Microsoft still not in compliance with DOJ interoperability order
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?...
The big picture, to me, is this: Microsoft is *still* not in full compliance with its obligations to provide documentation. That was the issue the DOJ raised two full years ago, and I was teasing Microsoft about it then. Two years later, it's nowhere near as funny.
Maybe the "good ol' Microsoft" never left the room, after all.
I'd encourage you to sift through the report and Groklaw's response. Microsoft feels more like Job Trotter every day: Outwardly smiling to hide a shifty internal countenance. In The Pickwick Papers Trotter eventually comes clean. Will Microsoft?
By the way, I actually do care about the answer, as interoperability with Microsoft is a big deal. I'm just not sure how to accomplish it on fair and level terms, given Microsoft's seeming inability to engage openly on interoperability. If Microsoft treats the US government with this much disdain, how can a business partner possibly hope to be treated any better?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Shocked! I am shocked, I say!!
The DOJ needs to be looking for WMDs. Windows of Mass Debugging.
One problem with specs developed (often after the fact) by the implementors is that there is a great deal of tacit understanding that can only be caught by outside parties.
My take is that this is a mammoth undertaking, it takes great effort ot shift to an interoperability-focused approach, and this is a journey, not an end point. There may never be a time when there is a nice bow tied around everything.
What I find encouraging is that all parties seem to acknowledge the progress that is made and how course-correction is being put in at each iteration.
It is magical to expect that this could be any different. Go look for specifications anywhere in the industry that satisfy the implicit assumption (by Groklaw and you, apparently) that there is some perfect state available. The stable ones that I know of (TCP/IP, say) all had birth and growing pains before settling down. It is natural to expect, even for Microsoft protocols that are a bit long in the tooth (but still evolving).
What's the solution?
Give up.
Justice should sue to have the boot loader opened up so that PC manufacturers can ship boxes with 9 OSes available at boot which the user can buy at his discretion. It could freshen up the PC market a little for consumers.
"Hey, are you a PC dummy with no experience and no legacy applications you have to drag along from Windows or Mac? Boot and keep Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It's free. Does email good and all the Firefox browser is optimized for porno - just the way you like!
"Are you an computer engineer? Try OpenSolaris.
"Are you a paranoid computer user with extremely high security needs. Try Fedora 9 and look up the latest patches. A tighter box would be hard to find.
"Here are Dull Computers, we love 'em all - but let you decide!"
Trust me. MSFT in this scenario would be in compliance and have evangelists on every plane leaving Seattle within hours touting its unparalleled interoperability.
- by hozelda July 6, 2008 7:03 AM PDT
- The open source world is efficient about documentation: you reveal everything about every single cog. You give the source to the sw and to all the tools required to build it, including a full blown kernel. It's difficult to *guarantee* the ability for interop without going this far, and this is from a bunch of people that code in the public and care about clean modular code and interop with each other.
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(8 Comments)Now close off everything: the tools, the OS, the particular body of code in question, all other code that touches any of these pieces.. several generations out. Add that some code is ancient and was not necessarily built by people thinking engineering quality ahead of marketing demands (and these people may not work there any longer). Add that it's extremely beneficial (to the tune of billions of USD per week) for Monopolysoft to hide their tracks. Add that they can hide their tracks all over their platform: a key knob for networking code might be hidden in strange places to thwart reverse engineering.. and those key pieces of code might be a key portion of some protocol and might override what is found in one or more obvious locations. Wash, rinse, and repeat. [http://Keep in mind, only a few Monopolysoft experts would need to know how to descramble this.. or rather, have access to the necessary tools at any point in time.|http://Keep in mind, only a few Monopolysoft experts would need to know how to descramble this.. or rather, have access to the necessary tools at any point in time.] Add that buggy public libraries help them (ie, don't try "too" hard with the public interfaces). Add that to maintain a leaner internal reverse-engineer proof code base that works fairly well with a dual public version that might have all sorts of subtle traps/bugs and "special code" for special competitors and other special occasions requires a lot of magic glue code.
Who really expects that they are going to reveal what they need to reveal in order for interop to work? It's not desireable and maybe not very possible short of dumping all the code to every piece of software used by them (including all code from any "special" tools).
This mess is intentionally meant to be impossible to be resolved adequately short of a full dump of source. [http://I expect any such fake dump that may occur in time to require special Monopoysoft tools in order to get working.|http://I expect any such fake dump that may occur in time to require special Monopoysoft tools in order to get working.]
To get Monopolysoft to really try and behave, forbid them from conducting business until interop is somewhat provably achievable by third parties... or do something similarly "bottom line" impacting. Is six months advanced warning enough time? That's about the only way they may gain the open source religion.
I'd also watch out for the addict to return to the old ways if enough time hadn't been spent in rehab.
I know, I know, I like to paint a GLOOM picture. I don't forget though that if when you try it's difficult to interop without revealing source (even Java, with it's problems, came with much Sun code since the early days) just imagine when you have billions of USD reasons weekly to keep you from doing a good job and/or to spend on doing a "creative" job.. and you know that you likely won't EVER have to reveal the source to anything particularly crafty you come up with.
I wonder how many engineers will eventually have been needed for desensitization work?
Yes, I'm pessimistic. Maybe this is a worst case scenario I describe. Given how much Monopolysoft buys or mimics, I figure that the developers there would need something to keep them busy.. to "justify" their bank account figures. Surely, they have to be innovating somehow. You can't play golf all day everyday and not risk being bumped.