In a major shift in its approach to the open-source community and intellectual property, Microsoft announced Thursday four broad principles for openness and interoperability.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the principles -- to provide open connections to Microsofts high-volume products, to improve data portability, to enhance Microsofts support for industry standards, and to open communications with the IT industry.
The move is a direct result of the European Court of First Instances decision in October that Microsoft must provide open access to its APIs and protocols.
MAKING PEACE WITH EU
"Its a fundamental recognition on Microsofts part that the company has more to gain by working within the requirements of the European courts decision than to continue beating its head against the wall," said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in a telephone interview.
"The EU courts have said Microsoft is going to have to abide by its markets rules. There comes a point where a company needs to examine and re-examine what its doing," King said. "As the IT industry increasingly goes global, companies have to learn to play by the rules of the markets they want to compete in," whether that means the openness the EU requires or the complicity in censorship that China requires.
To open connections to Microsoft products, "We will document APIs and communication protocols," Ballmer said. "Developers will not need to take licenses to access that information."
Ballmer said Microsoft is immediately publishing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade-secret license. It will also post documentation for Office 2007 protocols "in coming months," Ballmer said. Bob Muglia, senior vice president for the server and tools business, said that documentation will come online no later than June 2008.
PRESERVING DATA
"Documents and data have a lifetime that now exceeds the lifetime of the application that created them," said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect. "Document portability and interoperability have become a vital concern." The open-connections principle is an "important strategy shift for Microsoft -- for our engineers, for the development community and for customers," Ozzie added.
Ozzie emphasized that with this documentation, "developers that connect their products to our products will use the same specifications as Microsoft developers do. This is a level playing field with full technical documentation available to everyone."
To improve data portability, Microsoft is designing new APIs for Office that allow developers to create additional document formats and for customers to choose their own default formats, Ballmer said.
To improve Microsofts support for standards, the company will document "how we support standards, including our extensions to standards," Ballmer said.
Ozzie added that Microsoft will open up "the means by which customers will help us decide what standards to support and how we will continue to innovate with respect for open standards."
Finally, Microsoft pledged to create a Document Interoperability Initiative to address data-exchange issues and to create a publicly available online Interoperability Forum on the MSDN Web site.
A PATENT COVENANT
On the legal front, general counsel Brad Smith outlined new intellectual property principles for the high-volume protocols that "cover both the sharing of technical information and the licensing of IP rights." When protocols are covered by Microsoft patents, the company will license the patents on "reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, at a low royalty rate," Smith said.
In addition, Microsoft is offering free access to all its trade secrets related to the high-volume open protocols and APIs. And it is providing a "patent covenant" not to sue open-source developers for implementations of these protocols, Smith said.
This is the patent framework covered by the European courts decision, Smith said. "Companies can use the protocols without a patent license and companies that engage in creating commercial implementations will obtain a patent license on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms."
Smith emphasized that this announcement doesnt signal a "a change to our broader perspectives on intellectual property." The new rules only relate to Microsofts patent rights to its specifications on its high-volume protocols and APIs.
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