The Twenty Fourth Yicrosoft Directory day ..
Microsoft has declared a truce with the open source community.
The Redmond giant said that they would make available, for no cost, the APIs for Office and Windows Server initially, and eventually the APIs for Windows Vista, the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The one gotcha attached to the arrangement is that Microsoft has pledged not to sue open source developers working on non-commerical software -- the moment money becomes involved, Microsoft patents and royalities kick in.
The move has not received universal acclaim with the European Commission expressing doubt over whether Microsoft would actually do what it stated it would and saying that the announcement would not affect its antitrust investigations against the software giant.
"The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability," read the statement. "Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability."
It's been a big week for Microsoft as it has been fined a record 899 million euros by the Commission for defying sanctions imposed on the company for abusing its dominant position in the software market. Microsoft also announced students would be able to get their hands on free copies of Microsoft's Visual Studio, Server 2003 Standard Edition, Expression Studio, XNA studio for developing Xbox 360 software and SQL Server 2005.
The free developer tools announcement was discussed by Bill Gates in a video interview.
28.02.2008. 09:53
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