Microsoft has given programmers the free use of 35 standards with a so-called ‘Open Specification Promise’ committed. The company promises it will not prosecute anyone who uses patented Microsoft technology that is “necessary for implementation” of the standards. It is remarkable that various ‘released’ standards, such as SOAP and WSDL, are used as open standards by umbrella organizations such as Oasis and W3C. considered become. If Microsoft were to try to block implementation of such software based on its patent portfolio, it would have far-reaching consequences for the adoption of the standards, not least because Microsoft is a member of Oasis.
Yet Microsoft’s promise is not entirely empty, says lawyer Andy Updegrove. The pledge was made in consultation with representatives of the open source community and would therefore be more in line with developing GPL software than was previously the case with the ‘Not To Sue’ Covenant for the Open XML file format. Furthermore, with the new initiative, Redmond will want to build goodwill among open source developers, because interoperability is a precondition for the success of web services. Several competitors are going a step harder; for example, in June IBM gave a bundle of web service software under open source terms to the Apache Foundation. However, Microsoft is also moving in the right direction, Red Hat’s Mark Webbing said.