MS: 'Clients made us do it'

By Leon Engelbrecht for Microsoft
Johannesburg, 12 Jun 2007

Client pressure caused Microsoft's Pauline conversion on open source, and a subsequent deal with Novell, says Microsoft platform strategy manager Paolo Ferreira.

"Our customers run mixed environments. Obviously, we realise this," Ferreira says.

Speaking at a recent Microsoft interoperability forum, he said: "The agreement [with Novell] ultimately looks after the concerns our customers had. It is a great story, because it is about the interoperability of two vendors who typically did not interoperate well before. It is also a meeting of two worlds, the proprietary and the open source, talking to each other.

"We need to build bridges between these two worlds," he added, saying this "is probably not something typically seen in the past, but it is important for us to establish open dialogues with such communities".

Ferreira distinguished between the product and process of open source. "With regard to the process, Microsoft does not compete with other vendors. However, when it comes to the product, what we have seen is open source solutions, such as Linux, becoming more commercial and obviously, from a Microsoft perspective, when it comes to the commercial offering of that open source product, we compete at that level."

Returning to process, Ferreira says Microsoft tries "to strike a balance between our investments from an R&D perspective and releasing our intellectual property to our partners and the community, and ensuring everyone's needs are met".

An example of this was Windows CE for smart phones: "We've released the source code for this technology under a non-traditional Microsoft licensing agreement, called an MS permissive licence, and basically that enables developers to look at the source code.

"It is important for you to understand we do participate in open source collaboration."