Many people consider Microsoft to be an extremely "closed" company - especially in dealing with the information being given out about their products. This is due to their reasoning that Microsoft does not release the source code of their programs.

I, however, have a slightly different take on this. Yes, Microsoft generally doesn't release its source code. But they do release a well documented API/SDK with each of their products along with a ton of sample code to get you up and running. And by my experience in the PCQLinux team, I can tell that this sometimes can be much more useful to end developers. The mess of code that I've seen in the so called "open source" world - no API, no documentation/comments, no architecture - just a bunch of lines of code hacked together to create what is needed at a particular point of time.

However, coming back to the line of the title, Microsoft has recently become very conscious about the need to not just be open - but also to be interoperable with other open products or technologies. Some of the things they have done (and starting about 2 years or so back) are:

• Working closely with open source projects. SugarCRM, XEN and JBoss are the most well known of these collaborations.
• Supporting Linux with Virtual Machine Additions on VirtualPC and Virtual Server
• Working with Linux developers to make their distributions work perfectly with Hyper-V
• Jointly developing FastCGI with Zend to give PHP (and possibly other OSS platforms, such as Perl) a much needed boost on IIS7. In fact, I would go so far as to say that PHP now works much better and has more abilities possible on IIS7 than on the LAMP stack
• Getting two Microsoft open source licenses (MPL and MRL) approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
• Release of the Microsoft .NET Framework source code

Now MS has also gone and announced the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. This broadly allows open source developers to work closely with Microsoft products in the following broad areas:

1. Open connections: including protocols, APIs, documentation access. Low cost royalty for patented items as well as a covenant not to sue any oss developers for non-commercial distribution of stuff using these
2. Standards: Support and compatibility with open standards. Any extensions to the standards will be open and documented
3. Data Portability: Opening up of data formats and also providing MS applications the ability to interact with open formats directly
4. Engagement: Executive and customer level engagements

Overall, I think this is a great step forward. There will be of course many who crib. For instance, certain commercial Linux companies who have refused to have an amicable agreement with Microsoft will probably be the first to criticize this. While other ones who are agreeable to working together for the better interest of the end customer will probably see a lot of innovation coming their way since they will be able to now integrate well into the Microsoft world and vice-versa.

UPDATE

About 15 minutes after I posted this, I saw that Slashdot had linked to an article by the self-appointed guardians of openness - Groklaw - that gave precisely these arguments on why the announcement has no merit. Of course, considering that they themselves list a number of companies who do not directly benefit from this. I wonder which one of them "sponsored" this piece.

The major complaint seems to be that Microsoft promises to remain incompatible with the GPL. So what? Isn't their so-called freedom open enough to accept that a company might want or not want to be compatible with the GPL. Linus Torvalds himself has been a great critic of GPL 3.0. And anyway, there are so many other open source licenses out there, so why can't Microsoft decide to choose which one to be compatible with. GPL, as you might know, is extremely viral in nature and it's a good thing to not support it.

The other thing they crib about is the clause on non-commercial distribution of software using these open initiatives. They say that commercial oss companies will not benefit from this. In other words what they are saying is: "We don't want to pay you any royalties on your innovations, but we want to use your idea commercially for our own benefit. But since we can't take any other developer's already created open source work and include it in our distributions for free - without paying either you or them, you are not open enough. "

Nice, isn't it? And it's these very people who added specific clauses in the GPL to prevent interoperability with Microsoft. That says a lot too.

UPDATE 2

I had posted a pro-Microsoft comment on the Groklaw article linked above yesterday. However today when I went over to check for any replies there, I found that it had been removed. There was nothing objectionable in the matter I had written (in terms of language or appropriateness). I can't remember my exact words there, but it was a summarized version of this post.

However, Groklaw decided to be open enough to censor my words. The post is completely missing from the page. Unfortunately, neither Google nor Live had cached the page yet. And interestingly, Archive.org says it cannot archive the contents of the site since there is a robots.txt file that prevents it from doing so. So there is no way that I can prove it. Will try posting it again and seeing whether it remains there or not.

UPDATE 3

Amazing, they did it again!!! Anyway, this shows how "open" they are in listening to pro-Microsoft words and when they do not really have any counter points other than damning Microsoft, BillG, SteveB and all of us who use Microsoft software. This final time I'm posting it, with a message also stating the prior censorship and I've also taken a full page dump as an image using WebShot.

Tags: open source, rave
Categories: Development | Microsoft | Rave