Monday September 20, 2004 The gift that wounds?
Over the weekend I see that Microsoft posted news of their decision to allow governments to educate themselves from some of the source code to Office in the GSP scheme - that's one of the deviously-named Shared Source Programs. While they are to be welcomed for realising that there is demand for an open source office productivity suite, this isn't the way to meet the demand. More than that, the things unsaid in the press release (and left unasked by the mediocre reporting of that release) are the ones that are most interesting.
Why is this release being made now, this week? Well, it's because this week is the week of the growing OpenOffice.org annual conference in Berlin - maybe they're worried because I am delivering the opening keynote? Microsoft know it's happening - they are an exhibitor and will doubtless have other staff there. Of course, they don't mention it, but it's clearly the motivation for the timing.
Why are they taking this step? It's an attempt to defuse the growing pressure they are facing to end their proprietary misbehaviour with Office. In particular, the European Union has, as part of a drive to file format standardisation, asked them to join in with the OASIS Open Office XML Formats Technical Committee, a request they have still to my knowledge failed even to respond to, least of all fulfil.
How does it help? I'm not sure it really does. They are confusing two objectives and hoping you'll be confused into treating the important questions as answered and thinking they are open or generous or something. I have written two essays on this, but here's a synopsis:
- "Open Source" makes developers free. It's about creating a "commons" in which developers can innovate and implement without concerns about code ownership. The existence of the commons allows any developer to participate freely. Despite names that sound related and small projects that garnish their opposition, Microsoft vigorously opposes this approach to development and this announcement is more to do with preventing than facilitating open source.
- "Open Standards" makes deployers free. They're about defining the means for interoperability, and that's done by documenting the format that's "on the wire" comprehensively and unambigously. They've not done this and the new move merely allows a limited group of people to laboriously reverse-engineer what's missing (perhaps, if it's in the 90% of code made available) and then do nothing useful with their knowledge.
This is neither fish nor fowl and helps almost no-one.
Does this mitigate the risk of litigation? Doesn't seem to, although IANAL. Even in the midst of apparent peace-making with Sun, Microsoft went to the extreme of explicitly saying they had the right to immediately sue for use of IP in "Open Office" (Sun included), and all this move seems to do is further pollute the freedom to clean-room engineer the file format by open source community members by exposing them to proprietary code.
What would have been more useful would have been publishing full specs for the Office file formats (there's no clue in the current partial publication on how to handle embedded objects, for example - they sit in the XML just as encrypted blobs rather than namespace references). As it is people will have to reverse-engineer that information from the source, and because they are presumably doing so under strict licensing terms they won't be able to do anything useful with the information they learn, like contribute the knowledge to an open source project.
So this could be a great first step if it's a move towards true openness and interoperability. Instead, it seems to me suspiciously like a move to stifle one of the main sources of support for the unmentioned OpenOffice.org and pollute the experts who read the code so that they can't contribute to that project. This is in character; rather than listening to their government customers, Microsoft is lobbying against open source. What would make a difference to defuse this scepticism at this stage is what Tim suggests:
Of course, that concern would vanish if Microsoft were to state that they won’t use intellectual-property litigation as a competitive weapon against other office-software packages. Simple enough. How about it?
A formal, enforceable statement we can all rely upon is required. The ball is in their court.
