Microsoft Cuddles up to Open Source

One major factor in Microsoft's sidling up to open source is the PHP script language, according to Andreas Urban, their manager of open source strategy in Germany. PHP is becoming increasingly more prevalent in Microsoft products. So the Redmond giant put Pierre Joye as head of PHP development in an interface role with the community.

Evidence seems to show that Redmond is putting all its effort into being as transparent as possible with its in-house products. It currently provides more than 50,000 white papers free of charge describing the interfaces to some of their products, notably the Exchange Server and MS SQL. Licensing is required only for patent-protected interfaces in commercial products.

Andreas Urban, manager of open source strategy, and Sandra Schaefer, manager of interoperability strategy, at Microsoft.

Opening up their interfaces wasn't so much inspired by a commitment to interoperability in the software universe, as Microsoft likes to claim, than to fulfill the obligations of a European Union lawsuit. Microsoft was to fork over 1.6 billion dollars in an antitrust settlement, but ended up paying $899 million.

Another model of transparency that Microsoft likes to present is OOXML, the open documentation standard, according to Sandra Schaefer, manager of interoperability strategy at Microsoft. When asked why a certain specification ran over 6,500 pages with some facts still missing, she remained contrite. The reason for Microsoft's working its own standard, she claims, is that not all functions of the Office suite can be displayed using the ODF format. That's only half the truth, say the European Union and other government agencies who have held Microsoft responsible for license infractions that could have cost them some market share in favor of OpenOffice. Nonetheless, Schaefer reiterated that MS Office 2007 SP2 will include a native implementation of ODF 1.1 that should allow users to open and save documents in that format.