IBM's response to Microsoft's promise
Bob Sutor
has responded to the question (indirectly anyway - he was responding to the same question
raised by David Berlind at ZDNet) I raised
in my post about Microsoft's open specification promise. It's certainly succint:
nice start, but there is such a long, long way for them to go after being such active opponents to open collaboration and innovation. The first step was perhaps hard, but they now need to start running fast to catch up to where the industry has been around open operating environments, open middleware, open development environments, and so forth.and not quite as positive as
the response from Simon Phipps, his equivalent at Sun, who welcomes the news, with some caveats related to the specifics of the promise.
I was hoping that Bob would put competition to one side and outline IBM's stance regarding the WS-* specifications which the company has co-authored with Microsoft (and others). Does IBM promise the same? As James Governor at Redmonk
put it:
My question is: what does IBM do to up the ante? If there is one war I will sign up to enthusiastically its the war for open standards, unencumbered by potential chilling effects. So come on IBM lets see you really nail it. The 500 OSS patent pledge was just a tester. Lets see more irrevocable stuff.You could argue IBM covenants are not a bluff, but I have yet to see anything as clear and domain-specific as Microsoft's new policy.So, over to you Bob.
