Many of us are waiting for a Microsoft press conference to start at 8.30am Redmond time (20 minutes from now) with all the big hitters: Ballmer, Ozzie, Bob Muglia and legal eagle Brad Smith. (They got our attention by promising not to talk about Yahoo.) Oddly enough, someone at Microsoft is even more on the ball and has posted the press release already.
So (barring people who type faster than me), I can perhaps exclusively reveal that:
To enhance connections with third-party products, Microsoft will publish on its Web site documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other Microsoft products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information. Open access to this documentation will ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft's high-volume products just as Microsoft's other products do.
Also:
Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.
The products covered are: "Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products."
This seems to go much further than even the European Commission demanded. It will be interesting to see if Neelie Kroes still wants to be a monkey on Steve Ballmer's back ... but I suspect she does.
At least the guys at Samba should be pleased. It's a win for them.
