The words Microsoft and Open Source usually leave a bad taste in my mouth after I say them in the same sentence. Hopefully that will change with Ray Ozzie’s new Microsoft pledge:
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.
They are also releasing 30,000 pages of documentation related to Microsoft technology, that would allow open source developers to make their software more interoperable with MS programs.
These are obviously baby steps towards being more open, but still not enough. In their defense, they’ve got to start somewhere.
(Via TechCrunch.)
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