How Open Is Microsoft?

SIGNS OF HOPE
By far the biggest benefit of a more open Microsoft would be improved interoperability and integration, cited by 81% of survey respondents. "It should make it easier to move data from Office and Microsoft's database products to non-Microsoft technologies," says Brian Rice, services information manager with General Motors. "That would be something we'd definitely be interested in."

Rice is only speculating on what might be possible, but he's doing so based on real developments. For example, Microsoft's Office Communications Server now uses the industry standard SIP and Simple communications protocols to connect to PBXs and instant messaging systems, a proof point of Microsoft's interoperability intentions.

For years, Microsoft has offered developers its Windows API and software developers' kit for software compatibility, but developers have had to create open source layers like Wine (for porting Windows apps to Mac OS and Linux) and Samba (which lets Linux machines communicate with Windows) to establish interoperability where Microsoft doesn't provide it. "It's one thing to promote interoperability based on open standards and an open process that multiple parties can integrate and another to promote compatibility with your own systems," says Jim Zemlin, director of the Linux Foundation.

In one example of how that plays out in the real world, Windows and Active Directory are designed to work together, but Windows admins have to roll up their shirtsleeves to use Kerberos authentication in lieu of Active Directory. "You can't use that as an authentication source without setting up local, non-domain accounts for every workstation," says Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba, calling such an approach "completely unusable in a business environment."

Microsoft's good intentions--transparency, standards, and interoperability--are partly the result of external pressures, including unrelenting regulatory scrutiny. Efforts to get Microsoft to document and license protocols go back to U.S. Justice Department and European Union rulings in 2001 and 2004, respectively. Regulators have criticized Microsoft's response as plodding and incomplete, and they're not satisfied yet. About the same time Microsoft introduced its interoperability principles in February, the European Union fined the company $1.35 billion for failing to comply with an earlier antitrust ruling. Microsoft is appealing.

The public release of Microsoft protocols has been more painstaking than breathtaking. Microsoft released documentation for its Windows Server communication protocols in 2004, though it did so for a fee and under a trade secret license. It wasn't until this year that Microsoft published documentation detailing how several of its collaboration products communicate with the Windows client. It now promises to document protocols for a wider range of products, but customers and commercial software vendors will have to pay royalties to implement the patented ones.

Microsoft laid the groundwork for its recent release of protocol documentation two years ago with its so-called Open Specification Promise, a legally binding assertion that Microsoft wouldn't enforce certain patents. The list of technologies covered by that promise includes some Web services specs, e-mail authentication, identity management software, a virtual hard drive format, Office file formats, a robotics protocol, and a synchronization framework used in Live Mesh called FeedSync. The Open Specification Promise, which Microsoft compared to the General Public License, was applauded even by Red Hat.