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Microsoft Takes Bold Steps Toward Open APIs and Publishing Tech Specs
2/21/2008
"This is an important strategic shift in terms of how each and every engineer at the company views what their mission is and what their job is," said Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.
"As individual end users, sharing information across the Internet and putting more and more of our records in documents, interoperability's become important for end users," Ozzie added.
Microsoft's announcement today is also its strongest statement to date that it will play in the open source world. Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business launched the company's Open Source Interoperability Initiative "to enable engagement with the open source community," he said.
While Microsoft has a number of agreements with open source players including Novell, Xandros, and others, developers can now freely access Microsoft's APIs and communication protocols.
"Going forward developers will not even need a trade secret license, which is something that was needed for our communications protocols in the past," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general council. "Instead, developers will be able to access this information in the same way that they access any other page of content on the Web."
Smith also said it is providing the royalty-free use of its APIs "so that any other software that calls on these APIs in Microsoft's products can do so without any concern about patent issues."
While Microsoft is making its patent licenses for its APIs and communications protocols "readily available," the company is not giving away its IP for commercial use or individual consumption.
"We will continue to view that as valuable intellectual property in all forms, and we will monetize from all users of that, not all developers, but for all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers and all commercial users of that patented technology," Ballmer said.
Ballmer's gave an overview of Microsoft's four new principles and how they will be implemented:
- Open Connections: Microsoft will document all of the APIs and communications protocols used by Microsoft products. "Developers will not need to take a license, or pay a royalty or other fee to access any of that information," Ballmer said. Microsoft released 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows clients and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license. In the coming months, Microsoft will publish additional API documentation including Office 2007 and the .NET Framework.
- Data Portability: Microsoft is designing new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint that will let developers plug in additional document formats and enable users to set those formats as their default for saving documents.
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