Microsoft Vows to Open Its Chamber of Secrets
February 21, 2008 —
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In the wake of mounting pressure from European antitrust regulators, Microsoft has pledged to do the unthinkable: It will publish documentation for APIs and Windows client and server protocols, for which it once fought tooth and nail to hold as trade secrets.
Microsoft’s decision to divulge how its products can be more easily used with third-party solutions is driven by four self-described “interoperability principles” that the company announced last month.
In the four principles, the company vows to ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards, and more openly engage its customers and the industry, including open-source communities.
The interoperability principles apply to high-volume business products, including Exchange Server 2007, Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework) and all future editions of those products.
Microsoft will implement those principles by making the API documentation available to developers on the Web, license- and royalty-free. The process began last month when it dumped over 30,000 pages of documentation for its Windows client and server protocols onto the Microsoft Developer Network Web site.
The company said that protocol documentation for additional products, including Office 2007, would be published in the coming months.
Access to information about the networking protocols was previously restricted by a trade secret license under one of two schemes: the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program.
Microsoft was forced to make the protocol documentation available to competitors under these schemes after the European Union’s Court of First Instances ruled in September 2007 against Microsoft’s appeal of the 2004 decision by the European Commission that found the company guilty of anticompetitive behavior.
In January, an emboldened European Commission decided to initiate two new antitrust investigations against Microsoft, brought on by complaints from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a coalition of Microsoft rivals, and Opera Software, a browser maker. The complaints accused Microsoft of infringements of the rules on abuse of a dominant market position, as set forth in Article 82 of the Treaty establishing the European Community, originally Article 86 of the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
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