Microsoft: Getting to grips with open source

...Microsoft has often supported standards, such as ODF, to avoid the need to change their own business model and publish intellectual property freely, in the same way as its open source counterparts.

While Microsoft supports the ODF standard, Bacon points out that it has only recently ratified the standard for the most basic levels of interoperability with its products, and only after pressure from key customer bases.

"To be fair to Microsoft, it is doing a really good job of managing its relationships with its customers," he says. "But I’m fairly convinced that large government customers, who really need these standards, told Microsoft it needed to support ODF. And Microsoft has been clever, as far as I can tell, by introducing ODF to its products through a translation layer that plugs into Office. So additional file formats such as ODF then plug into that translation layer. It's not likely we'll see ODF as an option on any 'Save as', dropdown menu on a Word document soon."

Microsoft's commitment to interoperability is patchy in areas where its product portfolio are as proprietary as ever, adds Bacon. "At a recent meeting with Microsoft, Exchange was used as an example of a product that, if you want to use it, you have to use Microsoft Outlook to access it," he says. "I'd like to see people talk to it with anything, like Thunderbird for example. But interoperability like that avoids lock-in and, until Microsoft tackles lock-in, they cannot claim they are fully interoperable."

Microsoft's head of platform strategy, Nick McGrath, claims his company has the right to ensure customers will only get the best from their investments when used in a complete Microsoft stack. "We always look at how to build software that integrates with our platforms, for smooth, seamless integration. Our customers look to us to provide a total solution."

Conversely, he says that open source components are most often used as point solutions within the infrastructure, and are more difficult to manage. "We have a single management console for our server environment, which is not the same for Linux where you need many different tools, requiring lots of integration with minor business applications. The open source component may be cheap, but the total cost of ownership is more expensive."

Robin Noble, IT director for the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, has first-hand experience of working with a mixed IT environment, and says his organisation's membership of the Microsoft Shared Solution Network has helped it achieve better interoperability and enabled it to share its work with others in an open way.

Microsoft executives often point to a maturing attitude towards knowledge and information sharing with its facilitation of the public sector Shared Solution Network, established at the beginning of 2005. The Network allows local authorities, such as Kingston, to freely publish code written using Microsoft's .Net development environment for other member authorities to use, therefore reducing time and money spent on testing and development.

"I can see specific areas where open source components can play a role — in the network, for example — but I think Microsoft is catching up," says Noble. "We have been able to use Microsoft BizTalk server and .Net development to get different systems to talk to each other, to provide a fully integrated system that gives the public a seamless service."

As part of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's mandate to get as many people using online services as possible, Kingston is using BizTalk to allow residents to report problems getting their rubbish collected. The messages are routed to Oracle databases that hold information about collection routes and removal companies. The BizTalk solution then sends the message through to the rubbish removal company to alert it to the issue, returning the eventual response directly to the resident.

 "We've also just gone live with a council-tax e-billing facility based on the same principles, which integrates with the Government Gateway [the central registration service for e-Government initiatives]. We're happy to share our work, free-of-charge, for download from the Microsoft Network so, in the longer term, others can make enhancements and feed them back to us."

But, despite Noble's enthusiasm for the initiative, he admits that Microsoft has only acted as a facilitator in the network. Kingston has done all the work itself in partnership with system integrator, Ciber UK.

"In reality, BizTalk is only the messaging server; the systems it talks to can happily be open source as long as you're using open standards, but in reality it gives us more options to use Microsoft applications. Third-party software may not be as 'safe', if you want to call it that," says Noble.

Despite its apparent aspirations to co-opt elements of the open source model, the Microsoft Shared Solution Network appears to encourage more lock-in, with lower interoperability risks.

Todd Barr, director of enterprise marketing for commercial open source vendor Red Hat, commented on this wave of Microsoft initiatives. "The sharing of source code and distributed development initiatives have been happening for years — look at the size of SourceForge [the world's largest development and download repository of open source code and applications], for example. Microsoft's efforts aren't unique. And you can't apply 'open source' as a veneer on top of existing proprietary code or development processes."

His comments echo Bacon's view that Microsoft's attitudes towards open source may be changing due to customer pressure, but that its strategies for dealing with open source competitors have not.

"Partnerships with JBoss and MySQL, for example, have very little to do with open source. Microsoft, smartly, wants any popular applications to run on its operating system, and smart software vendors want to be able to sell their applications to the Microsoft installed base. I'm sure there are dozens of new proprietary applications Microsoft partners with each year," says Barr.

Traditionally, open source and commercial software has been a black and white landscape, but some analysts claim we're moving into a grey area in both camps. Phil Dawson, Gartner research vice president, agrees that Microsoft is making efforts to curry favour with open source supporting customers, but says end-users can exploit this to get the best of both worlds.

"I think you'll see Microsoft go down both the open and commercial routes with a hybrid model to capture both opportunities. I don't think we'll see Microsoft go open source — what we're seeing now is a political move to forge alliances, where these two camps will work together but never be best buddies," he says. "But it gives customers the opportunity to run hybrid environments and get the best of both worlds. It's just up to them whether the open source/commercial split should be 50/50, or 80/20 one way or the other, because ultimately they have to manage those environments."