Openness?

2月22日

In these days Microsoft announced that they are working on a set of fairly broad changes in their technology and business practices, "designed to further increase the openness of our products, and to drive greater interoperability and choice for developers, for partners, and for competitors" in Steve Ballmer's words.

"We will document all of the APIs and communication protocols that are used by other Microsoft products [...] developers will not need to take a license, or pay a royalty, or other fee to access any of that information. As an immediate first [...] we're publishing to the Web over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a 4D trade secret license. In addition, protocol documents for additional products like Office 2007 will be published in the upcoming months.
[...] we recognize that different users definitely support different file formats for different reasons. [...] we're designing new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint that will allow developers to plug in additional document formats, and enable users to set those formats as their default for saving documents.
[...] we're also going to document how we support various standards, including documentation of extensions we make to the standards.
[...] in the area of industry engagement, we're calling our open source interoperability initiatives. This will provide a set of labs, plug-fests, technical contents, and other information to promote more interoperability between Microsoft software and open source software."

These changes will pertain to Microsoft Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and all of the future versions of them.
It is a meaningful announcement for sure, which seems to reveal an honest aim by MS to change its politics towards a brand new level of openness . No surprise there actually, since the closed-source software paradigm has shown relevant limitations in the last years against some competitors which proclaimed themselves hardcore open-source supporters (perhaps without actually being like that); Microsoft just understood the simple fact that selling constant rounds of unwanted, unnecessary upgrades to bloated legacy applications isn't going to work much longer, moreover if an easy and free alternative is available.
The first step is done, but now there's the whole stairway left to go.

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	FrancisReese发表: Wow, they're actually DOCUMENTING their own stuff, which will allow users to actually configure MS software! They are so nice! :P This had to be made many years ago, when they had written thousands of (some worthless) APIs and didn't have the brilliant idea to write some decent documentation. So, if it wasn't clear, that doesn't sound to me like openness or changes of policy, but rather some necessary decision, that hasn't much to do with open-source et similia. (piaciuto come primo commento? mi sono anche impegnato :D) 2 月 25 日
	BlackJay发表: Our common uncle :P has developed an upgrade to his emulator Giano 2.1, i still have to check it but YUP! :P Today he's at a meeting in Monterey (CA) caroooooooo :) http://research.microsoft.com/research/EmbeddedSystems/Giano/giano.aspx check this out. see ya 2 月 22 日
	Gianmaria发表: Is something changing? Is MS opening a little? Sounds so strange... But sounds a little sweet too. 2 月 22 日

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