Huddled Masses

Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, passed down a new set of rules for Microsoft to live by this week, and they’re pretty spectacular. Microsoft’s Windows Principles: Twleve Tenets to Promote Competition smells a lot like a public relations move, with much of the content being essentially promises to continue living up to their anti-trust settlement; but there is also an apparent underlying commitment to openness and even some accountability that software developers have been waiting for a long time! There’s also some missing pieces. [dontgetit]

I really want to comment on this intelligently, even though it’s hard to resist just picking every tenet apart and complaining about them, so I’m going to skip right over the first 5 points which are basically promises to let you use (and sell) whatever software you like with Windows, and to not rig prices against PC manufacturers that choose to also sell Linux or Mac PCs… [rolleyes]

Opportunities for Developers

There’s a nice basic premise here, but the details are ridiculously weak.

Going forward, Microsoft will ensure that all the interfaces within Windows called by any other Microsoft product, such as the Microsoft Office system or Windows Livea??, will be disclosed for use by the developer community generally. That means that anything that Microsofta??s products can do in terms of how they plug into Windows, competing products will be able to do as well.

This quote is from Tenet 6, APIs. It’s a really nice commitement (even though it’s just a pledge to continue to live up to the antitrust settlement after it’s ruling expires), but I would have liked to see that read: “all interfaces within any Microsoft product called by any other Microsoft product” ...

Point 7 is a pledge to keep “Windows Live” seperate from “Windows” (why’d they name it that, then?), but I’d be more impressed if instead of being able to “choose WIndows with or without Windows Live”, I could “choose Windows Live, with or without Windows.” (ok, maybe that’s asking a bit too much [pondering]). And as for Point 8, it scares me that they even thought to mention that they’re not going to have Windows charge you for accessing web sites. What does this stuff have to do with “Opportunities for Developers” anyway? Are they really saying “please consider this your ‘opportunity’ to compete with the software and services being offered by the biggest monopoly ever created”? [lol]

Interoperability for Users

The last three points are based on the idea that Windows will interoperate with other OS’s… but they start out in a way that makes me quite unhappy: “Microsoft will make available, on commercially reasonable terms, all of the communications protocols … “ and they continue to say that “Microsoft will generally license patents on its operating system inventions … on fair and reasonable terms …”

It’s great that their willing to license their OS patents and communication protocols, but as someone who ocassionally finds use in non-Microsoft Operating Systems, I’d be much happier if they promised to make all communication protocols completely open and free, and in the future, instead of trying to patent them, to release to the public domain any “inventions” that sound like this: “the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices.” (Read More [protest]) Honestly, I’m mostly opposed to the current format of software patents, period, so I’d like to see Microsoft pushing Congress to shorten the term of software or “process” patents to something like 5 or 10 years, as well as strengthening the “non obvious” clause in current patent law … but I’m not crazy enough to expect that.

The last point, that Microsoft will support industry standards in Windows is more like what we were hoping to see, but coming after that bit about licensing protocols on “commercially reasonable terms,” this is such a weak, generic statement, that it’s really easy to miss. Ah well. If you want to read more rants about this, [geek] check out the slashdot article...

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Tenets, Openness, Software, Windows, Patents

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