Microsoft and interoperability

Bill Gates continued the MS FUD campaign by first praising his companys great work in the area and among other things stating that open source lacks interoperability:

"Open source is a methodology for licensing and developing software that may or may not be interoperable," Gates said. "Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts."

Suuuure - MS is doing all it can to ensure that everyone is able to interoperate with their software...or maybe NOT:

It would take a team of geologists many months to dig through the multiple strata of irony in this case. The protocol Microsoft is so jealously guarding was invented at IBM and has been widely adopted across the industry: Server Message Blocks was intended to be and has been used as an open, extensible networking system. Only Microsoft has taken it and created undocumented proprietary extensions, renaming it the Common Internet Filing System along the way. As was the case with the Holy Roman Empire, it is none of the things in its name.

SAMBA is a popular open source implementation of the *OPEN* SMB protocol which the "interoperability experts" at MS have (as the only ones) added proprietary extentions to. This means the SAMBA developers need to do a lot of boring, tedious work to make SAMBA work in a Windows environment. The history of SAMBA and the way it has been implemented, can be read in this great article at Groklaw by Andrew Tridgell. Others are refuting Gates' claim:

"It is nonsense to say that open source software is more likely to produce variations," said Barnett. "The fact is that with GPL there is no direct monetary benefit to create forked versions. The same is true for other open source licences as well."

The EU is also interested in open standards and curriously, the MS XML document format wasn't considered open enough, however the format (OpenDocument) for the upcomming OpenOffice 2.0 and KOffice is. OpenOffice 2.0 is going to be released later this year, you can read a good overview of the OpenDocument format here.