The Open Road

For years, Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge that its patent portfolio is a precursor to interoperability discussions. On Monday, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization.

The deal includes several key components, all related to virtualization:

• Red Hat will validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies.
• Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux server guests to be supported on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
• Once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server operating systems virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

Pretty straightforward, as interoperability should be, and driven by customer demand for Microsoft technologies running alongside Red Hat's, according to Mike Neil, general manager of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft. The top Linux vendor partnered with Microsoft: this is a major win for customers.

Crucially, Red Hat's interoperability deal with Microsoft does not include any patent covenants, the ingredient that torpedoed Novell with the open-source community:

The agreements establish coordinated technical support for Microsoft and Red Hat's mutual customers using server virtualization, and the activities included in these agreements do not require the sharing of IP. Therefore, the agreements do not include any patent or open source licensing rights, and additionally contain no financial clauses, other than industry-standard certification/validation testing fees.

Red Hat has long argued that patent discussions only cloud true interoperability, which is best managed through open source and open standards.

While Red Hat has flirted with such interoperability before by joining with Microsoft in the somewhat toothless Vendor Interop Alliance, this is its first direct interoperability initiative with Microsoft.

What most people don't know is that Red Hat had been discussing interoperability initiatives with Microsoft for a year before Novell and Microsoft tied the knot, but Microsoft ultimately derailed the talks by trying to introduce a covenant not to sue over patents, similar to what it ended up negotiating with Novell. Red Hat rejected this unnecessary inclusion, left the bargaining table, and Microsoft connected with Novell to use interoperability as an excuse to attack open source.

Monday, Red Hat and Microsoft have together demonstrated that interoperability can exist independent of back-room dealings over patents. Microsoft has increasingly been forced to open its stance on patents by the European Commission, anyway, proving Red Hat's resolute stance against patents was the right one. But this announcement suggests that Microsoft is maturing in its views on how to interact with open-source vendors.

It also suggests that Red Hat is maturing in its realization that it must interoperate with the old world of proprietary software even as it attempts to forge a new one of open-source software. Red Hat has long depended upon proprietary software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux's success has derived from its support for Oracle and other proprietary vendors.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft on Monday lowered their guns long enough for customers to win. They did so without encumbering interoperability with patents, which will be critical to ensuring that Microsoft can lower its guard further to welcoming open-source solutions to the Windows fold as a full partner.

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Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center used to make news by partnering with SugarCRM, MySQL, and other commercial open-source projects. Those partnerships seem to have hit a dry spell over the past two years, with little in the way of new announcements, but this doesn't mean that Microsoft's OSTC has been inactive.

Quite the contrary. As its work with the PHP community suggest, the OSTC has actually been in overdrive. In an interview with the PHP Classes blog, Microsoft gives some background as to the motivations behind its work with the scripting language:

Open-source initiatives at Microsoft are important to the open-source community because they give developers greater exposure for their products through access to a broadly adopted platform....The (open-source development and interoperability) initiatives are important because they break down barriers between proprietary and open-source developers allowing them to benefit from each other's work.

All of these points apply to the PHP community. In the past year, we've demonstrated significant performance improvements on Windows, making PHP applications more attractive to Windows customers. The (Internet Information Services) team created the FastCGI module to implement process persistence and better manage non-thread-safe applications. And the SQL Server team has created a PHP driver providing access to database services on Windows.

Microsoft engineers and contractors have made contributions to the PHP run-time engine and to PHP application projects. And communication between Microsoft; commercial open-source-based companies including Zend, OmniTI, and iBuildings; and open-source developers has broadened significantly.

In other words, both the PHP community and Microsoft benefit from this interoperability development.

However, what remains unsaid in this commentary is perhaps Microsoft's biggest benefit by tying into PHP: enhanced relevance in the Web world, in which it's trying to compete. The Web is largely built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) stack today. For Microsoft to win on the Web, it must engage PHP, however much it might want the world to beat a path to its .Net door.

In a separate but related initiative, Microsoft's Silverlight is going head-to-head with Adobe Systems' Flash with Web design developers, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

But that's only part of the Web battle. Web scripting languages like PHP have been heavily influential in developing the Web, and today, PHP and its clan are largely hardwired for MySQL, not Microsoft's SQL Server.

Microsoft's OSTC is helping change this by engaging the PHP community. In discussions with various Microsoft executives, I've heard that this work is not fully appreciated (yet) within Microsoft, but I suspect that Microsoft will come to significantly appreciate the work that its OSTC has been doing for it, both within the PHP community and in other open-source communities.

John Donne wrote that "no man is an island, entire of itself," and the same holds true for Microsoft. It can no longer afford to be an isolated, monolithic development ecosystem, especially as it races to catch up with the competition on the Web.

For all its endless talk about really, really wanting to open up its documentation to enable interoperability with its products, Microsoft is still dragging its feet on delivery of this documentation, according to a US judge as reported by Ars Technica yesterday.

Today saw Kollar-Kotelly hold the latest hearing on the status of the consent agreements, and a number of reports suggest that there still seem to be problems there (no legal documents arising from the hearing have been filed yet). Although the Dow Jones Newswire seems to think everything is fine, other reports seem to contradict this.

Reuters, however, indicates that the Judge was a bit annoyed that Microsoft filed a document that suggested it viewed itself as being in full compliance with the agreement, given that the documentation wasn't ready. Referring to the 2009 date for the lifting of the consent agreement, she said, "That's not going to happen unless these things get done."

As a platform company, interoperability should help Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft isn't simply a platform company anymore. It's an applications company, too. This hybrid problem can plague any big software company that has ambitions to creep into other fiefdoms: witness Oracle's move into the hardware appliance market, for example.

All that said, Microsoft has been making some headway on its documentation. It was thanks to the EU forcing open Microsoft's documentation that my own company, Alfresco, was able to support the SharePoint protocol to facilitate interoperability with Microsoft Office. I'm sure other companies are enjoying similar benefits.

However, it's frustrating that it has taken so long, and so much government pressure just to get Microsoft to do what is right for its platform business. Yes, interoperability may crimp Microsoft's plans for its applications business. Even if so, it's time for Microsoft to stop talking a big interoperability game and then choosing to ride the bench.

In an attempt to get its Office 2007 program on the desktops of U.K. youth, The Register reports that Microsoft is saying all the right things to the U.K. government in its attempt to placate the European Commission over interoperability with open file formats. Everything, that is, except how it intends to make its software more interoperable

Now Microsoft has stepped in to appease some of the education tech body's grumbles by announcing a new Open Licensing Programme (OLP) for government that will launch at the start of next month.

The company said the OLP offered "a new way for public sector organisations to purchase software from Microsoft resellers" who will sell MS products at a discounted rate.

However, while offering Microsoft products with a reduced price tag to the public sector might be viewed by some as a move in the right direction, the firm didn't reveal how Office 2007 might be made more interoperable with other doc formats.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" seems to be the strategy. Discounts are nice, but discounts only make it cheaper to fall into lock-in. The Open Source Consortium's president, Mark Taylor, says it well: "Schools can now choose between long-term software freedom or a short-term discount on the next lock-in play."

Fortunately, groups like Becta, which brought the original complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission, are unlikely to fall asleep at the wheel.

Microsoft will no doubt eventually be forced into offering interoperability alongside its discounts. As noted on InfoWorld, Microsoft has even made some strides toward a more peaceful future with open source, the kissing cousin to open standards.

It's just too bad that so much time must be wasted along the way.

Microsoft is about to embark on a new advertising campaign designed to make people love it again, and not merely endure it. With Apple showing that people will pay for beautiful, functional, and fun technology, Microsoft is playing catch-up with comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

There is rich irony in Microsoft opting for a comedian to help pitch its products, but I won't go there.

No, I'm more interested by its marketing theme: "Windows, Not Walls." Mary Jo Foley has taken a stab at deciphering the intent of the message.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, people close to Microsoft's campaign suggest that "the point is to stress breaking down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting." If this is correct, let me suggest an alternative tagline for a similar message:

Build bridges, not toll roads.

Through closed standards, aggressive patent FUD, and proprietary Office file formats and SharePoint repository, Microsoft has effectively declared war on the very idea of "breaking down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting"...unless you happen to be using 100 percent of Microsoft's software to do the job.

One of the biggest trends to knock down barriers to true interoperability has been open source and the open standards it espouses, yet Microsoft has sought to impose a patent toll on open source. For those interested in connecting with Microsoft's technology, Microsoft is glad to oblige, but only on its terms, with Microsoft firmly in control. Open source, however, believes in a very different kind of interoperability.

Microsoft needs to tear down its Berlin Wall between open source and its own proprietary technology if it truly wants to "break down barriers." Microsoft can't talk out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand it seeks to control and maintain its monopoly power through closed tolls, yet on the other it talks about breaking down barriers. It can't have it both ways.

This isn't about open source versus proprietary software. IBM and others have shown that one can embrace open source without giving up proprietary software. No, it's about a closed, destructive agenda that refuses to acknowledge open source on equal terms, and hence engages in the most constricted of ways.

Microsoft can do better. Whether it wants to, however, is a very different matter.

"Follow the money" was Deepthroat's suggestion to journalist investigators in the Watergate scandal. Several decades later, that same advice helps to unravel the mystery of why Microsoft keeps upping its investment in Novell's SUSE Linux certificates...while simultaneously denouncing Linux for violating its intellectual property and generally wishing that Linux would cease to exist.

As context, Microsoft and Novell today announced an expansion of their 2006 interoperability agreement, which included a controversial covenant not to sue over patent infringement. "The investment focuses on enhanced programs from Novell to provide tools, support, training and resources for customers seeking an enterprise-class Linux platform and specifically, the optimal interoperability solution between Microsoft Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server," writes Fox Business.

But it's not the interoperability provisions that anyone is going to be talking about. It's the $100 million in additional SUSE Linux certificates that Microsoft is buying. I know from friends at Novell that customers are indeed lapping these up, but not for the reasons publicly stated (patent protection (Microsoft) and interoperability (Novell). No, the primary reason is that they are cheap.

With this underwriting of Linux by Microsoft, Novell is able to sell its Linux software at highly advantageous pricing. As Novell's Linux business has grown, it has been able to stand more and more on its own and discount less, but to follow Deepthroat's counsel, you really need to ask why Microsoft would want this.

How do the two companies benefit? As eWeek's Joe Wilcox suggests:

Leave it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to distort the definition of "open standard" in order to serve the interests of Microsoft and its other members. The BSA doesn't like the European Commission's increasing interest in open source and open standards to deliver software interoperability.

As the BSA's European software policy director declared,

They [the European Commission] define open standards inconsistent with the common understanding of the term in what we believe is a dogmatic approach. It fails to recognise that almost all standards that help interoperability and that governments should indeed use to promote the very objectives of the EIF do have intellectual property.

This is a clever shift of the argument, trying to preserve the status quo while it's clear that the European Commission is looking forward to improve interoperability, rather than backward to defend the type of interoperability we've had for far too long. You know, the kind where everyone is forced to interoperate with Microsoft because it controls 95 percent of a market, and can only integrate with closed, poorly documented APIs and protocols.

The European Commission is increasingly realizing that open standards without safeguards like open source are a hollow promise. Interoperability, in turn, depends on such open standards, as Red Hat, for one, has long argued:

Microsoft has been slow in complying with the US Department of Justice's 2001 order for Microsoft to provide documentation on how its programs interoperate, but it's now promising to have them delivered by March 2009.

Whatever. It has taken Microsoft many years and it still can't - or, rather, won't - provide documentation that it must already have internally?

Come on, Microsoft! Many software vendors would like to see their applications - open source and otherwise - work even better on Windows or with Office. This intransigence doesn't just hurt you. It hurts your would-be partners. It hurts your customers. Start acting like a grown-up that can share the sandbox.

260 employees and several years later, Microsoft still can't manage to document its software to comply with a United States Department of Justice order, as detailed in a progress (?) report but more comprehensively covered on Groklaw. Groklaw writes:

It appears from that record that no matter what Microsoft tries or how diligently they work at it or how many employees they assign to this noble task of providing interoperability documentation, it just can't be done. Microsoft is like Sisyphus of old, working every day with all its might to get that boulder to the top of the hill, only to see it fall back down again, throughout eternity. Of course, you might point out that his troubles are a myth. Microsoft's are real. You think?...

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