Microsoft has said it would be supporting open
source development as part of its interoperability
initiative.
Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, said, "Today's
action will enable greater transparency and interoperability. Our
success depends on providing customers and partners with
choice."
As part of its interoperability initiative, Microsoft has also
launched the
Open Source Interoperability Initiative. The company's strategy
is to promote and enable more interoperability between commercial
and community-based open source technologies. Microsoft said it
would provide resources, facilities and events, including labs,
plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing
co-operative development.
Ballmer said, "We will document all of the application
programming interfaces of all the communications protocols used by
Microsoft products and developers would not need to take a licence
"
He also said Microsoft today has published 30,000 pages of
documentation of Windows protocols freely available on the
Microsoft website.
One of the key aims is to support the needs of end-users who
require longevity of their document formats. Microsoft chief
software architect Ozzie said document preservation has become
vital for users.
Bob Muglia, senior vice-president of server and tools said, "We
have been working closely with the open source community. The
community behind Samba has worked with us interoperability.
"By June we will publish the protocols in Office 2007 that are
used to connect to Exchange and SharePoint 2007."
