OStatic

Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP) has been somewhat controversial, which is probably not what the company intended. The OSP is basically a we won't sue you promise to developers who implement software based on any of a variety of Microsoft specifications. Due to longstanding distrust or specific legal issues, some open source developers have viewed the OSP as a threat rather than a promise. As OSCON today, Microsoft tried to lay some of those fears to rest, and also extended the reach of the OSP.

Microsoft's IronRuby project is an interesting anomaly in the software world. On the one hand, it's a bona fide open source project aimed at a compliant implementation of Ruby, one of the most popular dynamic languages for open source projects. On the other hand, it's a product of Microsoft - who many still regard as an implacable foe of open source. At OSCON this week, the IronRuby team made a group of announcements that confirm their intent to be full members of the community, despite their corporate home.

A few weeks ago we reviewed the case of the Microsoft Sandcastle help file builder. At the time, you may recall, the project had been removed from Microsoft's CodePlex site because of a discrepancy between license and action: the license was the open-source MSPL, but the source code was nowhere to be found.

We've written before about the strange and dubious story of the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML document formats as an international standard by the ISO. The ISO ratified the standards a few months ago as part of a fast track process that left a number of members of the open source community disquieted, or even disgusted. Now, however, it seems that the game may not be over yet, as several member bodies of the ISO have lodged appeals against the outcome.

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie gave a talk this morning at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, one of those gatherings for top-level executives. As part of the Q&A, he was asked about the perception that Google was a disruptive force that was hard for Microsoft to deal with. While admitting that Google was a tough competitor, Ozzie went on to focus on something he called even more potentially disruptive : open source.

One of the latest reports from Forrester, Enterprise Desktop and Web 2.0/SAAS Platform Trends, 2007 is starting to make its way around media outlets on the web. The Forrester folks tracked software trends in major categories across 50,000 users month-by-month, and now their conclusions are out. Depending on how you look at it, they're either good or bad for open source.

The Mono Project has reached a couple of milestones recently: the release of version 1.0 of the MonoDevelop IDE, and the release of Mono 1.9, the beta for Mono 2.0. (Mono releases do not track .NET releases exactly, so Mono 2.0 will include a mix of features from .NET 2.0 and later versions). This advances the ability of open source developers to use the .NET platform, but how much does that matter?