February 25th, 2008
Needless to say, I was shocked and amazed when I saw this statement on Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles this weekend. To summarize, they are committing to make open and public the protocols and APIs for their major products, including Vista, Exchange, SQL Server, and Office. And, wait for this, access to those documents will be free. Is your mind blown yet? How about reading on and seeing that they plan to embrace non-Microsoft standards, and “increase interoperability with open source solutions”? I’m going to take all this at face value and say, “Bravo Microsoft!” I hope it all plays out according to this plan. The IT world will be a much better place if it does.
I think there is an explanation: MS mentions ‘Office’ and these days ISO members will vote on OOXML, the 6000(!) pages of ISO/IEC DIS 29500.
In light of this push into the open source ethics, I guess it makes sense that they are also giving away SQL Server 2008 before the RTM at the launch event. Good news for developers, I guess!
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Nico del Castillo
Microsoft 2008 Joint Launch Team
http://www.microsoft.com/2008jointlaunch