Paul Thurrott's take:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/ms_interop_2008.asp

In the end, it doesn't really matter too much if MS opens up the documentation for their "standards". The problem is, their "standards" (file formats, protocols, APIs etc) are generally very poorly documented and have many incompatible versions.

I believe one of the reasons for this is that when designing a dominant proprietary format, you don't want it to be easily reverse-engineered. In some cases, you might want *parts* of it to be easily accessible to third parties, but you still want *your* products to just somehow work better/faster.

This goal leads to a design approach where features are not streamlined, but hidden within layers, and have subtle implementation variations, which easily create incompatibilities when used by third parties without direct knowledge of the underlying design.

So while you probably could, in theory, make a completely compatible and "as-good-as-Microsoft" version of something with Microsoft's documentation, it's going to be an incredibly frustrating journey and the end result isn't going to be very elegant - simply because the specification was never designed with elegance in mind.

As I read the announcement, MS will stop threatening Linux-companies with unspecified patents. They still want the companies to pay for licenses, but now they are going to tell which patents are relevant to which software.

This is a great advantage to the FOSS-world, because they may be able to side-step or challenge some of the patents, and because they won't have to worry about unknown patents.

It is also important to MS's image: people can understand that they want to earn money from their patents; whereas asking companies to pay for a license without saying which patents are involved just seems unfair.

Another sign of the apocalypse. That and Castro retiring. Next thing you know they will start shooting spy satellites out of orbit. Oh, wait...

A few days ago they starting giving Win2K3/VS2K8/etc away for free to students, and now they're playing nice(r) with open source in general. This may be a self-motivated move from MS to keep the market share they have, but it could still end up being good for OSS in general.

Fighting fair is fine. It's the underhanded stuff that makes enemies.

So who was saying that the EU commission was all BS ? Looks like it scared MS to do something.. although what that something is, remains to be seen.

Adi

Nononono MS is NOT going open-source. This is an effort to bring back developers to their proprietary platforms and sell more product, nothing more. Yes, they are getting more "open", but let's not confuse things by calling it open source. Ryu is correct in that this is a move to maintain market share by being THE standard for everyone else to measure up to.

If MS goes opensource then there will be more variant versions to come from third party makers.

In the end MS takes all the profit.

Bill is stepping down, Ray is stepping up, and Microsoft is trying to remain relevant in a very different world. Good luck with that, guys.

I fail to see how this make MS any more or less relevant in today's world.

If anything this is someone getting hit the clue bat to the fact that making your software more accessible can only help your market dominance.