21st February 2008, 4:16pm
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| Forum SuperMod SuperMod
Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Liverpool
Posts: 15,514
| Re: Microsoft's "Major Announcement"
More info... Quote:
Microsoft has promised to make sweeping changes to the way it designs and shares information about its products.
In a clear acknowledgment of the growing importance of open-source software Microsoft has promised to introduce a number of measures including:- The publication of APIs for "all high-volume" products
- Sharing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret licence
- Indicating which of its protocols are covered by patents, and promising not to sue open-source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols
- To create new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to enable developers to plug-in additional document formats, and set these as their default format in Office 2007
"These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies," cliams Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer in a pre-prepared statement.
"For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today's announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency.
"Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies."
Microsoft is holding a press conference on the announcement shortly. We'll update you with the details.
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