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Microsoft’s sudden affection for openness
Techies know full well that the software market is becoming an ecosystem of sorts in which products not built to standards and lacking interoperability will wither… and disappear.
Up to now, Microsoft has been the perfect example of closed source software stuffed with heavily patented processes, even when such processes were so common and blatantly obvious that they shouldn’t have gotten any patent protection to start with.
So in face of the powerful grassroots tsunami in favor of open standards, open source and creative commons-type of property statements, Microsoft has recently decided to take a concrete action towards openness by publishing 30,000 pages documenting Windows protocols that previously were only available under restrictive licenses.
Furthermore, Microsoft said it won’t sue open source developers for noncommercial implementations of those protocols but frankly, it remains to be seen if an open source coder will take the chance to inject Microsoft-based code in their work.
Ongoing European antitrust scrutiny over Microsoft’s push to get its Open XML document format ratified as an international standard might have everything to do with the company’s CEO, Steve Balmer, suddenly vowing for openness.
Microsoft’s move is a step in the right direction because even though some third parties might take from them, codewise, they might also add value to the current codebase.
Since loosely coupled systems will become a basic requirement for business success in the coming years, Microsoft’s decision to play more nicely with all other coders out there appears that much more important for the company’s future.
Tags: microsoft, openness, open source, developers, windows, protocols, open xml
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