinary nerds. Some of them are kind of poor, kind of green. A lot of people out there do not know the bad things Microsoft does. Microsoft spreads the net wide; they actively recruit all over the nation. There are plenty of programmers who don't know about the scope of the company's ethical shenanigans. Recruiters don't mention THAT. So they take the job and work there.

I'm trying to unpack this point because properly abstracted it is very important to society at large. In America, even people without cars depend on petroleum because that's how food and most stuff gets transported. You and I depend on gas and we don't really like it, but by playing along AT ALL we are in a small way enabling a horrific, bloody, environment-destroying, war-mongering industry. And when millions of people do this in their own small way, the environment is slowly but surely ruined, multibillion dollar wars are funded, thousands of people die, and much evil takes place -- though most of the power behind this evil comes from people who can't accurately be called evil. Their hats (our hats) are gray, not black (*). There is blood on our hands, but just a few drops. Conrad explored this theme in Heart of Darkness and I think it's very important.

* sorry to use black as a metaphor for evil, I know that is tactless, I hope you can bear with me.

Re:Wait a year

[Just Some Guy]

So mostly these days, as I work on Linux-based Java projects, I just tell people that I worked for a number of years at a "major software company in the Northwest."

Tell them you work for a company that makes some popular keyboards and mice. At worst, they'll assume you mean Logitech and throw a flaky webcam at you.

Re:Wait a year

[lgw]

Well, I won't buy Tyan again, but they still have my money for this one. Replacing the mobo is so labor-intensive that I might as well build a new PC at that point. My boot drives are staring to fail, so I have to do something, and my careful plan of just adding a fresh drive to the mirror has been wrecked by these idiots.

Yes, I've worked on a standards committee. There are really two types: the kind where the members represent interested vendors, and the kind where the members represent the "in crowd" for some technology. The former are not a complete waste of time, and it can be satisfying to actually get something done. The latter are just a circle-jerk, as the "standards committee" doesn't actually represent the implementors (I'm looking at you W3C).

Re:Wait a year

[phliar]

One of the tricks they used to get fast performance was to serialize internal data structures to disk,

Exactly the sort of thing that I would fire -- no, let's say re-educate and rehabilitate -- someone for. This "baling wire and duct tape" attitude is what makes people hold them in contempt.

Re:Wait a year

[jma05]

> 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.

Yes. MS had good business reasons to do all that. Likewise, they got an edge when they dropped security and stability in favor of performance, when machines were slower. Problem is... they now want to call all that legacy "documentation" (an incomplete one at that) of their system, a standard. The whole point of this particular standard is to make alternate implementations possible and prevent vendor lock in. Who cares what historically justifiable reasons MS had. None of those reasons matter for applications NOW.

Re:Wait a year

[Z34107]

This is a separate issue COMPLETELY unrelated to the bungled OOXML thingie. The EU apparently wants them to release a bunch of documentation about their file formats because of a ruling ordering them to release information on protocols their OS uses, so that other OS vendors could make interoperable products.

OOXML != Binary Word 6 documents.

Besides, you're forgetting that pre-internet, computer security was not an issue. You didn't want somebody trashing your drive, obviously, but how could that happen? Viruses were a novelty that spread through floppies. If you had a PC at home, you knew who had access to it. Businesses were using them as giant calculators for the longest time, and had just as many problems with people vandalizing PCs as they did with somebody abusing an electric typewriter.

It wasn't a security v. performance tradeoff - there just was very little to "protect" against at the time when these formats were written.

Re:Wait a year

[geschild]

Apologies are in order. I managed to mix up 'GP' postings due to my lack of 'finesse' in using the new moderation system. Oh well. Live and learn.

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

[R2.0]

I believe there are legal consequences to making public statements like that, but I forget the legal principle - it basically says "once you announce something in public, you can't just 'take it back'".

Re:Pledge

[PPH]

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

Re:Pledge

[morgan_greywolf]

Its what the PoTUS does at his inauguration when he says he'll uphold the Constitution. Tries he damnedest to keep from ROFLMAOing?

Re:Pledge

[magus_melchior]

Well, in Microsoft's case, their history says it's akin to saying it's a pledge elsewhere, and actually saying "I blow my nose at you, toffee-nosed English pigdog!" at the flag.

Re:Pledge

[morgan_greywolf]

Yup. And for the long haul, there's also the doctrine of 'estoppable' or -- "mend the hold". If Microsoft says they're not going to sue and developers use the spec and, but some years later subsequently get sued -- the developers can use the estoppel doctrine as an affirmative defense, saying Microsoft took no action against them or anybody else for implementing the spec, so they are estopped from taking any action against them.

Re:Pledge

[benjonson]

A pledge is when you cross your fingers behind your back.

Re:Pledge

[illumin8]

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

Re:Pledge

[el cisne]

Nah, the "legal" term for it is "Guantanamo", from the Greek, meaning "a right prpoer buggering".

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:Pledge

[youthoftoday]

in which case, going by the current prez, we can pretty much guarantee that MS will sue people into the ground

Re:Pledge

[ConceptJunkie]

In Microsoft's case, a pledge is "something they while catching their breath between successive stabs in your back".

Re:Pledge

[sm62704]

"Fuck you, go to France" says the coward. You made me laugh, thank you.

Re:Don't worry

[Brian Gordon]

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

[xzvf]

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

[illumin8]

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.

Re:Open Standards is the goal

[setagllib]

By that logic, Linux systems will take over, not MacOSX. MacOSX is not exactly an "elite's" operating system, although maybe an "elitist's". The technical elite who know they can learn, configure and use any operating system they want, often pick something like Linux or BSD based on their needs. If their needs expand to include Windows or MacOSX, they'll fire up any of the many free and commercial virtualization platforms.

I think MacOSX is still more likely to take over by appealing to the average person. Even if only 30% of desktop users end up on MacOSX, it creates just enough heterogeny to require greater interoperability and market freedom - which benefits Linux and BSD and others greatly as well, giving them more room to grow and finally form a diverse market with low barriers to entry. But like Microsoft, Apple will not hold a dominant position for long, and unlike Microsoft, Apple probably will never get a dominant position in the desktop market to begin with.

Re:Open Standards is the goal

[wintermute000]

Sorry, I respectfully disagree.

I think the environment has changed to the point where the 'tipping point' you describe above will be a lot harder to achieve. Back in the mid 90s not every office worker had their own computer, email account and NETWORK ACCESS (nevermind internet). If they had a computer it was not uncommon for it to be used as a glorified typewriter and calculator. Also it was normal NOT to have a computer at home.

Now everyone has a windows PC and lives off IE/word/excel/outlook. The barrier to entry so to speak has been raised many bars higher. How many non geeks do you know who would be willing to learn a new OS? Heck people don't even want to use firefox as they're too used to cllicking on the IE icon.

Also back in the mid 90s, if they wanted to build a home domain/network environment, most geeks had few other options except for NT unless they could afford a unix server at home. And NT was poor. Now the obvious option is linux, which is free, very heavily documented, highly reliable and can be made to do everything bar make coffee (pretty sure someone's getting around to that too!)

Hence IMHO you are kinda right if you substitute mac for linux - what you describe above has been one of the big reasons for linux taking over the server space. But I still disagree on the desktop side.

Also like the below poster mentions, linux is the weapon of choice amongst the geek elite.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that macs can't regain their dominant status (market share wise) but I don't think it will primarily be driven by the top down method you describe.

disclaimer: typing this from my macbook, with a fedora box as samba/squid/torrentflux+apache/ssh backend server, and seriously thinking about a hackintosh when I build my next desktop

Re:Open Standards is the goal

[illumin8]

Also like the below poster mentions, linux is the weapon of choice amongst the geek elite.

I guess I'm not really talking about the geek elite, but more about the warez/gamer/hacker community, which is more likely to be technically savvy, but not savvy enough to grok Linux. They may have tried Linux a few times, but were frustrated by it's difficulty. Personally I'm a Linux Sysadmin and a UNIX admin before that, so I have no problem grokking *nix, but I'm thinking of the legions of MCSE Windows Admins, local computer shop repair guys, etc, that outnumber me by about 100 to 1. I work with guys like that all the time, and lately I'm hearing from them "I want to buy an iPhone" and "do you think you could help me pick the parts for my hackintosh?"

They are increasingly becoming disenchanted by Vista and Microsoft in general, and Apple makes a better OS. Also, while I've used Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I still think OS X is a much better and more polished version of UNIX. Apple has really locked down how to make a commercial desktop OS that is solid and does pretty much anything you could want a desktop to do.

I remember in the early 90s drooling over those 4-way 4GB Sun workstations and wishing I could have one at home. Now I have something better: A quad-core 3 ghz hackintosh with 4GB of RAM... The power of a UNIX workstation for less than $1k... If Apple is smart they will silently encourage piracy of OS X, which will drive greater Mac sales and adoption by word of mouth.

If they were serious about the patent issue....

[8282now]

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.

yeah, sure, I'll buy THAT for a dollar

[el cisne]

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."

Which APIs?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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!

Re:Which APIs?

[Shados]

Ways to plug your own storage engine into SQL Server?

Well, for sure, I doubt Microsoft will be publishing APIs on how to do something they themselves wouldn't be able to :)

Re:Which APIs?

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, sure would be nice to be able to have more than 8K of data in a single row.

Re:Which APIs?

[Shados]

You can. You just can't have more than 8k of numeric, datetimes, etc data. Types like varchar(max) and varbinary(max) don't count toward the 8k limit (and varchar(max) isn't like text...it is can be fully processed like normal varchar columns). So in any sensible database schema, you'll never break the 8k limit. Not saying they shouldn't lift that limitation: they should. But if it gets to be a problem, there is, 99% of the time, a problem with your database design.

Re:Which APIs?

[CastrTroy]

Really the problem is with stuff like VarChar(4000) and columns like that, where you could specify that your row could hold more than 8K, and then only to have it fail one day when somebody decides to actually fill up those columns. Take a typical table to hold contact information. You have First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Department Name, Email, Telephone, Fax, Address Line 1, Address Line 2, City, State, Country. Assuming you assign 256 bytes per column (average), you are already up to 3K. And that's just for storing a list of contacts. Take an ordering system where you have to store a shipping and billing contact, and now you have 6K of data, just for the contact info. Sure you could create an extra table for the shipping info, along with another table for the billing info, but now you have 3 tables instead of 1. 256 bytes might seem a bit large for some of these fields, but if you're using nvarchar, remember, that's only 128 characters. Also, Varchar(Max) only works in SQL server 2005. When you go outside the 8K limit, it puts the data on another page. So while you can do all the usual operations you would normally do on a varchar field, your performance does take a bit of a hit.

Re:Which APIs?

[Shados]

Also, Varchar(Max) only works in SQL server 2005

Well, yeah. There's no point talking about problems of older version... DB2, MySQL, Postgres, etc were total jokes (for other reasons) back when SQL Server 2000 came out, too. The only RDBMS that had legs to stand on back then was Oracle, if you didn't mind the buttrape price :) I mean, SQL Server 2008 is about to come out o.O

Sure you could create an extra table for the shipping info, along with another table for the billing info, but now you have 3 tables instead of 1

And having it all in one table will bite you in the ass sooner or later... especially with that example. I worked on a system where it was done that way originally... Ouf did it hurt when requirements changed to have N adress per customers, have multiple customers with the same adresses linked, etc... major refactoring there. Database design rules aren't there for show =P

Plus: Company Name, department name (pushing it), city, state and country should be lookup tables. Multiple adress lines in their own tables, and Telephone/Fax should be in their own with a "Phone Number Type" column. Bang, you're nowhere close to 8k anymore, and thats just basic normalisation (things you should do regardless of RDBMS limitations.

Of course, you seem quite knowledgeable, so I'm not going to pretend that I know better how to solve your database problems, or that I'm smarter than you. I'm most likely not :) But unless you're making a "quick and dirty" database for a web site or something (in which case, SQL Server isn't even the best tool for the job), that should be how such a database be designed.... and it actually become difficult to hit the 8k limit.

Well, unless you're like one of my old boss...

Inventory
----------
Product ID
Quantity Production Color 1
Quantity Production Color 2
Quantity Production Color 3
...
Quantity Production Color 16
Quantity Shipping Color 1
Quantity Shipping Color 2...

you get the idea :) I think 450 columns that table had. And it was in Btrieve. Man that was painful.

Re:Which APIs?

[Shados]

Whoops. -1 point for me for forgetting to close a quote tag.

Re:Which APIs?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Hey, don't knock Btrieve too badly. For what it was intended for, it was pretty good.

Re:Which APIs?

[Shados]

Btrieve back then was top notch. Its just not quite as top notch with modern requirements, under the piece of crap that is Pervasive SQL.

Re:Which APIs?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Oh, I'll fully agree that the mashing together of Btrieve and Scaleable SQL, well, didn't quite work out as well as they'd hoped. Pervasive.SQL, I don't dig. But Btrieve, as an embedded database engine, works quite well.

Wine

[calebt3]

So which projects would most benefit from having these APIs? WINE, of course. Maybe also mail clients and Samba. Anything else?

Re:Wine

[pak9rabid]

So which projects would most benefit from having these APIs? WINE, of course. Maybe also mail clients and Samba. Anything else? Zimbra + Outlook integration comes to mind

Mono support

[D4MO]

Hopefully we'll see official support of mono in the same manner as moonlight / silverlight.

Re:Mono support

[el cisne]

Miguel?? Is that you??

Re:Mono support

[Vexorian]

"Hopefully"

Microsoft's new tac...

[Undead Ed]

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

Which 30,000?

[sjbe]

Who wants to bet a lot of the pages look like:

"This page left intentionally blank"

Re:Which 30,000?

[lhorn]

Or avoiding exporting sensitive technology with:
"This page left internationally blank"

Treat this like some version 0.01 software

[pembo13]

Wait a year or so, and see if makes sense at all, or just all talk for politicians and business people to feel better.

Major shift

[m04rt3]

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.

Re:Major shift

[1001011010110101]

Actually, its not. They ensured that their initiative is not compatible with the GPL, which is at the moment the most used open source license.

Re:Major shift

[wzzrd]

...but this is just as big as the trustworthy computing initiative that Microsoft underwent in the early part of the decade.

Ye... And see where that led us...

Re:Major shift

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

[...]core development practices so that they are better aligned with open source software initiatives.

BZZZZZZZT!

No.

It's so open source software can be better aligned with them. They'd never allow themselves to be seen as Number Two. They want to still be the coach, and everyone else to play the game their way. If saying that isn't true, why would they need to release their APIs? We'd already know that info since they'd already be using the open standards, not their versions of them.

If they were playing nice, they'd drop their stuff and use the standards.

Re:Major shift

[timster]

this is just as big as the trustworthy computing initiative that Microsoft underwent in the early part of the decade.

And thank god for that. Now it's so easy for people to understand what is really going on inside their computers, easy to establish straightforward relationships of trust with applications (as well as other computers, and other users), and easy for developers to write applications within those frameworks of trust so that they aren't tempted to demand access to everything.

It's great that Microsoft alone understood that "trustworthy computing" was a UI problem more than a computer science problem. Their innovative security UI is a beacon for the industry.

Re:Major shift

[penix1]

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.

As the saying goes

[SpiceWare]

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

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

Re:As the saying goes

[el cisne]

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

Oh, sorry, I've heard it as :

"Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice..." (then a long pause, then) "...won't get fooled again."

You'll sound much more presidential, I think.

Re:As the saying goes

[The Angry Mick]

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

Unfortunately, its more like:

• Fool me once = shame on you
• Fool me twice = shame on me
• Fool me thrice = Stop it! I'm warning you!
• Fool me four times = No. Seriuosly. Cut it out! I'm warning you.
• Fool me five times = Stop, Dammit! You're really starting to make me angry!
• Fool me six times = Huff! Huff! Huff! I am very angry!

Continue ad infinitum.

All our outrage is about as threatening to Microsoft as Marvin the Martian is to Bugs Bunny.

If only there were something like a . . . um . . . "justice" department. You know, a place where people could go when they felt like a company was engaging in bullying or monopolistic practices . . .

Re:As the saying goes

[savuporo]

ITake ?. Is this just a way of making sure that you take no salt with your Apple products ?

Re:As the saying goes

[ch-chuck]

Dubya must have had a flashback to his drinkin' days with the Who when he said that:

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

- - - The Who - "Won't Get Fooled Again"

A Pledge?

[Beefslaya]

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.

Re:Major shift "Fundamenta Shift?"

[davidsyes]

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...

Patent clause is for non-commercial only

[dsginter]

Wouldn't it be better for them to in a sense "escrow" those patents w/ an external body like the open patents.org people?

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.

This announcement is just marketing spin on what the EU was about to require.

Re:Patent clause is for non-commercial only

[postbigbang]

If it's done under open source, then non-commercial might well apply as various forms of commercial licenses aren't commercial in the strictest sense anyway. You could charge for media, but not the code. However, if you try and BSD-license some of it-- giving it commercial purposes and intent, then I can see by the licensing stricture that it wouldn't be allowed.

That doesn't mean I'm not very suspicious, rather non-commercial is the basis of GPL licensing, generally speaking.

Re:Patent clause is for non-commercial only

[rrohbeck]

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.

Re:Patent clause is for non-commercial only

[g2devi]

So basically, they can go after RedHat, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, xBSD, and any other company-backed distributor of open source that wishes to inter-operate with Microsoft's formats or protocols unless they pay the Microsoft extortion tax. Any project that takes Microsoft up on the challenge faces the following issues:

1) If they use the information, then no commercial backed distribution will use any of their code (sort of DeCSS code and MP3 which are popular but problematic) unless they submit to Microsoft extortion -- thus helping to marginalize "good" distros or "good" formats like ODF.

2) If they don't use the information and use traditional techniques like reverse engineering and working around the patent, they will slow down their progress compared to competing tainted projects *and* commercial-backed distros that use their "clean" projects will have to justify that they aren't "tainted", This was a lot easier to do before (you could claim ignorance) than now (things are out in the open, so many open source developers will jump at the offer unless the project explicitly states it will refuse or work around any code with known Microsoft patents regardless of the promise ).

3) The promise covers current versions of Microsoft formats and protocols. There's no reason to believe it will cover anything not yet released, even if it's a point revision of the formats or protocols. Anyone with their guard down might assume something that's not true.

Re:Patent clause is for non-commercial only

[backwardMechanic]

So you write a neat FOSS tool that would infringe these patents, but MS agree not to sue you. But how does it work out for Redhat (et al) who want to sell a distribution containing your tool?

Is the Sky Falling?

[jrspur2003]

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...

Seems like only yesterday...

[clang_jangle]

...we were being patent-trolled by Balmer. One would have to be insane to buy this.

Estoppel

[ClayJar]

I believe there are legal consequences to making public statements like that, but I forget the legal principle - it basically says "once you announce something in public, you can't just 'take it back'". The legal term is "estoppel".

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).

Re:Estoppel

[alx5000]

Of course, anyone can sue anyone for anything any time in our legal system

Which side of the Pond's legal system are you talking about? Here in the EU (at least in Spain), we have good laughs at the frivolous lawsuits going on day after day in the US.

Re:Estoppel

[ArsonSmith]

Of course there are those who abuse the system, but it is still worth having the ability to seek recourse when wronged in a way not yet covered by law.

Re:Estoppel

[sed quid in infernos]

Here in the EU (at least in Spain), we have good laughs at the frivolous lawsuits going on day after day in the US. You mean like the guy who sued the parents of a boy he hit while driving 70-100 MPH for damages to his car?

Re:Estoppel

[sed quid in infernos]

Why do you think I didn't read that? He dropped it - that doesn't mean he didn't file a frivolous suit.

Re:Estoppel

[jimicus]

Would this apply if their press releases had said "We will not sue!* Aren't we nice? Microsoft believes in an open development process! (* subject to the following conditions...)" and the conditions were missed out by the reporters?

This is exactly the kind of thing I can imagine happening.

No wonder it's been such a cold winter...

[betterunixthanunix]

...with hell freezing over and all.

Believability

[Spudds]

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.

Re:Believability

[Phurge]

"I for one, am not convinced of their sincerity." Neither am I, and yes most likely its lip service too, but it is a small step in the right direction (from which it will be difficult to move backwards). Hopefully a combination of regulatory & competitive pressures will produce further steps in the future.

Re:Don't worry

[AmaDaden]

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

[sm62704]

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.

"Pledge"

[Vexorian]

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...

Re:"Pledge"

[BokLM]

"Promise not to sue (which may be broken any day) => not GPL compatibility."

Actually it's worse than that. Promise not to sue, but only for non-commercial distribution => absolutly not GPL compatible

The crucial condition

[MLCT]

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.

Re:The crucial condition

[YaroMan86]

Not to mention almost ten years ago, the infamous Halloween Documents. Microsoft is indeed threatened by FOSS. Is this new? No. News? No. Are they right to be threatened? Yes. does this mean we rest easy? No. We have a long long way to go before we can find ourselves safe from Microsoft lip-service and trolling. I haven't seen Microsoft shut up about the 235 patents crap, and then we have moves like Shared Source and this little stunt.

Shared source being a nice looking lure, eh? Nice and shiny, unfortunately to those developers as dull as fish they do not see the sharp hook hidden beneath the lure. And now Microsoft is claiming to be more interoperable, more lip service, this time trying to get themselves out of trouble they put themselves in.

On a slightly off topic note, I wonder what would happen if Microsoft were hit by the DoJ again in the next administration. No Bush administration to bail them out. If its an administration that isn't gonna let Microsoft get away with this stuff, an anti-trust suit against Microsoft might even have the potential of turning into a conviction of being a monopoly here in the United States that is actually productive.

Open standards are needed, not this

[forgoil]

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:Open standards are needed, not this

[marzipanic]

This makes no sense at all, and must obviously come from a legal world and not a developer world.

Nothing that MS do makes any sense, much.
It is similar to somebody who becomes a priest for a "job" but does not actually believe in god.... Open source has the passion which MS lack and also the common sense and know how.... I could go on!

My god is my computer, well that, art, music and beer

Re:Open standards are needed, not this

[RAMMS EIN]

``Shouldn't *they* adhere to open standards?''

Yes. Inasmuch as there are open standards available, they should be prefered. In that respect, perhaps the EU is doing more harm than good, by making the interoperability problem with using Microsoft's proprietary technology less obvious.

On the other hand, the problem is less obvious because it is actually less there. There being actual documentation and a pledge that you won't be sued for implementing what is in that documentation is a great step forward for interoperability. So there is definitely something good here. Especially where the documentation covers functionality for which there aren't any standards yet.

Re:Don't worry

[pak9rabid]

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.

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.

Re:Reading Slashdot from Microsoft

[Froqen]

There were periods of time where /. would block Microsoft because some tool thought all the requests coming from microsoft's proxy servers were flood attacks. So I'm guess there are quite a bunch of us.

Re:Reading Slashdot from Microsoft

[mysticgoat]

One of Microsoft's more annoying practices, to those of us not working for the Evil Empire, has been their use of astroturfing. Would you as an ex-Microsoftie care to speak about that? I've always been curious about the incentives astroturfers were given.

Were there tangible incentives, or was it all done with a pat on the head and a rousing "Attaboy!"?

How extensive is the practice these days? Rather, how extensive was it when you were last in Microsoft's employ?

Re:Reading Slashdot from Microsoft

[JoshHeitzman]

I'm hadn't personally met anyone who did it while I was, nor did I personally hear about anyone doing directly it through the internal grapevine, but considering there are over 70,000 folks working at MS it wasn't very likely that I would personally know any of these folks.

Re:Reading Slashdot from Microsoft

[ozmanjusri]

There is no overarching strategy for astroturfing that is visible to the average Microsoft employee.

What about the evangelism teams? Where do they fit into Microsoft's hierarchy?

Re:Estoppel - definition correct, situation IDK.

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[sm62704]

I like Wikipedia but unfortunately I'm in a bad mood and need a good laugh. So I looked Microsoft up in the Uncyclopedia.

"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
~ Oscar Wilde on Microsoft

"In the case of Microsoft software, nobody knows, what is a bug and what is a marketing strategy"
~ Unknown User

"Nonsense, that's just an optical illusion! Aren't we great!"
~ Miscrosoft on the Red Ring of Death

"PEICE OF SHIT!!! SON OF A BITCH MICROSOFT CRASHED AGAIN!!"
~ Mother Teresa on Microsoft

"Cannot find REALITY.SYS...Universe Halted."
~ God on phone with Microsoft Customer Support

"You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
~ Microsoft on In need of assistance

"Microsoft Anti-Virus software had a stroke of genius. They give you some free samples of viruses!"
~ Bill Gates, Head of the SS

"Buy our new ShitoSoft FK, for all your incontinental needs!"
~ Bill Gates, Head of the SS

"Does anyone know how to reverse the calibration on the leggimonitoner and change the halter on the second flartion of the JCU cable while simultaneously ordering 30 pounds of chicken nuggets by whispering to the graphics card? Me neither."
~ The guy who invented the Automatic Transmission on Microsoft and all things in general

"Where do you want to go today?" Evidently, Gates lacked the foresight to realise one cannot go far without a ticket...If you have more than six hundred and sixty six brain cells and don't want to enter hell, the religious nutcakes at Conservapedia have written an article about Microsoft.Micro$$$oft (formerly known as Magma, ltd and the translation from German of micro schaft, literally meaning small penis and international communist bureau of the Holy See) is the name of a now defunct software company coined by Jeff Metz and his first wife. Since its incorporation it has distributed duct tape, wombats, cinnamon, toilet rolls, Donald Trump, turnips, syphilis and horn-rimmed spectacles to numerous international markets. It has also had a minor role in the computer industry. The opposite of Microsoft is Megahard.

Two pilots are flying their helicopter along when all of a sudden a thick blanket of fog appears out of knowhere. The pilot fly's to a nearby building and holds up a sign saying 'Where are we?'. A person in a nearby window writes on a piece of paper 'here'. The pilot is then able to find himself on the map and fly home. An amazed co-pilot asks him how he knew, to which is reply is "It had to be the microsoft building, While technically correct, the answer was a load of bullshit."

Oh shit the boss is coming, you'll have to click the link to see the rest.

Where's the Exchange doc ?

[ldapboy]

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.

Re:Where's the Exchange doc ?

[Phurge]

"I just spent ten mins grokking the documentation linked from the MS press release page." You spent 10 minutes grokking 30,000 pages of documentation? wow(!?) I refer you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok . I suggest you spent 10 minutes skim reading the press release.

Re:Where's the Exchange doc ?

[ldapboy]

A definition for you, dude : http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vacuous So yes I did completely read the list of documents, and there are no exchange-related ones there. And what, pray am I supposed to glean from the press release ? It only has the same information as TFA : that they claim to be documenting, among other things, the Exchange protocols (the actual documents have existed for months if not years), but it seems that those documents are not posted today. So are they a) in some other place that I haven't discovered yet or b) not yet posted, but they will be (but why??? since they exist and could have been posted along with the stuff they have put up on the web) or c) the press release is incorrect in citing Exchange as being covered by the document release.

Re:Where's the Exchange doc ?

[Phurge]

Thanks for that definition, did you win a spelling bee with that one? Here's one for you http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tangent

a pledge not to sue open source developers .. ?

[rs232]

"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."

Let's be blunt

[Dracos]

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:Let's be blunt

[et764]

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. This is hardly meaningless. Take a look at some of the Windows Protocol Documentation that has already been released. For the networking protocols, it documents every byte that goes over the wire, complete with annotated examples. There is enough detail that any competent developer should be able to write a complete interoperable server or client using any of these protocols.

Re:Let's be blunt

[auralrothko]

If they published everything, there would be a completely FOSS Windows clone started within months

Already started!

hyperopia

[CarpetShark]

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

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.

Re:hyperopia

[Your.Master]

No, you cannot assure him it is minimal. While what you say is true, it doesn't mean he was blind in this instance, or that you can see.

implimentation of the Microsoft tax ..

[rs232]

"open source developers will be able to use the documentation to develop implementations of these protocols without paying for a patent license", Brad Smith

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 .. and we will monetize from .. all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology", Steve Ballmer

Re:Don't worry

[gstoddart]

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

Re:I am...

[jbeaupre]

Speechless

Don't worry. There's probably a speech API in the mix.

Heresy

[Archangel Michael]

You're a HERETIC! Where's my pitchfork, stake and torch?

Re:Don't worry

[funaho]

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.

Hmm I thought it was more like this: "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."

More like...

[mrops]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[Shotgun]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[Atriqus]

Hmmm, I vaguely remember that expression used in a politicsical setting.

Re:Don't worry

[pyrbrand]

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

[DMoylan]

> Only an idiot would take their word on issues like this

you've just described 95% of management. +/-10% margin of error.

Documenting code that's already released?!?

[Comboman]

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.

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.

Re:Don't worry

[jcr]

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

Re:Don't worry

[sm62704]

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.

Oh the irony!

[TheNinjaroach]

It's getting too thick.

commentModeration++;

Re:Don't worry

[turgid]

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.

IBM hasn't really changed, it's just gone up to a new level of abstraction. It's no a services company, that happens to make its own computers and software.

IBM uses Linux and Open Source as a pawn in its war against Microsoft. IBM encompasses everything, except Solaris. AIX lost the unix wars to Solaris and now IBM uses Linux as a pawn against it.

IBM will sell you anything, and charge for support, whether it be Microsoft, IBM, Linux, Dell, RedHat, Oracle, Sun, SGI, Lenovo, ...

"You got a wallet? We got a Hoover!" - IBM

Re:Don't worry

[MightyMartian]

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.

Translation

[g2devi]

Let me translate what you've just said:

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 .NET.

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.

Being really open: support ODF

[feranick]

What would be a truly sincere support of interoperability and open standards? For one, full support of OpenDocument.

Re:Don't worry

[starfishsystems]

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

Red Hat's Response

[emacnabber]

http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/02/21/red-hat-statement-on-microsoft-announcement/

Think this is at all related to the console war?

[Ang31us]

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 $$$.

A picture is worthed more than a thousand words...

[feranick]

Here: http://blog.mycintosh.com/blog_pics/open_ms_gross.jpg

Microsoft GM on CNBC just a minute ago....

[publius1234]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[spikedLemur]

Well, they do have a really bad track record. But this time I genuinely think they're playing it straight. The EU is putting so much pressure on them that they don't have a choice not too. So, personally, I'd like to credit them for finally moving towards a level playing field, even it was done at gunpoint.

Microsoft Declares a Truce

[nurb432]

My ass.

Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a year

[Ang31us]

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.

Let the bashing commence

[WebCowboy]

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.

Has MS ever...

[Roadkills-R-Us]

...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.

Re:Don't worry

[sumdumass]

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

I agree. I would seriously like to see this pledge not to sue over the patents for APIs. It would be interesting to find that it only applied to certain types of used which would still be too restrictive for GPLv3 compliance.

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.

I have always been under the impression that Microsoft threw that out just to see what kind of rise they could get and steer people to the Novell platform which they had established a revenue stream. When the FSF took hold of it and used it to champion the largely rejected until that time, GPLv3, it took on a life MS hadn't originally expected but they continued it because of all the infighting it caused within the FOSS communities. I think MS maintained that position only to continue the infighting and FUD generated on our own side. This is also the reason I made speculations like I did about the promise not to sue (to continue the infighting and diminish the advanced roles the FSF plays in the community by forcing a reversion from the GPLv3 to the GPLv2 for license compatibility as well as making furture demands for openness look pedantic).

They could have a motive other then to satisfy EU requirements. Or they could be finally just caving to pressure and have no intention of being friendly with the FOSS community (read pissing off the cook making your lunch into that).

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.

Until MS starts selling FOSS software, I don't think they would ever have our interest at heart. I am more worried about them being hostile in subtle ways. I don't care if they take an agnostic approach and don't even recognize open source software or the community, as long as they don't attack it or attempt to manipulate it to their favor. I think it is unrealistic to think they would be our friend. But I think it totally acceptable for them to simply be fair and honorable and above the board on their marketing tactics so that actions aren't taken personal as they are now.

Re:Don't worry

[Sanat]

"Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

Fool me twice...Won't get fooled again

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:Fool me twice...Won't get fooled again

[Locutus]

I was stunned when Sun signed the Java license deal with Microsoft in 1996 or so. It was soooo obvious over 10 years ago what Microsoft's tactics are yet here we are and again, most really believe what Microsoft says. It is just amazing how short sighted, ignorant, naive, etc people are with regards to how Microsoft operates.

The Charlie Brown / Lucy football gag is very fitting. And after decades of this, people still running full steam at Microsoft holding the football. And the press...constantly just publishing constant MS press release garbage without regard to their constant falsities.

LoB

Does this mean others can play nice with Exchange?

[t34g4rd3n]

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?

Re:Don't worry

[David Gerard]

Actually, they encompass Solaris as well - IBM is Sun's biggest reseller.

Re:Does this mean others can play nice with Exchan

[t34g4rd3n]

Woopsy, I meant that Mail only supports Exchange in IMAP mode.

Re:Wait a year - revisited

[poetmatt]

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?

Re:Don't worry

[mjmartin_uk]

Especially since it's a trap.

(from the doc...)

• 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.

So basically they'll be sending the hounds over to the Ubuntu camp, Red Hat and anyone else who doesn't want to pay their fees. Any developer of GPL products should steer well clear from any of their bait.

Re:Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a ye

[Cederic]

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.

Non Serviam

[argent]

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.

MS builds a big horse

[wardk]

who is dumb enough to roll it inside the walls?

Finally a use

[LM741N]

for all those old RS-232 cables.

Re:Don't worry

[ardle]

Do you think he couldn't remember the rest of the saying? I reckon he had let his mouth get ahead of his brain and realised - just in time - that the words "shame on me" were going to be on permanent record as spoken by him.
He's not the brightest but he's not the idiot he's made out to be...

Re:Don't worry

[ardle]

MS want to be IBM (they cannot get the ear - or wallet - of big business the way IBM can).
I sort of want them to be IBM too - big enough to ignore :-)
If they become even more like IBM and relocate to India too, maybe we'll see a bit of innovation!

Re:Don't worry

[LingNoi]

When the FSF took hold of it and used it to champion the largely rejected until that time, GPLv3, it took on a life MS hadn't originally expected but they continued it because of all the infighting it caused within the FOSS communities.

Except for the fact that GPLv3 came out AFTER MS had issued the patent threats. So how could the GPLv3 be rejected before it was released?

It took on a life of its own because it was then RELEASED, hence why it got more popular, because people could start using it.

People on Slashdot arguing over GPL2 v GPL3 isn't the FOSS community and I'd hardly call it fighting, it's like saying that emacs vs. vi has caused a huge rift in the open source community, what crap.

Hmmm....

[cptdondo]

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...

Re:Pledge - Funny

[Culture20]

+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.

Re:Don't worry

[BeanThere]

If he was generally consistently well articulate, I might be inclined to believe that explanation, but he quite often (extremely often for someone of his standing) bumbles his words and says other kinds of way-out stuff, and often seems to struggle and have to kind of 'think' and work hard to get each next bit of a sentence out (it's a strange pattern, watching him speak, with these unusual pauses and so on) - against this backdrop it seems more likely he just got confused. I don't think he's stupid, but I genuinely (I don't mean this as an insult) think there is something slightly wrong with him somewhere in the brain (perhaps minor brain damage), particularly around the speech processing regions (maybe he got dropped on the head as a child or something). A person can still be intelligent but have quite specific defects from things like minor brain damage, but such a person might come across as stupider than they are as a result.

Re:Don't worry

[ozmanjusri]

The EU is putting so much pressure on them that they don't have a choice not too.

The EU doesn't agree with you.

The European Union's top antitrust regulator's scepticism about Microsoft's latest pledge to compete fairly comes after "at least four similar statements by Microsoft on the importance of interoperability".

ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, voiced similar scepticism.

"The proof of this pudding will be in the eating. The world needs a permanent change in Microsoft's behaviour, not just another announcement. We have heard high-profile commitments from Microsoft a half-dozen times over the past two years, but have yet to see any lasting change in Microsoft's behaviour in the marketplace,"

It's lovely that you're so trusting, but do you think it's wise?

Re:Don't worry

[A nonymous Coward]

There are videos floating around the web of him speaking as governor of Texas, before he ran for President, and he is perfectly articulate and clear. I sure think something happened to him. It's a night and day difference.

Re:Don't worry

[spitzak]

I agree. I would seriously like to see this pledge not to sue over the patents for APIs. It would be interesting to find that it only applied to certain types of used which would still be too restrictive for GPLv3 compliance.

They said "for non-commercial use". This is too restrictive for GPL3. It is too restrictive for GPL2. It is too restrictive for BSD, or for Public Domain. Hell it is even too restrictive for Microsoft's own shared-source licenses!

Re:Don't worry

[spitzak]

I think you may be somewhat over-estimating the quality of what IBM was selling. There are reasons why Unix and many other things were developed on non-IBM hardware.

But it took a while...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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. It took IBM DECADES to get over their bad rep. Literally two generations of new programmers had to grow up while they were being good guys before they were trusted. It started with opening the hardware of the PC (and took a massive financial hit over a number of years rather than trying to suppress the clones), built as they reorganized themselves into a software-services company that supported and contributed to FOSS, and was finally complete when they took on SCO.

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.

Re:But it took a while...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking. (Of course Sun and Apple didn't start from such a deep hole, either... B-) )

Re:But it took a while...

[AmaDaden]

Sun is partway down a similar path

This is the first I'm hearing of Sun hating. I'm a Java programmer and am quite happy with Sun and their doings as of late. What did they do back in the day? The only thing I can think of is that Java Applets for a dynamic web and the fact that only now is Java open source.

Re:But it took a while...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This is the first I'm hearing of Sun hating. I'm a Java programmer and am quite happy with Sun and their doings as of late. What did they do back in the day? Sun wasn't hated - it was more like annoyance and exasperation. Unlike Microsoft's predatory and often illegal business practices, Sun was a proprietary vendor that legitimately (though sometimes unwisely) chose to keep its technology tight. This made it unnecessarily hard to write drivers and design third-party hardware to interface with their stuff. (IMHO this is a big part of why Intel-ish PCs have essentially won - and was certainly the main cause of my own abandonment of Sun products for the technically-less-clean but more-open PCs.)

There were a few particular annoyances - like when they cut a deal with Grasshopper Group to merge their NeWS GUI implementation into Sun's X implementation to form X-NeWS, then abandoned the project but refused to release or relicense the NeWS rights back to the developers to continue on their own - either as a product or to open-source it (which they would have loved to do).

They were also one of the major players in the consortium that created the SystemV reimplementation of Unix. IMHO was primarily a move, after copyright was extended to software and patentability of software was established in federal court, to sidestep several questions about whether the original Unix had fallen into the public domain by moving further work to a Unix variant with major components that were unquestionably proprietary.

When it came to opening their stuff up they went for years in a "toe in the water then pull it back out" mode: Opening then reclosing the SPARC architecture to Sun-cloners, releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it back, etc. You'll see traces of this in the Star Office vs. Open Office business, or the proprietary nature of some aspects of Java.

Starting with the true open-source release of the Star/Open Office code they've been much more onboard with FOSS, and have earned some high marks and gratitude. But they still have a way to go - at least in terms of time - before they have demonstrated enough commitment to shed the reputation of being a reluctant bride. (And buying that SCO license when Darryl's operation was running out of cash didn't really help.)

Re:But it took a while...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... releasing a SunOS version for 386 then pulling it back ... Sorry, that was a Solaris version - back when their marketing department hadn't smeared the naming across the boundary so the distinction had meaning (SunOS = their earlier BSD variant, Solaris = their later SVRx development line).

Re:But it took a while...

[phliar]

Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking.

(Of course Sun and Apple didn't start from such a deep hole, either...

In fact way back (mid-80s), Sun were the good guys (at least in software).

SUA

[drfreak]

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.

Re:SUA

[Alioth]

Unless they've done some serious work on it recently, Services for Unix fell far short of Cygwin's functionality. SFU at least a couple of years ago was like using a late 80s copy of ISC or SCO UNIX, i.e. awful.

The best predictor of future behavior ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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. As with individual psychology so with corporate psychology: "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

First they ignore you...

[restive]

...then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

I hope we're reaching that last point there.

Re:First they ignore you...

[TheAwfulTruth]

Considering that the FOSS world ridicules Microsoft about a million times more than Microsoft ridicules FOSS.. who is going to win?!?

Infringe when possible comply otherwise.

[Requiem18th]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[rtb61]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[DogBotherer]

Alcohol/drug abuse? I mean, he has the medical history...

Re:Don't worry

[Hucko]

They can't win.

Wow, what a confession! From a proud fanboi no less!

The impetus

[dave87656]

Re: The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft.

Actually, I believe the impetus is ISO standards acceptance.

Hooray for the EU! Down with fascism!

[TakeyMcTaker]

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....?

Re:Hooray for the EU! Down with fascism!

[BokLM]

Obviously you didn't read all the details of this announcement. We're talking about fake interoperability here. Basically it says that you can be interoperable, but only if you pay the Microsoft tax.

Re:Don't worry

[sumdumass]

Except for the fact that GPLv3 came out AFTER MS had issued the patent threats. So how could the GPLv3 be rejected before it was released?

Lol.. Don't you remember? It was the 1st and 2nd revisions that were being rejected. MS made their patent claim, the FSF clear up the revisions a bit and then people started jumping on board because of the Novell threat.

It took on a life of its own because it was then RELEASED, hence why it got more popular, because people could start using it.

It took on a life of it's own because the FSF attacked Novell and claimed the GPLv3 would prevent abuse in the future. Only those drinking the cool aid actually thought the GPLv3 was better then the GPLv2 until that time.

People on Slashdot arguing over GPL2 v GPL3 isn't the FOSS community and I'd hardly call it fighting, it's like saying that emacs vs. vi has caused a huge rift in the open source community, what crap.

Lol. It wasn't people on slashdot. You had name calling and generalizations with ill intent comming from Stallman, ESR, Torvolds and so on. You don't get that with the emacs verses VI debates. Or at least the ones I have seen. I mean even to this day there is a rift that is attempting to minimize the effect Linus has on linux so they can attempt to move it to GPLv3. IF you don't see a rift or infighting, then you really need to open your eyes.

Hell froze?

[GNUThomson]

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.

Re:Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a ye

[Excelsior]

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.

Get real

[slashbart]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[mrchaotica]

It took on a life of it's own because the FSF attacked Novell and claimed the GPLv3 would prevent abuse in the future. Only those drinking the cool aid actually thought the GPLv3 was better then the GPLv2 until that time.

I'm sorry, but that statement rubs me the wrong way: why are you saying that the people who supported the GPLv3 from the beginning were "drinking the cool[sic] aid" when the Novell issue proved that they'd been right all along? I'd call that foresight, not fanaticism!

Re:Don't worry

[mrchaotica]

So what if it's a lot of work? Can't they fucking do the work before yakking about it?! If they did that, then we wouldn't have any reason to suspect they were lying to us, now would we?

Re:Don't worry

[donaldm]

The problem with Microsoft is that they say one thing and mean something else entirely. Opening up the format specifications of their proprietary files sounds fantastic on first reading (great for the CEO and other pointy haired beasties) but what if they withhold vital pieces of of their formats such that only programs by Microsoft can work efficiently? It has happened before and I see no reason why it is not going to happen again.

With regard to OO.org and the Samba team I think Microsoft will play fair for a few years at least until the European Union is distracted by something else.

With Microsoft stating that they have patented open protocols they are basically setting a trap for the unwary. Oh yes they do say they will license them "on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates" but IMHO that is still a trap.

Actually if Microsoft really wanted to interoperate with the Open Source Community what is to stop them, after all it is not as if the source code and formats are closed to them.

Re:Don't worry

[bvimo]

Isn't Ubuntu free?

I interpreted that section as an attack on Sun and its commercial version of OpenOffice - SunOffice, StarOffice or something.

The non-commercial clause makes the promises void

[apt-get moo]

[T]here's a clear distinction here between people who are developing open source software and engaging in non-commercial distribution on the one hand, and people who are engaging in commercial distribution and use on the other hand. With respect to the former, meaning developers and those engaged in noncommercial distribution, this new covenant not to sue, with respect to patent rights, is applicable.

On the other hand, 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, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available.

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.

The only decissions that matter...

[jotaeleemeese]

.... 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.

MS has a legal record to be ashamed for.

[jotaeleemeese]

The enormous majority of other companies don't.

So your point is completely useless frankly.

Re:Don't worry

[LingNoi]

Don't you remember? It was the 1st and 2nd revisions that were being rejected. MS made their patent claim, the FSF clear up the revisions a bit and then people started jumping on board because of the Novell threat.

Revisions aren't the released license, everyone was told to not use it until it was released.

Still don't believe me here..

Microsoft Patent Claims - Wednesday November 08 2006
GPL 3 Released - 29 June 2007

Months apart from each other, although don't let facts get in the way of your trolling.

Re:Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a ye

[BokLM]

I think you quoted the most important lines of this announcement.

People like me have long memories

[B5Fan]

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.

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!)

Mod parent up! Insightful

[B5Fan]

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"

qwerty

[Sithgunner]

qwerty

Re:Pledge - Funny

[sm62704]

Yeah, that surprised me too.

Re:Don't worry

[ardle]

I agree with your assessment of his condition (and therefore agree with sibling posts :-) but remember: impaired brain function != stupidity. In my assessment, he was smart not to finish the sentence the usual way! I'm sure he's aware of YouTube and The Daily Show.
His presidency didn't start out the way he expected (understatement) and he has been under a lot of pressure ever since, Texas walking style notwithstanding. Concentration problems may be a result of perscribed drugs, rather than historical substance abuse. Or just a result of having a lot on his mind...

Re:Don't worry

[sumdumass]

lol.. figures. At least it doesn't create a void between the two different GPLs.

Re:Don't worry

[sumdumass]

It can rub you anyway you want it to. In the beginning only a few people who tend to follow "the Church of Stallman" as they say (follow the FSF philosophy) were in support of the GPLv3. When the Novell thing happened, they used it to champion their cause and revised the GPL and started getting more support.

And it is debatable to whether the Novell issue proved anything. After the release of the details of the deal, the patent protection offered only applied to stuff they worked on together that wasn't in competition with Microsoft's products. This means yet to be written software that could have any license at all and the GPLv3 still couldn't be used to stop it until they added the anti Novell clause to it. And to that point, it only works on GPLed software they used and some people like Linus have pointed out that the GPLv2 already covered the problem.

Re:Don't worry

[sumdumass]

Oh come on. Are you seriously calling me a troll and then claiming that the revision and selection process the FSF used to create the GPLv3 doesn't count in order to make that claim? The fact is that there was a support system where people made comments about the GPLv3 revisions, suggested ideas for the revisions, and expressed support or not. Very few people were in support of it because the existing revisions were a mess at the time.

I guess it is my fault you appear to be a moron about this. I didn't specifically state the development process. I assumed that people would have remembered the time line and been smart enough to know what I was talking about. I guess this is what I get for making assumptions about people's inteligence when erroring in their favor.

Re:Don't worry

[pyrbrand]

RTFSummary, they did do the work (that's what the 30,000 pages of documentation are for), and at a significant cost.

Re:Don't worry

[pyrbrand]

So your premise is that MS has yet to release documentation and thus this is an empty promise? RTFSummary, and you'll see that the announcement isn't that they're "going to" release documentation, it is that they did, along with allowing open source projects the the use of the patents pertaining to implementing the information they're releasing. It's not an announcement of what they "will 'just do'", it's an announcement of what they've done.

Re:Don't worry

[spikedLemur]

Actually, that article supports my point that MS appears to be playing it straight this time. Think about it, all four previous proposals were shot down almost immediately as transparent attempts to get around the ruling. However, after looking at several documents and the patent commitment, I can't find a hole yet. To my knowledge no one else has either.

Now, this isn't to say I entirely trust them. My style is more "trust but verify." However, so far this appears to be the real deal. Until there's good reason to think otherwise our reaction should be cautiously optimistic, because a positive response could encourage good behavior in the future.

Of course, I hope the EU rails them if this turns out to be another ruse.

Re:Don't worry

[sjames]

A pledge is one thing, an irrevocable blanket world-wide non-exclusive license is another entirely.

Re:Don't worry

[ozmanjusri]

Actually, that article supports my point that MS appears to be playing it straight this time.

Very few people agree. Consensus amongst most who've reviewed the actual content of the statement is that it's business as usual.

Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080221184924826

Re:Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a ye

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:Microsoft learned NOTHING from SCO Re:Wait a ye

[Ang31us]

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.

Apologists

[Ximogen]

"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.

Why do MS has to "write" the docs for a released..

[Seth Kriticos]

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?