Microsoft opens up its Open Specification Promise

Steve Ballmer may not have anything better to say than "blah" and "Google" in his analyst meetings, but his open-source group came up with a doozy today. The flawed Open Specification Promise (OSP) just became whole. Or close to it. Microsoft has opened up its Open Specification Promise to make it meaningful and usable to a wider group of people. Even Groklaw, which sets a high (and generally fair) bar for Microsoft is impressed. Microsoft's OSP has been controversial in part because it's basic covenant not to sue developers was crippled by its application only to noncommercial developers, as well as other ambiguities that have been resolved. With this update to the OSP, this restriction is gone, as Sam Ramji, Director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, confirmed: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were... [read full story]