Announcement: Microsoft Increases Product Openness

Microsoft made a major announcement today on the availability of technology available. I have encapsulated the highlights below. Complete information is available in the references at the end.

Headline:

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

What does it mean?

Microsoft is changing policies on how information on the high volume products and technologies. The changes will hopefully help increase opportunities for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Highlights on How Microsoft Plans to Accomplish:

• Publish on the MSDN Web site more than 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols, previously available only under a trade secret license.

• Publish protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007, in upcoming months.

• Provide access to the protocols for free for development and non-commercial distribution to open source developers.

• License related patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates for commercial distribution.

• Document how Microsoft supports industry standards.

• Document any extensions affecting interoperability that are implemented in Microsoft products, available on Microsoft Web site without a license, royalty or other fee required for access. (Any related Microsoft patents that cover these extensions will be available on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

• Develop new APIs for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that will enable developers to plug in additional document formats and allow users to select those formats as their default for saving documents.