common ground between Microsoft and the OSS community is more common than not these days...
When I speak to an audience about Microsoft's partnership with Novell, I often frame the discussion around two themes: customer centricity and IP bridge building. The former deals with the fact that vendors should proactively work together to solve interoperability issues in the market (with partners and competitors alike), while the latter deals with a healthy respect for diverse business models and finding common ground on how to partner and work together. In the case of Novell, we worked through an innovative patent cooperation agreement that paved the way for healthy business and technical collaboration. The resulting partnership has yielded a number of technical innovations, a joint lab in Cambridge, MA, and has served hundreds of customers. While we continue to compete, we also acknowledge that this model is a successful one - - for the pragmatist IT community who needs to improve operational efficiency in their data center, cut costs, and get better support from their vendors - we are succeeding.
In a similar spirit of cooperation - this time to support the broader software ecosystem - Microsoft in partnership with the Linux Foundation, sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute, last week, expressing concerns over its draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. You can follow the link to download the letter, but to summarize briefly, there were concerns about 1) how the principles were drafted (apparently with little or no input from industry) and 2) proposed principles not supported by contract law.
As written, according to the Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, the principles "interfere with the natural operation of open source licenses and commercial licenses as well by creating implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation, which would undermine the sharing of technology." Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, shares similar concerns at microsoftontheissues.com, stating that " certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers."
Our business models differ, ideologies sometimes differ, but we share, as Gutierrez states, a passion for software and a need to keep the industry from being inadvertently disrupted. There is power in such collaboration, and I am glad to see our organizations working together for the good of the vendor and developer community. Its true that we often find ourselves in competitive positions, but ensuring that we sustain a healthy, market-driven economy where the diversity of business models is honored and supported, is well worth the effort.
Check out Stephen McGibbon's blog for additional links and thoughts on how this might apply to the EU...
