Catching wind from TechCrunch, Microsoft is now trying to befriend the open-source community by releasing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows. And it's not all crap documentation. Specifications for Vista, Server 2008, Office 2007, and others are included.

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.

Not yet open-source but Microsoft is starting to embrace the force that is open-source (rhyme unintentional). Or are they really? One can speculate. And Microsoft is doing all this in the name of Interoperability and Data Portability. This may also be in line with their participation in the development of OpenID. The Redmond giants released this in a form of a promise. But as far as cliches go, promises are made to be broken. I still can't trust Microsoft. And this move of theirs is just making me more paranoid. I'll just keep my fingers crossed in the hopes that someday, there will be better interoperability between Microsoft and Open Source software.