Microsoft Commits to Greater Interoperability

The announcement represents an important strategy shift for Microsoft, one that affects its engineers, the development community and customers, Ozzie said, pointing to new add-in APIs that the company will be designing and supporting for Microsoft Office.

These will enable other developers to support their own document formats, and customers can choose any of those to be their default document format.

Next up was Bob Muglia, senior vice president for server and tools, who said that by the end of June, Microsoft will publish the protocols in Office 2007 that are used to connect to any other Microsoft products, including Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007.

"We will also take a .Net Framework-related protocol and publish that on MSDN as well. We are also announcing a document interoperability initiative to ensure that the documents created by users are fully exchangeable regardless of the tools they are using," he said.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said the announcement covers the sharing of technology information and the licensing of the intellectual property rights relevant to that technology.

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The principles announced provide access at no charge to all of Microsoft's trade secret rights relating to API rights in communications protocols in its high-volume products, and, moving forward, developers will no longer need a trade secret license for these, as had been the case until now.

"Instead, developers will be able to access this information in the same way they access any other page of content on the Web. The principles also provide royalty-free use of the patent rights relating to our APIs in these products, so that any other software that calls on these can do so without any concerns about patent issues," Smith said.

Microsoft is also providing a patent covenant not to sue open-source developers for the development of noncommercial distributions of these protocols, meaning that open-source developers will be able to use the documentation to develop implementations of these protocols without paying for a patent license.

But any company that uses these protocol implementations in commercial distributions will have 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, Smith said.

"This announcement represents an important step in a positive direction to address the obligations outlined in the September 2000 judgment of the European Court of First Instance. ... We are also committed to providing full information to the European Commission and other governments so they can evaluate all of these steps. We look forward to addressing any feedback provided by them in a constructive way," he said.