Microsoft is promising to take steps to improve interoperability with competing technologies. This is hardly the first time Microsoft has made such promises, although in the past the company has usually waited until it received a few pokes from one regulatory agency or another.
Microsoft will make APIs and other information available for 6 "high-volume" products:
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
SQL Server 2008
Office 2007
Exchange Server 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007
Developers will not need to pay royalties or any other fees to access these APIs and communication protocols. Microsoft will be publishing over 30,000 pages of documentation on MSDN that had previously only been available under a trade secret license.
From a more practical level, Microsoft will be designing new APIs for Office 2007 that will make it easier for users to choose between a variety of document formats. The company is also launching an "open source interoperability initiative" that should result in better communication between Microsoft products and open source alternatives like OpenOffice.org.
Lest you should think this latest push is entirely altruistic, Mary Jo Foley points out that ISO is scheduled to discuss the standarization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format next week. If Microsoft doesn't get the ISO standard, the company could lose out on government contracts that require open standards.
Linspire is a Linux distribution designed for Windows users looking to switch to an open source operating system. It comes pre-loaded with software to make the user experience as close to Windows as possible. In fact, Linspire used to bear the name Lindows until the big M filed a little trademark lawsuit.
Microsoft and Linspire plan to work together on the following items:
Linspire, Novell, Microsoft and other companies are working on improved document compatibility so that OpenOffice and Microsoft Office play nicely together.
Linspire will license the RT audio codec from Microsoft to allow voice communication between MSN Messenger and Pidgin.
Linspire will include Windows Media 10 codecs.
Linspire will license Microsoft TrueType fonts.
Windows Live Search will be the default web search engine on Linspire 5.0. Wait, seriously? Is that legal?
A couple of prominent web design gurus have announced a mini conference on "Web Browsers, Standards and Interop" during XTech 2007 in Paris on May 15th. The idea is to get browser vendors, web developers and designers all in the same room to spend a day talking about about how to make life easier for each other and, most importantly for website visitors. Ultimately, the organizers want a return to "the original platform and user agent agnostic vision of the Web."
That may sound like pie in the sky, but the organizers have made a good start: Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software have already committed to attending. Hopefully, the Apple WebKit developers and the KHTML team won't be far behind. Ideally, of course, some standards organizations would be involved, too. And who knows? Since this is all happening in Paris, some members of ISO and ECMA working groups just might stop by.
Personally, I'm excited about this. This conversation is about twelve years overdue. I don't expect to wake up on the morning of May 16th and discover that Trident and Gecko render CSS the same way, but it's a good first step in the right direction.
I'm not sure how this functionality can be found - I pulled the current version of Y! Messenger from the official website, and it doesn't yet have Sametime or LCS listed - maybe I'm just a little impatient...
[Update: I just booted my PC and the options appeared auto-magically...]
Today marks the one-year anniversary of what could have been a great milestone between AOL and Google."'Could have been'?" you ask? Well, one year ago today the two internet giants announced a $1 billion deal that put 5% of Google AOL in AOL Google's pocket. One result they promised was that the companies' instant messaging products, Google Talk and AIM, would be interoperable, allowing Google Talk users to send messages to AIM users and vice versa. And, as Steve Rubel points out, one year ago to the day, that interoperability is nowhere to be found.
Rubel speculates that AOL isn't delivering the advertising revenue that Google hoped for, which has put integrations on hold. "After all, why get married if the courtship is rocky?" he says. "It would only upset users if they re-segregated the IM systems." Whatever the cause, it's been a long wait and I hope they haven't decided to scrap the whole thing.
Microsoft and Novell have announced a collaboration "to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together." The two companies, once upon a time fierce competitors, will be providing improved interoperability and support between Windows and Linux, in particular Novell's SUSE Linux. Microsoft will be recommending SUSE Linux to its enterprise customers and providing coupons for SUSE Enterprise Server support and maintenance. The companies will also be providing each other's customers with patent coverage for their respective products. "Microsoft and Novell are enabling customers to take advantage of each other's products where it makes sense in their enterprise infrastructure," says Novell president and CEO Ron Hovsepian. "We jointly believe that our business and patent agreements make it possible to offer the highest level of interoperability with the assurance that both our companies stand behind these solutions."
According to the press release, Microsoft and Novell are making "three important commitments" to the open source community: "First, Microsoft will work with Novell and actively contribute to several open source software projects, including projects focused on Office file formats and Web services management. Second, Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual noncommercial open source developers. And third, Microsoft is promising not to assert its patents against individual contributors to OpenSUSE.org whose code is included in the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop." That third one is pretty important for small-time developers, but falls short when, say, a for-profit open source company wants to use one of those developers' GPL'd code.
The Microsoft-Novell agreement will be in place until "at least 2012." Does this really "make sense for the open source community," as Novell officials say? Time will tell.
Way back in October 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced they were going to connect their IM networks together. It's been a while since then, with little communication, but you can now join the public beta program(s) that allow you to add people from either network to either client.
You need the latest version of the client - Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger v8 Beta and you'll also need to sign-up for the betas, depending on which client you want to use:
Then, all you need to do is add your buddies to the client you prefer (mine is Yahoo! Messenger) and it'll go through the process of connecting you up. Once connected, you'll be able to see Presence, Status Messages, Nudge and Buzz, send emoticons and even Offline Messages - not too shabby for the initial release. As you can see from the picture, both clients indicate what network you Buddy is using.
Kudos to the Windows Live Messenger team for having a blog that posts more details about the integration (Yahoo! - where's your's??)
Microsoft is at Linuxworld
(in flame retardant suits no doubt), and they've already taken the wraps off their free version of Virtual Server.
So what's left? How about a site on how MS is trying to make all their toys play nice with Linux? Named Port25, the site is supposed to be an open view of what Microsoft is doing
for interoperability between their tools and Linux offerings, without all that FUD... We shall see how devoid of FUD
the site really is when it launches, but as of right now there's still nothing there (3:10pm EST). Bill Hilf, the new
guy in charge of the MS Linux operations, had this to say about the affair: "The reality is that customers run
different technologies. ... We’re still a commercial software company, but in some cases people want to run
Linux, want to run Windows virtualized, want to manage Linux using [Microsoft products]. In those situations, we can
find a way to interoperate." Yeah, that works for me too.
Microsoft is promising to take steps to improve interoperability with competing technologies. This is hardly the first time Microsoft has made such promises, although in the past the company has usually waited until it received a few pokes from one regulatory agency or another.
Microsoft is at Linuxworld
(in flame retardant suits no doubt), and they've already taken the wraps off their 
