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Microsoft Vows to Open Its Chamber of Secrets


By David Worthington
February 21, 2008 — 
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.

Last month, the Commission issued a statement acknowledging Microsoft’s intention to promote interoperability in its high-volume products, but pointed out that Microsoft’s announcement was unrelated to the question of whether the company has been complying with EU antitrust rules in the area of interoperability in the past, or whether it was just paying lip service to interoperability.

“The Commission,” read the statement, “would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability. Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.” The statement also made clear that its present investigations would continue regardless of Microsoft’s announcement.

The Gritty Details
Over the years, Microsoft accumulated vast portfolios of patents in the course of gaining its dominant position in the market. In the spirit of its newfound interoperability principles, the company claims that it will indicate on its Web site which protocols are subject to Microsoft patents, and will license those patents “on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.”

The company has extended an olive branch, in the form of a covenant not to sue, to open-source developers that distribute non-commercial software based upon Microsoft protocols. Companies that distribute software for profit will be required to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, but enterprises using those solutions will not require such a license.

Another step Microsoft announced by way of adhering to the interoperability principles is documenting how the company supports industry standards, and working with other implementers of a particular standard to ensure that implementations are consistent across products.

In a bid for transparency and perhaps clemency, Microsoft will stipulate when it has extended standards with proprietary extensions. The company pledged to provide supporting documentation for the extensions, including those aspects that conflict with other implementations.

Microsoft will also launch an Open Source Interoperability Initiative, a program that will promote greater interoperability between community-built and proprietary software products. Microsoft is promising to provide technical content and resources as well as to engage the open-source community in cooperative development, dialog and outreach.

It will make a similar effort to address data exchange between widely used document formats, and it intends to design new APIs for Office 2007 client applications, to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to set those formats as the defaults for documents.

“These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.”

In a separate statement, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie indicated that Microsoft understood that developers want it to deliver software and services that can be integrated with other solutions. “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers,” he said.


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