Once with the idea of collaborating with other software makers, Microsoft changed its business practices. It included, among the future partners, the other software providers and the open-source communities in the same time. More than this, the company’s executives elaborated new strategies and announced a proper documentation, in order to help these partnerships.
The open-source developers who create noncommercial software based on Microsoft's protocols will not be sued, due to the Microsoft’s requirement.Over the past three years, the discussions with the open-source developers, the previous commitments to interoperability and the standards support, are now fructified into this set of measurers.
Microsoft’s "high-volume products" will include the documentation for the application programming interfaces and communications protocols and the information will be available for the developers without paying a fortune or for license.
The beginning of the collaboration will be represented by the published protocols for communicating with Windows Server. What first was obtainable only under a trade secret license, now is free. The company also announced that the protocols for interoperability with Office 2007 will be the next distributed.
Windows Vista, the .Net Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 are the future beneficiaries of the pledge, according to Microsoft.
The executive’s opinion is that, besides the fact these steps are made in concordance with the obligations dictated by the European Court of First Instance in September, in a marketplace that increasingly values interconnected systems, Microsoft needs to be competitive and these actions will help more than ever.
The words spoken by the Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer strengthen all those written below: "In a more connected, services-oriented world...one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire".
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