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.

[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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[PPH]

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

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: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

[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

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."

Mono support

[D4MO]

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

Which 30,000?

[sjbe]

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

"This page left intentionally blank"

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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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: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

[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.

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.

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.

Being really open: support ODF

[feranick]

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

Red Hat's Response

[emacnabber]

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.