By J. Nicholas HooverInformationWeek
Ramji: There are things that are really easy, because Microsoft built its business in the '90's on open APIs, and publishing SDKs, and publishing device drivers, and one of the reasons that I was personally attracted to the platform as a developer was that I could see everything I needed, I could understand the error codes and I could write the software that I needed to get done for the ISVs that I worked in.
When you look at what's happened in the SDK, part of the value at the time for developers was, 'Hey, it just works and I understand how to interact with it.' Now, sample kits, codes that work against the SDK or the SDK itself is a great place to open the source code so that people can do more robust debugging, they can take ownership of it, they can modify it. In general, that's a great place to start.
When we look at our Solution Accelerators, our patterns and practices, ways to build higher-level functionality on top of the Microsoft stack, we find that there's a pretty rich environment. On CodePlex if you look at the patterns and practices team, it developed a lot of very powerful functionality, for example the enterprise library, and other horizontal and vertical building blocks of larger solutions. There's no arbitrary limit, so I don't want to set your mind in thinking that there are places we are excluding. We've taken entire products like [e-learning suite] Class Server into a Shared Source model, and we've started to move the boundary of transparency for that entire product.
InformationWeek: The EU's top anti-trust representative has said that the release of thousands of pages of protocol documentation doesn't necessarily equate to a change in business practices. Why should I look at that release as part of something larger, rather than a one-off result of regulator demands?
Robertson: It is in fact part of the changing business practices. Just look at the protocols. The first release of protocol specifications relates to client-server protocols and workgroup-server protocols. The commitment made in the interoperability principles has to do with six high volume products that go beyond Windows Client, Windows Server to SharePoint, SQL, Exchange, and Office. Microsoft's step here was to make available documentation that was previously available only under a license and through the payment of a royalty. Now, we have a situation where all of the information and all of the specification documentation is available for anyone with a browser without any need to sign a license or payment of a royalty. That's a huge step. We also committed to developing a patent map on each of the protocols so that people who want that documentation can see exactly where we have technology, and we've committed to making that available on very low royalty rate. Of course, we've extended the pledge not to assert patents against open source development in non-commercial distributions. This is just one of the principles.
Ramji: One really important point that I wasn't able to respond to, but I will just briefly now, is the distinction between popular perception and the reactions of the leaders of various open source communities. In the personal, one on one interactions I've had with the leaders of various communities, including Apache, Mozilla, PHP, and Linux, the leadership conversations say wow, this is significant, this is really good news, I'm optimistic. Where the patent discussion has come up, people have said we can agree to disagree about how intellectual property gets run in software but the transparency that you're offering is commendable, and that's a significant step forward. My personal day-to-day experience is significantly more positive than what I have observed in some of the trade publications.
InformationWeek: If I call Red Hat, will I get that response?
Ramji: If you talk to a commercial competitor, you're not talking about a community, you're talking about a commercial agenda, and a specific marketing differentiation approach and a whole messaging plan. When you talk to community leaders, you are typically talking to dedicated technologists who care that working, great technology gets built. I think that that's where there's a real distinction in the interaction.
Microsoft as of late has been championing what it says is the cause of openness. From releasing gobs of protocol documentation and using open source in a management product to increasingly speaking at open source conventions and signing patent cross-licensing deals with other software vendors, the company has plenty of moves to point toward. Customers, competitors and critics meanwhile remain skeptical.
In preparation for the magazine's May 19 lead feature story on whether Microsoft is indeed becoming a more open company, InformationWeek interviewed two Microsoft executives key to the company's understanding of the open source business models and community as well as interoperability and industry standards.
InformationWeek: How do you approach people to work out cross-licensing or interoperability deals between Microsoft and the open source community? Take your recent deal with the Samba folks, for example.
Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy for Microsoft: About a year ago, I began talking with Jeremy Allison and the Samba team. I attended the SambaXP Conference in Goettingen, Germany in late April (Microsoft went there again this year). Sitting down and having frank, engineer to engineer conversations around the table about what their goals were, what kind of information they'd like to get, what kind of things they'd like to see from Microsoft led us as a company to see that we can have these conversations, we can take down these lists of requests, we can go back and then deliver on those lists. Specifically with the Samba team that list ranged from MSDN licenses for some of their unpaid developers who needed development tools all the way to sending their engineers to their CIFS Conference at Google in September of 2007.
As we delivered on those different requests that they had, they saw that we were present in the conversation, we were good for our commitments, and that let us have another conversation with them in October about what a form of the trade secret copyright agreement would look like for the protocols they were interested in that would really work for their developers and their development model. Fundamentally, the technical engineering conversations are where all of these things start, whether you're looking at Java or PHP or Samba or Linux or MySQL. The difference between the technologists sitting around the table is actually not very big. We all care about the same things: we want users to get great software, we want the software to work well together.
InformationWeek: How much of this recent public push towards "openness" is about the realities of the Web and of the emergence of open source as a viable model versus something else? The people that you need to convince, they're going to be skeptical.
Tom Robertson, Microsoft's general manager of standards and interoperability: The company's been looking at the issue of interoperability for a long time, and I think over the last three-plus years, the effort has really redoubled because there's a sense of a changing marketplace. More and more customers are saying, 'We've got heterogeneous systems and we expect vendors to work together, regardless of their business model or how the development of their software took place.' We have people who have an always on, always connected expectation and they want to make sure that their software, their systems, the components of their systems work well together, and that their systems work well with or communicate with other systems that are out on the Web or the lines. Our customers are telling us that they want us to look at this issue more and focus our efforts across the company in an expanded way. Regulators are also interested in this.
Ramji: I think that frame is really helpful in how we look at the market, and there are two dimensions. There is the dimension of interoperability, which I think comes based on recognizing that there are a lot of other technologies out there that we really need to work well with. The other dimension is open source, where we've gotten a much more sophisticated understanding of what open source is. It can mean a development model, a sales and marketing model, a licensing model, a collaboration model; it can also get into conversations about what is open participation. There's a lot of open source outreach to run open source on Windows. We can be specific and concrete about where we compete with specific technologies offered by commercial organizations like Red Hat's Enterprise Linux or like Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
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