Microsoft and openness

On 2008-02-21 Microsoft said in a media release:

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.

Having a life, it has been some time before I've been able to read the documents. I have now done so, and compared them to what was already required of Microsoft by the European Union. I can now see why the EU was sceptical.

Unlike the EU settlement, this Microsoft documentation release is not compatible with the GNU General Public License as the patent license is not transferrable.

Microsoft are supplying only a small amount of documentation in addition to that which is available under better terms via the EU process. The most interesting of these is documentation of the Microsoft Exchange protocols.

The API promised for Office 2007 to allow document format plugins is new. The proof of this will be in the pudding. In one sense it's a clever way of addressing support for OpenDocument, as Microsoft need not then supply ODF support itself. The current official API is just dreadful -- basically you write a converter to and from Microsoft's rather limited Rich Text Format -- so something better is welcome.

All in all, the cynics who said this was just a clever spin of what the EU were making Microsoft do anyway are in-the-main right. Those cynics also point to the timing -- immediately prior to the DIS29500 Ballot Resolution Meeting.