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Promises, Promises from Microsoft. Again. |
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Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:21 PM EST
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Nobody is buying it. Well. Employees, maybe. Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters. Microsoft is currently being investigated by the EU Commission regarding the same two issues, interoperability and its behavior pushing MSOOXML as a "standard". This is a promise to remain incompatible with the GPL, as far as I can make out. Here's the response from the EU Commission. They totally get that this promise is insufficient. They've heard it before, at least four times. And it doesn't wipe the slate clean regarding past violations, even if they meant it. ECIS's Thomas Vinje also issued a statement [PDF] pointing out that the proof is in the pudding, that Microsoft doesn't get to define interoperability unilaterally, and as for standards, if it meant it, it would support ODF. What the world needs, he says, is "a permanent change in Microsoft's behavior, not just another announcement." ECIS' members include
Adobe, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun
Microsystems. Here's Red Hat's statement.
Here's Andy Updegrove's take. Todd Bishop's coverage on Seattle PI. And here's the video and transcript of Microsoft's conference call, with Steve Ballmer, Brad Smith, Bob Muglia, and Ray Ozzie. Look at Ozzie's expression in the photo on this page.
Here's the complete ECIS statement: The proof of this pudding will be in the
eating. The world needs a permanent change in Microsoft's behaviour,
not
just another announcement. We have heard high-profile commitments from
Microsoft a half-dozen times over the past two years, but have yet to
see
any lasting change in Microsoft's behaviour in the marketplace.
In August 2007 - one month before the European Court of First Instance
threw
out Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's condemnation on
every
significant point - Microsoft announced "Windows Principles: Empowering
choice, opportunity and interoperability." At that same moment,
Microsoft
had yet to comply with the Commission's original decision of March 2004
requiring disclosure of interoperability information. Nor did those
"Windows Principles" address in any meaningful way the fundamental
abuses of
which Microsoft had been found guilty.
Be that at is may, the September 2007 Court judgment now compels
Microsoft
to end monopoly abuses which restrict full and fair competition. This
is
not a matter of choice. Nor should Microsoft itself be the ultimate
judge
of what constitutes acceptable practice, particularly in view of newly
announced investigations by the European Commission into Microsoft's
practices, as well as last month's extension of US government scrutiny
of
Microsoft's inadequate efforts to comply with the US anti-trust
decision.
In light of this history, it is far too early to say whether, in
Microsoft's
own words, "the actions announced today reflect a strategic change in
[Microsoft's] approach to interoperability". And even if that proves to
be
the case, it is far too early to say whether this new, unilateral
"approach
to interoperability" will bring Microsoft into compliance with
anti-trust
law in Europe and elsewhere. At this point, we can only observe that
today's announcement raises far more questions than it answers. For
example: -
Microsoft promises not to sue open source developers for
"non-commercial distribution". That's presumably great news for
hobbyists,
but completely excludes some of Microsoft's most threatening potential
competitors. We don't think that is what the European Commission and
the
European Court have in mind.
- Regarding the commitment to "enhancing support for industry
standards": Whose standards? For years now, Microsoft has either
failed to
implement or has actively corrupted a range of truly open standards
adopted
and implemented by the rest of the industry. Unless and until that
behaviour stops, today's words mean nothing.
More fundamentally, today's announcement is still all about the rest of
the
world interoperating with Microsoft on Microsoft's own terms, not the
other
way around. So long as that is the strategic orientation, the
interoperability devil will always be in the technical and commercial
details.
As either luck or Microsoft's timing would have it, an important test of
what Microsoft really means by "enhancing support for industry
standards"
will come next week at a meeting of the International Standards
Organisation
(ISO). If Microsoft is committed to truly open standards, it would
embrace
the existing ISO cross-platform standard for document processing, the
Open
Document Format (ODF), rather than push forward its proprietary
Windows-dependent standard for document processing, OOXML. ODF already
has
wide industry acceptance, permits unconditional open competition and
thus
promotes competition-driven innovation.
But despite all the standards support rhetoric from Redmond, Microsoft
has
yet to implement ODF natively in its own systems. The best proof of
Microsoft's intention to live by the principles it has announced today
would
be for it to agree now to harmonize its efforts with the ODF standard,
rather than trying to position OOXML as a "better" competing
standard.
It's actually more than a half dozen.
Here for your amusement are an additional ten previous Microsoft statements promising interoperability: - Steve Ballmer Speech Transcript, Sept. 2003 - Microsoft Government Leaders Forum (Europe)
-
Microsoft Announces Availability of Open and Royalty-Free License For
Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas
Offering Brings New Level of Transparency, Interoperability, Document
Portability And Ease of Communication, Nov. 2003
-
European Commission Decision: Microsoft Outlines Changes to
Interoperability Measures
Company Makes Proposals for Implementation of European Commission Decision, June 2005
-
Microsoft Statement in Response to the Adoption of the Statement of
Objections by the European Commission, Dec. 2005,
Microsoft today released a statement from Brad Smith, General Counsel
and Senior Vice President, in response to the adoption of the
Statement of Objections by the European Commission.
-
In Advance of the Government Leaders Forum, Microsoft Outlines a
Worldwide Public Services and eGovernment Strategy --
The strategy aims at reducing the cost burden of red tape through technology, Jan. 2006
-
Microsoft Establishes Customer Council on Interoperability
Industry and government leaders to provide input on making
technologies work better together
-
Microsoft Expands Document Interoperability
Company to sponsor open source project for Open XML-ODF file
translation to deliver more choice for government customers and their
constituents
-
Microsoft and Industry Leaders Establish Interoperability Alliance
Founding members of Interop Vendor Alliance, including Sun
Microsystems, Novell, BEA Systems and SOFTWARE AG, share common goal
of making technologies work better together for customers, Nov. 2006
-
Next Step in Document Interoperability and Choice Delivered
Customers benefit from open source Open XML Translator funded by Microsoft, Feb. 2007
-
Microsoft and Trusted Computing Group Announce Interoperability --
Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect architecture to
incorporate Network Access Protection's primary client-server
protocol, May 2007
And yet they are still not interoperable. Even the OSP, Microsoft's patent promise regarding MSOOXML, excludes GPL programmers, so far as I can understand their promise. And they've been selling interoperability to folks like Novell for money on terms that clash with GPLv3. So I'd say we still have a way to go. What the world needs is true interoperability, including with GPL code, so the artificial barriers to smooth interoperability come down and we have a fair playing field for everyone. Here's the full EU statement: Antitrust: Commission takes note of Microsoft's announcement on interoperability principles
The European Commission takes note of today's announcement by Microsoft of its intention to commit to a number of principles in order to promote interoperability with some of its high market share software products. This announcement does not relate to the question of whether or not Microsoft has been complying with EU antitrust rules in this area in the past. The Commission 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. In January 2008, the Commission initiated two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft – one relating to interoperability, one relating to tying of separate software products (see MEMO/08/19). In the course of its ongoing interoperability investigation, the Commission will therefore verify whether Microsoft is complying with EU antitrust rules, whether the principles announced today would end any infringement were they implemented in practice, and whether or not the principles announced today are in fact implemented in practice. Today's announcement by Microsoft does not address the tying allegations.
In its Microsoft judgment of 17 September 2007 the Court of First Instance established clear principles for dominant companies with regard to interoperability disclosures and the tying of separate software products (see MEMO/07/359). In January 2008 the Commission initiated two formal antitrust investigations in order to verify whether Microsoft is complying with the principles established by the Court.
One of these investigations focuses on the alleged illegal refusal by Microsoft to disclose sufficient interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and also in relation to the so called .NET Framework and on the question whether Microsoft's new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products.
The second investigation concerns allegations of tying of separate software products, including Internet Explorer, to the Windows PC operating system.
The initiation of proceedings in these investigations does not imply that the Commission has proof of infringements. It only signifies that the Commission will further investigate the cases as a matter of priority.
And the Microsoft press release: Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability
New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products.
REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.
Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
“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. “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.”
According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, the company’s announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing. As heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.
“Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions,” said Ozzie. “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”
“The principles and actions announced today by Microsoft are a very significant expansion of its efforts to promote interoperability,” said Manfred Wangler, vice president, Corporate Research and Technology, Software and Engineering, Siemens. “While Microsoft has made considerable progress on interoperability over the past several years, including working with us on the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, today’s news take Microsoft’s interoperability commitment to a whole new level.”
“The interoperability principles and actions announced today by Microsoft will benefit the broader IT community,” said Thomas Vogel, head, Information Management, Novartis Pharma. “Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products presents significant opportunities for the vast majority of software developers, which will help foster greater interoperability, opportunity and choice in the marketplace. We look forward to a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions.”
The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products. Highlights of the specific actions Microsoft is taking to implement its new interoperability principles are described below. -
Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products. To enhance connections with third-party products, Microsoft will publish on its Web site documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other Microsoft products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information. Open access to this documentation will ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft’s high-volume products just as Microsoft’s other products do.
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As an immediate next step, starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program (MCPP). Protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume products covered by these principles, will be published in the upcoming months.
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Microsoft will indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates. To assist those interested in considering a patent license, Microsoft will make available a list of specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol.
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Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
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Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions. To increase transparency and promote interoperability, when Microsoft supports a standard in a high-volume product, it will work with other major implementers of the standard toward achieving robust, consistent and interoperable implementations across a broad range of widely deployed products.
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Microsoft will document for the development community how it supports such standards, including those Microsoft extensions that affect interoperability with other implementations of these standards. This documentation will be published on Microsoft’s Web site and it will be accessible without a license, royalty or other fee. These actions will allow third-party developers implementing standards to understand how a standard is used in a Microsoft product and foster improved interoperability for customers. Microsoft will make available a list of any of its patents that cover any of these extensions, and will make available patent licenses on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
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Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats. To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.
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Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products, this initiative will provide resources, facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.
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Expanding industry outreach and dialogue. An ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open source communities will be created through an online Interoperability Forum. In addition, a Document Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between widely deployed formats.
The Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, an advisory organization established in 2006 and consisting mainly of chief information and technology officers from more than 40 companies and government bodies around the world, will help guide Microsoft in its work under these principles and actions. The full text of Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles, and a full list of the actions Microsoft is taking, can be found on Microsoft’s Interoperability site.
The interoperability principles and actions announced today reflect the changed legal landscape for Microsoft and the IT industry. They are an important step forward for the company in its ongoing efforts to fulfill the responsibilities and obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI).
“As we said immediately after the CFI decision last September, Microsoft is committed to taking all necessary steps to ensure we are in full compliance with European law,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel. “Through the initiatives we are announcing, we are taking responsibility for implementing the principles in the interoperability portion of the CFI decision across all of Microsoft’s high-volume products. We will take additional steps in the coming weeks to address the remaining portion of the CFI decision, and we are committed to providing full information to the European Commission so it can evaluate all of these steps.” As you can see, you still have to pay to be interoperable, and if you are Linux or any commercial FOSS project, they can sue you to the moon over patents if you don't pay them -- terms that are incompatible with the GPL. This is for patents that may or may not be valid, that have not been court-tested and approved. Nice work if you can get it. And that doesn't even reach the issue of whether any of the patents are actually needed. Let me remind you that when Microsoft presented its list of patents to Samba, they didn't need a single one on that long list. Yet Microsoft wants to be paid for patents like this? In short, they still want to be in the driver's seat. I believe one calls that benefitting from a monopoly, unless I am very much mistaken. And they refuse to be compatible with the GPL on its terms. I just hope the EU doesn't fall for the patent hustle this time. Stephen Shankland very accurately describes this latest promise as "just the latest refinement of the company's ambivalence" toward FOSS: At the same time that Microsoft's new arrangement opens up previously secret specifications and protocols for use in open-source software, it also insists that companies planning on distributing or using that software need a patent license. He goes on to trace, back to 1998, Microsoft's long history of open-source acrimony, as he puts it. The thing is, this is a promise to interoperate with old-fashioned competitors. It doesn't enable interoperability with the GPL, which is not compatible with patent licenses, and that is Microsoft's true competition. Forgive me if I conclude that this is a deliberate exclusion. People aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be. So what does Microsoft need to do if it really wants to be interoperable and respect standards? Red Hat's statement by Michael Cunningham, VP and General Counsel, explains it nicely:
Eight years ago the U.S. regulatory authorities, and four years ago the European regulators made clear to Microsoft that its refusal to disclose interface information for its monopoly software products violates the law. So, it is hardly surprising to see even Microsoft state today that “interoperability across systems is an important requirement” and announce a “change in [its] approach to interoperability.” Of course, we’ve heard similar announcements before, almost always strategically timed for other effect. Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:-
Commit to open standards: Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML, Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization’s meeting next week in Geneva. Microsoft, please demonstrate implementation of an existing international open standard now rather than make press announcements about intentions of future standards support.
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Commit to interoperability with open source: Instead of offering a patent license for its protocol information on the basis of licensing arrangements it knows are incompatible with the GPL – the world’s most widely used open source software license – Microsoft should extend its Open Specification Promise to all of the interoperability information that it is announcing today will be made available. The Open Specification Promise already covers many Microsoft products that do not have monopoly market positions. If Microsoft were truly committed to fostering openness and preventing customer lock-in, it would extend this promise to the protocol and interface information it intends to disclose today. There is no explanation for refusing to extend the Open Specification Promise to “high-volume” products, other than a continued intention on Microsoft’s part to lock customers into its monopoly products, and lock out competitors through patent threats.
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Commit to competition on a level playing field: Microsoft’s announcement today appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open source community. How else can you explain a “promise not to sue open source developers” as long as they develop and distribute only*/ “non-commercial” implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous. The only hope for reintroducing competition to the monopoly markets Microsoft now controls – Windows, Office, etc. – is through commercial distributions of competitive open source software products.
Update: This is funny. From the transcript of the teleconference, Brad Smith is explaining the patent situation, whereby the patents that Samba disdained, are now free in popular products for OS developers and for a fee to the commercial players, when Steve Ballmer interrupts to correct him:
BRAD SMITH:...First is the scope of the patent rights that are affected. What this addresses is the patent rights relating to our implementations of our specifications of our communications protocols. So, in effect, this is technology, and a set of IP rights, that people have said is very important for interoperability, and we are addressing this in a broad and new way.
Second, and I think that this is also worth putting into perspective, just as we did last October when we hammered out the final details of our compliance with the European Commission's 2004 decision, there's a clear distinction here between people who are developing open source software and engaging in non-commercial distribution on the one hand, and people who are engaging in commercial distribution and use on the other hand. With respect to the former, meaning developers and those engaged in noncommercial distribution, this new covenant not to sue, with respect to patent rights, is applicable.
On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available. Novell already has an agreement with us that covers all of these patent rights. Some other companies, such as Xandros and others, also have a patent license. So they've already addressed all of that, and their users are already addressed. With respect to other distributors, and users, the clear message is that patent licenses will be freely available.
STEVE BALLMER: Patents will be, not freely, will be available.
BRAD SMITH: Readily available.
STEVE BALLMER: Readily available for the right fee. The basic economic analysis that you should go through sort of goes like this. We have valuable intellectual property in our patents, 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.
We also have trade secret information, which we will continue to protect, with the exception of some important trade secret information in the interoperability realm, which we will still value, but we will make available free of charge, so that people can do appropriate interoperability. So from an economic perspective you could say, in some senses, we're opening up. Yet, at the same time, we retain valuable intellectual property assets. There you are, Microsoft, 2008. For the right fee you can interoperate. Otherwise you can't. Nothing new about that. And as best as I can figure, they are selling patent licenses to patents Samba says it didn't need. They could work around them. And by the way, Novell is cited as a fine example of Microsoft's efforts to be interoperable. But Novell has yet to ship any GPLv3 code. Because it can't, without consequences. So how is that interoperability? The audio file url is incorrect. It's wm.microsoft.com/ms/presspass/2008/02-21ConCallAudio.wma. Yes. They haven't bothered to post it in a format that everyone can use, only Microsoft users. It says it all.
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Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:30 PM EST |
To help PJ finding them [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:32 PM EST |
For the on topic - off topic marvel you wish to submits.
With clickies if you how how o make them. See the red instructions at the bottom
of the posting form.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:33 PM EST |
Name the article in the title please.
Amazing, am I doing the hat trick?[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Jude on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:54 PM EST |
IMO, Microsoft is stalling for time while they search for a political lever they
can use to make the problem go away, the same thing they did in DOJ v.
Microsoft.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Promises, Promises from Microsoft. Again. - Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 08:16 PM EST
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Authored by: tqft on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:55 PM EST |
The physicist in me wants to see an experiment.
Take the released stuff, make a product and release it.
Ideally we want it released as GPL3 and one that competes with an MS product.
Unfortunately this is a non-trivial exercise and then never knowing if MS would
sue means it isn't a very good experiment. Throw in court vagaries and timing
and any patents in question could easily have lapsed.
Great FUD and PR but pretty useless unless you want to write to MS with an
outline of a competing product and ask if it is OK to go ahead and get the
answer in writing - commercial suicide.
Oh and does anyone know what juridstictions these promises apply in?
---
anyone got a job good in Brisbane Australia for a problem solver? Currently
under employed in one job.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 07:56 PM EST |
Link
It
basically repeat what is in PJ's report, with some additional comments from
someone that have attended the press conference:
The company will
still charge a fee to companies that sell software built using this information.
But Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie described the fees as "low royalty
rates."
I wonder if this is a one time fee for unlimited
distribution rights, or if per copy charges are applicable.
There is also
this part:
Michael Cunningham, general counsel at Linux operating
system distributor Red Hat Inc., wrote in a blog post that Microsoft's
announcement "appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open
source community."
I have tracked the announcement to be this one. It appears to be a better link than the one in PJ's
article because it comes straight from the horse's mouth.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 08:10 PM EST |
Bob Sutor gathered a collection of links
documenting reactions on this topic. It is aptly titled "No, Really, We Mean It
This Time".
I notice the great quantity of skeptical reactions, with article
titles like "Microsof
t's open-source patent threat still intact" and "Microsoft pledges (yet again)
that it wants to be interoperable" showing up almost instantly. The FUD is
not working this time. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: kawabago on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 08:19 PM EST |
Microsoft no longer has a product that people want and they are hemorrhaging
money everywhere. Business was waiting for Vista SP1 before considering
installing it but now it's been recalled. Even Microsoft's fixes are broken.
Microsoft is turning into an increasingly desperate train wreck. It can still
do considerable damage, but the world is already moving on. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Brian S. on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 08:52 PM EST |
Microsoft made their announcement.
The EU made their statement.
Not
the slightest thought about "we have read your announcement, we will issue a
statement when we have had time to study it's implications". Nada.
Zilch.
This must be setting a record for an EU response.
Microsoft: You
have a problem.
Brian S.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: fudnutz on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 09:10 PM EST |
New interoperability pronouncements and actions will limit openness of key
products, block GPL.
REDMOUND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — The Monopoly today announced a set of
broad-sounding promises about its technology and business practices to increase
the impression of openness of its products and to expand its reach through
greater, remunerated interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers,
partners, customers and competitors.
Specifically, Monopoly is promising four new interoperability principles and
corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring
open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for
industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and
the industry, including open source hacker communities, but not any open source
companies..
“These pronouncements appear to be an important step and significant change in
how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Monopoly
chief executive officer Heve Stallmor. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a
lot of information and misinformation with hundreds of thousands of partners
around the world and helped build the Monopoly industry, but today’s
announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater
transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and
choice for our customers and developers throughout the industry by making only
our products more open and by sharing even more of their information to benefit
our technologies.”
According to Oz Rayzie, Monopoly chief software architect, the Monopoly’s
announcement reflects the inevitable significance that individuals and
businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing. since promiscuous
heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, vendor-blind
interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.
We can no longer force our formats and applications on all the enterprises.
“Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Monopoly, to deliver
software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use
their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to
compose entirely new solutions,” said Rayzie. “By increasing the seeming
openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to
innovate, pay us for IP, and deliver value for customers. If we can not lock-in
the customers, we must tax the developers.”
“The principles and actions announced today by Monopoly are a very significant
expansion of its efforts to promote apparent interoperability with our products
and maintain their Monopoly status,” said Winfred Mangler, vice president,
Corporate Research and Technology, Software and Engineering, Seemings. “While
Monopoly has promised considerable progress on interoperability over the past
several years, including working with us on the Interoperability Executive
Customer Council, today’s news take Monopoly’s supposed interoperability
commitment to yet another level.”
“The interoperability promises announced today by Monopoly will benefit the
broader IT community,” said Vomas Togel, head, Perception Management, Ratonis
Pharma, clearly a Monopoly partner. “Ensuring open connections to Monopoly’s
high-volume, expensive products presents the only opportunity for the vast
majority of software developers, who must sign on and contribute to the
Monopoly. This will help foster greater interoperability, opportunity and
choice of us in our marketplace. We look forward to a constructive, structured,
and multilateral dialog to ensure Monopoly-driven evolution of these principles
and actions.”
The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the
following high-volume, high-cost Monopoly products: Blista (including the .FISH
Framework), Monopoly Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, MonopolyOffice 2007, Excheck
Server 2007, and Office LockPoint Server 2007, and future, incompatible versions
of all these products. Highlights and warnings of the specific actions Monopoly
is taking to implement its new interoperability promises are described below.
•
Ensuring open connections to Monopoly’s high-volume, patented products. To
enable connections with third-party products, Monopoly will publish on its Web
site voluminous documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs)
and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other
Monopoly products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or
other fee to access this information. Open access to this documentation will
ensure that only third-party developers can connect to Monopoly’s high-volume,
high-cost products just as Monopoly's other products do. Commercial developers
and distributors must agree to pay the Monopoly tax as usual.
•
As an immediate next step, starting today Monopoly will openly publish on MOPNET
over 30,000 pages of documentation for Monopoly client and server protocols that
were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Monopoly
Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Monopoly Communication
Protocol Program (MCPP). Protocol documentation for additional products, such as
Monopoly Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume, high-cost products
covered by these principles, will be published in the upcoming months. We
promise.
•
Monopoly will indicate on its Web site which protocols are protected by Monopoly
patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and
non-discriminatory terms, at what we consider low, but discriminatory, royalty
rates. To assist those interested in considering a patent license/tax, Microsoft
will make available a list of specific Monopoly patents and patent applications
that cover each protocol. Indeed, protocols are patentable in the United
States.
•
Monopoly must threaten with a covenant not to sue open source developers for
development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols
to keep them in line. These developers will be able to use the documentation for
free to develop products for their homes or Monopoly. Companies that engage in
commercial distribution of these protocol implementations, whether for free or
for a fee, must pay the Monopoly for a patent license, as must enterprises that
obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent
license, even from an independent open source developer. This should eliminate
all software under the GPL unless taxed by Monopoly.
•
Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions. To
increase transparency and promote apparent interoperability, when Monopoly
supports a standard in a high-volume product, it will work with other major
implementers of the standard toward achieving robust, consistent and
inter-operable implementations across a broad range of widely deployed products
remembering at all times that Monopoly has expensive patents on API's and
protocols.
•
Microsoft will document for the development community how it supports such
standards, including those patented Monopoly extensions that affect, and
sometimes destroy, interoperability with other implementations of these
standards. This documentation will be published on Monopoly’s Web site and it
will be accessible without a license, royalty or other fee. Besides delay, these
actions will force third-party developers implementing standards to understand
how a standard must be used in a Monopoly product and provide improved
interoperability only for paying customers. Monopoly will make available a list
of any of its patents that cover any of these extensions, and will make
available USPTO-certified patent licenses on reasonable, non-discriminatory, and
expensive terms.
•
Enhancing Monopoly Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document
formats. To promote user choice among document formats, Monopoly will design new
APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable
developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set
these formats as their default for saving documents.
•
Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable
more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source
technologies and Monopoly products, this initiative will provide resources,
facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and
opportunities for ongoing cooperative development. It will become part of the
Monoply Evangelism Program.
•
Expanding industry outreach and dialog. An ongoing dialog with customers,
developers and open source communities will be created through an online
Interoperability Forum and Fee Collection Channel. In addition, a Document
Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between
widely deployed formats.
The Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, an "advisory"
organization established in 2006 and consisting mainly of chief information and
technology officers from more than 40 companies and government bodies around the
world, will help the Monopoly spread its work under these principles and
actions. The full text of Monopoly’s latest Interoperability Principles, and a
full list of the promises Monopoly is making, can be found on Monopoly's
Interoperability site.
The interoperability principles and promises announced today reflect the
obligatory legal landscape for Monopoly and the IT industry. They are an
apparent, lengthy, reluctant, and necessary step in a new direction for the
Monopoly in its sudden efforts to fulfill the obligations outlined in the
September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI).
“As we said immediately after the CFI decision last September, Monopoly is
obligated to taking only necessary steps to ensure we are in full compliance
with European law,” said Smith Brady, Monopoly general counsel. “Through these
promises we are finally taking responsibility for implementing the principles in
the interoperability portion of the CFI decision across all of Monopoly’s
high-cost, high-volume products. We must make additional promises in the coming
weeks to merely address the remaining portion of the CFI decision, and we are
committed to providing reems of information to the European Commission so it can
continue to evaluate all of these steps.”
About Monopoly
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MOPY”) is the worldwide dominator in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize our
full potential.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 09:17 PM EST |
People will be able to freely customise programs to work with Microsoft
software, but if they sell applications for others to use, Microsoft will
extract fees, according to Mr Ballmer.
"In some sense we are opening up, and yet we retain valuable intellectual
property rights," he said.
"The clear message is that patents will be readily available for the right
fee."
Source:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/22/2169658.htm[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: philc on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 09:43 PM EST |
Notice the context of interoperability is always set as someone else being
permitted to interoperate with Microsoft?
The discussion is NEVER what Microsoft is doing to interoperate with someone
else. Never.
Until recently (still?) Microsoft does everything it can think of to eliminate
or at least reduce interoperability. This has been (is?) done at a technology
level, business level and legal level.
Whenever Microsoft is "forced" to interoperate they proclaim loudly
that they want interoperability and then they do what they can to make it not
work quite right.
For example take Kerberos. They broadly embraced kerberos and then made some
"required" extensions that were patent protected. No Kerberos
implementation could legally interoperate with Microsoft "standard"
Kerberos. Too bad.
For me, Microsoft will have turned the corner on interoperability, when they
deliver MSoffice out of the box (always gets installed as part of the base
installation) with an ODF plugin that meets the actual standard (without
extensions or omissions), and is as fast and easy to use as their other format
filters. Most importantly, it must be easy to set ODF as the default document
format.
Until then its just words.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: mattflaschen on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 10:15 PM EST |
I hope and expect that Microsoft will do what it says. There is certainly a
long way to go, but if they keep this promise, they will be a better company.
The most important and meaningful items are probably the API disclosures,
documentation of "embrace, extend, extinguish behavior", and the
Office plugins for non-MS formats.
However, I of course agree the proof is in the pudding.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 10:26 PM EST |
This is a new start for Microsoft. This isn't really about FOSS,
it's about post Bill Gates Microsoft with a bunch of new
corporate suits promoted from the ranks.
What's the harm of permitting Microsoft to attempt change?
Corporate Microsoft is really trying to improve Microsoft. There
seems to be more things changing than the things remaining
the old way.
Ultimately, the alternative to change from within is change from without
and fewer people would benefit then.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- What if... - Authored by: qu1j0t3 on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 10:39 PM EST
- Sadly Agree - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 03:34 AM EST
- What if Microsoft is putting their best foot forward? - Authored by: PolR on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 10:56 PM EST
- What if Microsoft is putting their best foot forward? - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 11:02 PM EST
- Ooooohhhhhh-kaaayyy... - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 11:04 PM EST
- The Pig Has Yet to Display Its Wings - Authored by: Weeble on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 11:22 PM EST
- Conmen keep promising too - Authored by: Peter Baker on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 12:38 AM EST
- What if Microsoft is putting their best foot forward? - Authored by: talldad on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 03:31 AM EST
- Read up on PJ's earlier post - Authored by: Winter on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 03:48 AM EST
- Best Foot ? - if Microsoft is putting their best foot forward? - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 08:14 AM EST
- Is anyone looking forward? Or are you too comfortable with the status quo? - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, February 23 2008 @ 11:02 AM EST
- What if Microsoft is putting their best foot forward? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 25 2008 @ 07:44 AM EST
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2008 @ 11:17 PM EST |
"We look forward to a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue
to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions."
Its multilaterally provable that any press release containing that sentence is
constructively structured to ensure negative comprehensability and to drive a
stake through the evolution of interoperability principles and actions.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 12:01 AM EST |
Does anyone else look at Ballmer in that clip and see Uncle Fester (The Addams
Family)?
I kept expecting him to stick a light bulb in his mouth and it light up.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: grouch on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 12:25 AM EST |
Anybody else get that phrase running through their head while reading Mr.
Cunningham's statements? (Of course, I'm not implying Mr. Gates ranks with the
Nobel Peace prize-winning Mr. Gorbachev). It seems Microsoft has distorted
truth, hindered progress, and destroyed competition for so long they believe
their own rhetoric and fear standing on a level playing field with
anyone.
How long will Microsoft cower behind its artificial walls? How much
longer will it depend on propaganda and tricks to avoid direct
competition?
The walls are crumbling. Microsoft had best start truly
embracing open standards, extending real interoperability instead of false
promises of it, or Microsoft will be extinguished by their own, self-created
isolationism.
--- -- grouch
"People aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be."
--PJ, May 2007
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: tce on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 12:27 AM EST |
Delay Delay Delay.
Get enough corporations and government agencies using 2007 versions of MS server
products and the lock-in deed is done for another 3-5 years...
Most of the view from Groklaw is from a consumer's perspective. Inside
corporations, MS is working very well at incremental lock-in.
Examples:
Web based everything is good, web base project management is good...everyone
knows MS Project. Here, upgrade to new MS Project 2007. Works best with Office
2007, Exchange 2007, Sharpoint 2007, and those new docx formats that take up
less space.
Need continued email support, want new features for your email? Upgrade to
Exchange 2007...works best with Project, Sharpoint, Office 2007..and Mista.
Need to manage your files and have Sarbanes-Oxley complaint access
controls...try Sharpoint 2007...work best with Office 2007, Project,
Exchange...
See? The standards stuff is great if it works...but its also not the only play
in the play book.
Interop has to include server systems or the corporate, no one ever got fired
for buying micrsoft (yet), landscape is still firmly in MS grasp.
Peter Quinn the post-dirty MS tricks former Massachusetts CIO wanted open
principles compliant formats because he wanted a vendor neutral IT
infrastructure in his server room. It wasn't just the desktop tools, it was the
100's of millions (over multiple years) of IT dollars that should be open to any
vendor (or community) and any implementation technology.
This is a fight for the Enterprise Architecture, not just Office.
Oh, and I bet your federal, state, and local government also use project,
exchange, need to store files, and write documents too....
--- note to MS stockholders ---
Instead of a tight grasp on a Bully-constrained market, MS, if it fully embraced
standards based computing, could help fuel EXPLOSIVE growth in IT. Its share
overall would possibly be smaller, but it could easily be a much bigger
company.
---
---
I wished that some Massachusetts could show that they made good-faith business
investments based on the Good Massachusetts Enterprise Technical Reference Model
(before the "upgrade") and then sued the new CIO for making a change
that went against their own stated principles.
--tce
Delay Delay Delay[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 01:54 AM EST |
Clear words confirm, that Microsoft excludes the GPL. What I don't understand
is their wiggling around before, as there was no need.
The situation isn't bad, though.
1. Microsoft tells us about the patents who are affected. This helps us to work
around and question them.
2. It confirms, that their counterparts were right regarding various
complaints.
cb[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: complex_number on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 02:36 AM EST |
It seems like the actions of Microsoft were very much akin to those of Matthew
Boulton and James Watt at the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Boulton and Watt Timeline
The Watt
Patent on the steam engine held back development for years. They actively tried
to stop others from improving the efficiency of Steam Engines. (Does this sort
of sound familiar?)
This held back progress whilst lining the pockets of
the patent holders. Watt Steam engines were very inefficient.
Advances in
manufacturing which ironically were made possible by the use of patented steam
engines allowed the development of more efficient engines which was stopped by
the very patent that allowed the development. Again, does this not sound
somewhat familiar in respect to Microsoft?
We should all remember what
happened in history when in 1941, Germany invaded Russia and failed to take
Moscow before the advent of the Russian Winter. Napoleon failed over a century
earlier.
Perhaps, someone should give the M$ upper echelons a little history
lesson?
The senst of Deja-vu is stong in the air today. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: JD on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 04:02 AM EST |
Could someone describe it?
Thanks[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 04:04 AM EST |
The effect of ensuring programs are intertwined has been identified as
anti-competitive action. The consequence of this strategy may not be obvious to
users who are not interested in how programs work and as they are in the
majority the Monopoly has been encouraged to continue in its ways.
If informed users, and this I think would describe Groklaw readers, showed the
wider community examples of how bundling is in the long term deleterious then
the effect of the FUD would be mitigated.
The growth of Firefox has been assisted by the demonstrations of how the
Internet Explorer non-compliance with standards has affected users. The market
can then understand why the bundling of the browser with the operating system is
anti-competitive.
Many users are coming to Open Office and simultaneously have Monopoly Office on
their machine as they need it for templates that do not render properly (because
of the use of a propretiary file system). They may have Open Office set as the
default for the generally used file types such as doc and xls so that they can
learn how to use the the program.
Anothe front that could be opened in this information offensive is that
updating Office programs which has to be done for 'security' reasons
automatically steals the file associations so that Monopoly Office opens as a
routine, Open Office when it updates just leaves things as they were.
Firstly this should be publicised as anti-competitive behaviour so that activist
authorities add it to the list of crimes, secondly informed users should use the
evidence of this hijacking to demonstrate why bundling and anti-competitive
actions are not in the public interest. This would also enable those not of a
technical bent to understand why the attempt to foist a proprietary xml file
system on the world is not in the public interest.
The war is fought on many fronts and using the evidence from Groklaw to educate
computer users that the war exists whilst explaining its relevance is something
that all readers can contribute, even the lurkers.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 04:05 AM EST |
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know we don't have software patents in
the EU (unless they are integral to a specific hardware app!). So MS is charging
for what exactly?[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Peter Baker on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 04:28 AM EST |
Sometimes MS' efforts to break someone elses standard has interesting side
effects. It has played the 'Open' game before, but in the case of OpenType things didn't go quite as planned. I guess that's why
they're so keen to keep the GPL out of it this time :-). And no, I'm not
buying it either. SCO as well as MS have demonstrated over the years that what
is said in a press release and what actually happens when the rubber meets the
road are two totally separate things - almost two different realities. Having
said that, if MS wants to put the EU commission on the wrong foot, all it has to
do is abandon OOXML and put its shoulders full under ODF. It actually stands to
make a mighty profit if it went the whole hog - it has the first choice office
suite, which would then support an ALREADY APPROVED standard. I'm of the
opinion that a Linux version would also sell incredibly well, it has a market
mind share that cannot be ignored, and it would demonstrate it was not as
desperately afraid of competition as its present actions appear to make
it. However, that would need some spin to convince the market MS was not
giving up on Windows Vista, so I guess they'll forego the Linux profit (would be
smart to separate the two company parts so at least one stands to survive).
Stupid, but management appears to be stuck in its modus operandi, and that will
be the death of the company now the markets are turning. --- = P =
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 05:03 AM EST |
His language refinement is almost as impressive as his gracious elegance at
displacing furniture.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 05:38 AM EST |
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would
have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable
of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to
dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor
player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no
more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying
nothing.
Enter a Messenger
Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy
story quickly.
Messenger
Gracious my lord,
I should report
that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.
MACBETH
Well, say, sir.
Messenger
As I did stand my watch upon the
hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to
move.
MACBETH
Liar and slave!
Messenger
Let me
endure your wrath, if't be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it
coming;
I say, a moving grove.
Well, just how spookily
prescient was that!--- Regards
Ian Al
When nothing else makes sense, use Linux. [ Reply to This | # ]
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- MacBeth plot flaw - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 09:09 AM EST
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Authored by: RPN on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 06:01 AM EST |
I am no rabid MS hater. I like some of their software. Regulars know I love
their older ergonomic keyboards (well my wrists do anyway).
That said what I'm reading here, especially combined with past behaviour and
with key figures like Ballmer still in place at the top, is close to empty,
meaningless babble. No wonder the reactions round the world so far seem
universally skeptical to plain disbelief that it amounts to anything real.
As far as I am concerned even if they deliver on this it isn't enough. And their
behaviour to date means they have a huge amount to do in order to begin to get
me to believe they will actually deliver even on this limited 'promise'.
I would like to think this is the beginning of change at least. I have huge
doubts that it really is.
Richard.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: zr on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 06:02 AM EST |
If someone has the time, it would be useful to make a feature by feature
comparison among companies with large software patent portfolios e.g. Apple,
IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun so we can see how the promises, licensing etc. stack
up against each other.
---
Don't follow leaders, watch the parkin' meters.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: PolR on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 06:13 AM EST |
I went back to Todd Bishop coverage in Seattle PI. He kept updating it with quotes from
Ballmer for the whole evening. This part is relevant to PJ's
updates.
Update, 9:40 a.m.: What exactly is Microsoft giving up
here from a financial perspective? Ballmer was asked that question during the
news conference in Redmond. His answer:
What we're forgoing
very specifically is trade-secret licensing fees. We are not forgoing patent
licensing fees for commercial use of our patents in any high-volume product,
which I think most pundits would have said was the bigger of the two potential
opportunities. I think that the amount of trade-secret licensing fees we forgo
will be, in the grand scheme of things, in the grand scheme of Microsoft,
relatively minimal. ...
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: TiddlyPom on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 06:28 AM EST |
That's the problem with compulsive liars (or at least distorters of the truth) -
nobody trusts them or believes them.
This is the situation that
Microsoft now finds itself in. They can make all the gestures in the world
about cooperation, interoperability and generally being a good citizen in the
software world but their past actions speak far louder then any words spoken by
their leaders. Even worse for them is that few and fewer Windows users trust them either.
Microsoft don't want to play
fair.
They just want to hang on to power (and by that I mean market
share) by any means that they can fair or otherwise. A good example of this is
their incessent pushing of their own products as 'standards' (e.g. Silverlight).
The only way that they can now compete is to maintain the proprietry lock-in on
web and document formats otherwise why would you need to buy yet another release of
Microsoft Office
Their Linux FUD
page is still online for starters.
Take their recent actions in
China as a good example or their pr
omotion of DRM which has crippled the PC (at least under Windows) as a
multimedia platform (not that I condone piracy in any way - but I do condone fair use).
I certainly don't
trust Microsoft in any way and nor should anybody else (IMHO). They are
simply looking for another way to stab any opponents in the back when an
opportunity arises.
They could convince me more if they shipped
subsequent releases of Microsoft with the full ability to read and write ODF
formats rather than users needing to download a third party product
from Sun.
--- Open Source Software - Unpicking the Microsoft
monopoly piece-by-piece. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 08:18 AM EST |
One of the key principles of being open is that you can sell your software if
you wish. The GPL isn't designed for charity, it's there to protect freedom.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I'm based in the UK and I'm tempted to write something based on their specs and
then sell it just to see if they do come after me.
But then, I'd rather spend my time implementing open specifications than tear my
hair out trying to talk to Exchange Server.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: dyfet on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 08:26 AM EST |
Indeed, on the promise of "openess", they have actually instituted
entirely new restrictions on the use of API's and protocols by third parties,
contrary to past industry practices, including their own. Indeed, a clever bit
of new-speak.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: fredex on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 08:46 AM EST |
"just the latest refinement of the company's
ambivalence"
I'd say that "ambivalence" is far too weak a word.
Something with more overtones of "hostility" would be closer to the truth.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: DannyB on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 11:07 AM EST |
Why is the interoperability doc published in a non interoperable format?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presski
ts/interoperability/docs/MicrosoftInteroperabilityAnnouncement.docx
I'
ll believe Microsoft's interoperability sometime after I see it, and
after a healthy dose of time has passed.
--- The price of freedom is
eternal litigation. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 12:25 PM EST |
Ballmer,
you can take you eyepeeeeee and trade shhhh! secrets and put them well you know
where put them.
the world can get along without your software and you are the ones that will
have to deal with that reality. the industry that you so called help build
would be a lot further along if it wasn't for your wonderful software.
so please say your breath - we know why you did this and when your so called
open xml fails to become an OSI standard you will start to see reality and start
excepting what the ultimate outcome will be and you can tell your stockholders.
I am already and have been for years telling clients to start developing for
open source and forget the tangled web of your eye-peeee - it is smart business
sense which I think you can appreciate.
See we don't need your eye-peee to run our business or our computers and I hope
someday you may realize that before it is too late.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 01:17 PM EST |
Man... You guys play into their trap every time.
They say something, you guys argue about it with them. They say nah nah and
nothing ever changes.
Here's an idea... Ignore microsoft. If they are ignored by a large enough
population of developers they will change. As long as the Free software/Open
source software movement keeps kowtowing to Microsoft nothing changes... They
dont offer any respect back. So why even include them.
People will say. You cant ignore Microsoft, everyone uses their software. They
help create "standards", They're the 800lb gorilla in the room. Thats
crap and exactly what they want to hear. You play into their hands. Because you
acknowledge them.
Give up acknowledging them on such a grand scale and things will change. Im not
talking about Governemnts ignoring them.. but developers, developers,
developers.
Appl developers ignore them pretty well... The same should be true for FOSS
developers.
Anything that does not support just ignoring them is not a reasonable answer and
will be considered a troll... Like all you guys do to everyone else.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 01:18 PM EST |
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskit
s/interoperability/docs/MicrosoftInteroperabilityAnnouncement.docx
- Download it onto your disk
- Rename it as .ZIP, e.g:
MicrosoftInteroperabilityAnnouncement.zip
- Unzip using 7-zip
- Look in the
word directory of the unzipped files
- Rename document.xml as
document.html
- Open with Firefox
This is not a joke. It really
works. You lose the layout, which is in other XML files, but maybe another
Groklaw reader can work out how to reference that - giafly[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: hamstring on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 01:18 PM EST |
It would be interesting to see such a list compiled of all the specs M$ has
broken, or foced changes to by introducing (features) out of normal mode.
- TCP/IP Bastardized by M$ (double ack introduced in NT4 to cripple non-M$
devices).
- HTML Table Bastardized by M$ (border, allaign, etc...)
- XML bastardized by M$
- Kerberos Bastardized by M$ (introduced new specs to ignore non M$ devices)
- LDAP (x.500) Bastardized by M$ (moved base schema, introduced new schema for
passwords breaking compatability with other systems)
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# echo "Mjdsptpgu Svdlt" | tr [b-z] [a-y]
# IANAL and do not like Monopoly[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 03:37 PM EST |
Some people comment their expressions, but how about what they wear?????
I can't help but laugh whenever I see a picture of these MSofties. They all keep
dressing in Bill Gates Uniforms. Soooo nineties! Suit with no tie for everyone.
Power to the empire.
It really looks funny.
Their PR-department desperately needs new people that knows how to make their
management look like they belong to the current era. I know it would only be
cosmetic but you got to start somewhere.
Anyway, Steve, thanks for the classic show. Please throw some more chairs! I
want more free entertainment.
Happy Ubuntu User
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Authored by: Marketer on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 05:56 PM EST |
The Boy Ballmer Who Cried "Wolf"
"Interoperability"
'nuff said.
--- GLENDOWER : I can call
spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR : Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
—I Henry IV [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: grundy on Friday, February 22 2008 @ 06:42 PM EST |
About 25 years ago I recognized Microsoft for what it is, was and will be and
saw damage to the progress of software that they were and still are causing. The
advent of the Macintosh showed me that all was not lost, but did not indicate
that Microsoft had been unmasked at all. When I started reading Groklaw I found
in links and comments that there were a few people that understood but that
mostly we were pissing in the wind. Very slowly the knowledge spread and
accumulated but it did not appear to the public even with the antitrust suits.
The Court of First Instance ruling finally opened the door to a wider audience
but much of the truth remained concealed. Now suddenly the existence of a
problem has been exposed enough that Gates & co. will begin to lose but the
full extent of the harm that Microsoft has done will not be fully exposed for
another decade, if ever.
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Having Moof! in Mind[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: daWabbit on Saturday, February 23 2008 @ 05:09 AM EST |
What ticks me off is that more than one usually responsible news site has called
this "open sourcing" or something to that effect. Journalists, or at
least their editors, should know better and be wary of such free-association
pronouncements.
For the record, no source code has been opened at all. Not one bit. Unless there
is some workable example code somewhere in the documentation, which I doubt.
Jack
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"There ain't no reason I should work this hard when I can live off the chickens
in my neighbor's yard" -Bruno Wolfe[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 25 2008 @ 06:26 AM EST |
On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in
commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a
patent license
Maybe I'm miss-reading it, but is Brad Smith
indicating that companies who use (not distribute, just use) software based on
Microsoft's interop information will require patent licenses?
So it doesn't,
for example, matter that the Samba team give their stuff away only "hobbists"
will be able to use it?[ Reply to This | # ]
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