Nice Microsoft

Posted Mar 30, 2009 1:00 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Nice Microsoft by hozelda
Parent article: Microsoft: Judge us by our deeds on open source (The Register)

When hasn't Microsoft given specs out?

Very often. Microsoft has given specs to what they have judged helped them keep their monopolies. They have withheld specs (or published them under painful terms) to what would have helped the competition break those monopolies. Examples of missing specs abound, but to name a few: the whole SMB specification (network protocol), file format specification for the whole Office suite or video formats. Not to speak of "secret" system hooks reportedly used by Office that were not available to external developers (or at least with a significant delay).

Now video formats are perhaps not the most important piece of information, but network interoperability and Office suite file formats I would consider to be essential in an interconnected world. Silly me.

Nice Microsoft

Posted Mar 30, 2009 1:56 UTC (Mon) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

Yes, I agree.

Nice Microsoft

Posted Mar 30, 2009 2:23 UTC (Mon) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

They can adjust their third-party interface implementations on the fly to suit their strategies.

PHP leadership would help themselves more by not helping out Microsoft.

When enough interesting things run exclusively (preferably) or significantly better on Linux, using protocols Microsoft has neglected, customers will more easily lose their blind devotion and patience with Microsoft and truly bake Linux into their future plans. First step being to stop buying into Microsoft's "latest and greatest", resulting in a serious hit to Microsoft revenues.

Customers have already started making serious preparations to alternatives. Can Microsoft embrace FOSS enough to turn back the tide?

Nice Microsoft

Posted Mar 30, 2009 3:49 UTC (Mon) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

Nice Microsoft

Posted Mar 30, 2009 10:50 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The two big examples (SMB, Office) aren't /entirely/ true.

In both cases I have documents written by Microsoft employees on the company dime. Microsoft did document SMB / CIFS quite extensively over the years in Internet RFCs, and they produced various documents on the Office file formats (particularly XLS).

However, you're right to the extent that these documents were deliberately pitched to support ISVs who saw Microsoft's offering as a platform, rather than to make it possible to compete on a level playing field. You can't use Microsoft's documentation to write an XLS file with all the features supported by Microsoft Excel, and you can't use their SMB / CIFS documentation to support all the features Microsoft's Server products offered to its Client operating systems. In both cases you will need to do some reverse engineering.