Microsoft's new promise

In the free software and open source worlds, licensing has always been a big deal. Choice of license is has a direct effect on the usefullness of code bases, and on their market growth as well.

Some code, however, makes use of standards that are open yet to some degree proprietary. Those degrees are often controlled by patents. Lately much lawyerly thinking has gone into making those standards useful to development efforts, and to disarming the patents involved. One of these -- perhaps the first -- is the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. The Promise is short on legalese, yet too long to describe here, beyond saying it's about what Microsoft won't sue others for, providing others don't sue Microsoft. Lawrence Rosen, author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall 2004) says the Promise "...enables the open source community to implement these standard specifications without having to pay any royalties to Microsoft or sign a license agreement. I'm pleased that this OSP is compatible with free and open source licenses".

The first standards in question involve SOAP and a variety of protocols from the WS-* portfolio. At the time of the Promise's announcement, in mid-September, approving public statements were made by a variety of folks on the open source side of the table. These include: Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel of Red Hat; and R.L. "Bob" Morgan, Senior Technology Architect at the University of Washington.

Before bringing the defenses up, bear in mind that this promise has been hammered out through collaboration between open-friendly folks inside Microsoft and countless cooperative conversations with folks from Red Hat, Mozilla/Firefox, XRI/XDI, OpenID, LID, Sxip, Higgins, Verisign and others, including customer-side entities such as North Carolina State University. The conversation has a name: OSIS, for Open Source Identity Selector (or something like that... even the initialism is open to change). Everybody involved is interested in developing open source implementations -- or products that interoperate with -- Microsoft's CardSpace, an identity selector that will be released with Vista and which Kim Cameron and others at Microsoft have for several years been trying to make as interoperable as possible in a world where many other identity systems will be in use. (See the Identity Metasystem article from the September 2005 issue of Linux Journal.) But the Promise may end up extending to other standards in other areas as well.

Disclosure: I've been involved in these discussions, and have worked for some time to help make them happen and to move forward. It's clear we are at the beginning of something here, not an end.

Of course the whole matter is open for input, debate and adjustment. To help with that, here are some links:

• The Promise: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp
• OSIS: http://osis.netmesh.org
• Kim Cameron: http://identityblog.com

Let us know what you think.

- Doc Searls