In a move to appease European antitrust officials, Microsoft on Thursday promised to open its products. It said its four-pronged approach would ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards, and improve engagement with customers and the industry, including open-source communities.
It’s that last item, open-source communities, that has the tech world talking, but it’s not all pro-Microsoft. Open-source heavy hitters like Linux vendor Red Hat are viewing the announcement with skepticism.
Red Hat’s Response
According to Michael Cunningham, executive vice president and general counsel for Red Hat, three Microsoft commitments would show the company really means what it says: a commitment to open standards, interoperability with open source, and competition on a level playing field.
“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,” Cunningham said. “So it is hardly surprising to see even Microsoft state 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 wants Microsoft to embrace the cross-platform industry standard for document processing, OpenDocument format, at the International Standards Organization’s meeting next week in Geneva. The Linux giant also wants Microsoft to extend its Open Specification Promise to all the interoperability information it says will be made available. Red Hat also noted that Microsoft’s announcement 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 ‘noncommercial’ implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous,” he charged. “The only hope for reintroducing competition to the monopoly markets Microsoft now controls –…