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Our Blogs Open Sauce What better time for MS to talk about interoperability? | What better time for MS to talk about interoperability? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
      
The embrace of four Linux resellers in 2006 and 2007 has been well documented and needs no elaboration - eager for handouts and keen to stand in line like good citizens, Novell, Xandros, Turbo Linux and Linpsire signed up with the team in Redmond. It's curious that an announcement titled "Microsoft Executives to Make Significant Company Announcement" comes a few days before national standards bodies gather in Geneva to begin a meeting that will culminate with a vote on whether Microsoft Office Open XML is accepted as an ISO standard or not. Call me cynical but I can't help noticing that this move also comes on the heels of a European Union announcement that it would investigate Microsoft's actions in its bid to get OOXML adopted as an ISO standard. The detail of the announcement will emerge later, much later, as there are thousands of pages which one must digest. Significantly, there is no time for those who are attending the Geneva meeting to understand this announcement - and that is by design. Remember, Microsoft does not mind open source applications succeeding - provided they run better on Windows. Microsoft loves software released under the BSD licence - it gets quality work done free and with no obligation to ever acknowledge that it has used the code either. Looking at the announcement, I have a few questions: Of what use is a pledge not to sue open source developers when it does not extend to commercial open source projects? Of what use is it when application programming interfaces are opened, patents are licensed on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms but the company still retains source code and more expansive patent deals for select partners? Of what use is it when, despite all the talk about openness, Microsoft will still not provide a means for Office to save documents in ODF format out of the box? Remember, this is the only currently accepted ISO standard. Open means just that - not half-ajar, not one-fourth open. When a company refers to "collaboration with Samba" and it is well known that such collaboration came after a shit-fight lasting nearly 10 years, then you begin to understand the meaning of the word "chutzpah". It remains to be seen how many FOSS people will be deceived by this. A great many have already jumped on board the Microsoft wagon - indeed, any questioning of Novell these days invites a great deal of criticism. |
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