El propio Ballmer aclara el asunto:

Readily available for the right fee. The basic economic analysis that you should go through sort of goes like this. We have valuable intellectual property in our patents, we will continue to view that as valuable intellectual property in all forms, and we will monetize from all users of that, not all developers, but for all users of that patented technology, all commercial developers, and all commercial users of that patented technology.

We also have trade secret information, which we will continue to protect, with the exception of some important trade secret information in the interoperability realm, which we will still value, but we will make available free of charge, so that people can do appropriate interoperability. So from an economic perspective you could say, in some senses, we're opening up. Yet, at the same time, we retain valuable intellectual property assets.

There you are, Microsoft, 2008. For the right fee you can interoperate. Otherwise you can't. Nothing new about that. And as best as I can figure, they are selling patent licenses to patents Samba says it didn't need. They could work around them. And by the way, Novell is cited as a fine example of Microsoft's efforts to be interoperable. But Novell has yet to ship any GPLv3 code. Because it can't, without consequences. So how is that interoperability?


La "apertura" de MS es un intento de cambiar la percepción general ahora que su fomrato OOXML está cerca de morirse y Europa puede convertirse en la plataforma de despegue de Linux en el desktop.

Olvide la referencia:

http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes