What is the Open Source Interoperability Initiative?
The Open Source Interoperability Initiative exists to foster more open engagement between Microsoft and open source communities. It will encompass a broad range of facilities, events, and resources supporting interoperability, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.

Why is Microsoft announcing the Open Source Interoperability Initiative?
The Open Source Interoperability Initiative is one component to a set of broad-reaching changes across Microsoft’s technology and business practices. These changes will increase the openness of Microsoft software and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community of customers, partner and developers. The principles are as follows:

• Ensuring open connections to its high-volume products;
• Promoting data portability;
• Enhancing support for industry standards;
• Fostering more open engagement with the industry, including open source communities, around interoperability and standards issues.

Complete announcement details can be found here.

Is the Open Source Interoperability Initiative a change to Microsoft’s open source strategy?
Microsoft’s open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today's heterogeneous technology world. This includes increasing business opportunities for partners, regardless of their development model. It also means increasing opportunities for developers to learn and create by combining community-oriented open source with traditional commercial approaches to software development. Within the context of these broad-reaching changes, the Open Source Interoperability Initiative is a re-affirmation and enhancement of Microsoft’s open source strategy.

More information about Microsoft’s open source strategy is available at www.microsoft.com/opensource/faq.aspx.

What new activities and programs are being announced today as part of the Open Source Interoperability Initiative?
Over the past three years, Microsoft has been committed to building partnerships and increasing participation with commercial and community open source partners. The Open Source Interoperability Initiative is a significant expansion of this commitment to customer choice and interoperability that will increase the opportunity for collaboration between Microsoft and open source communities.

For example:

• Practices for sharing code outside Microsoft, including through the use of Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source licenses and forges like Codeplex, are now included in the Engineering Excellence Guide, the definitive reference source for development practices at Microsoft.
• Collaboration between Microsoft protocol engineers and the Samba Team on documentation and interoperability testing for CIFS and SMB2.
• Expanded interoperability content for the IT community through efforts like Port 25, a website dedicated to the open source community at Microsoft.

Future details regarding the Open Source Interoperability Initiative will be available at: www.microsoft.com/opensource/interop.

What are existing examples of engagement between Microsoft and open source companies and communities?

• Since September 2005, Microsoft has been involved in technical collaborations with the open source industry including: JBoss, SugarCRM, XenSource, Zend and SpikeSource. These projects are designed to help our mutual customers take advantage of the Windows platform while demonstrating the choice available to partners and customers when considering both Microsoft and open source.
• Landmark technology interoperability projects such as Linux and Windows virtualization, as well as FastCGI, now integrated with IIS7, which enables customers to have reliable, high-performance hosting for PHP applications with full support from Microsoft.
• Interoperability agreements between Microsoft and open source distributors. including Novell, Xandros, Linspire, and TurboLinux.
• In December 2007, the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a nonprofit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation used to interoperate with the Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.
• In October 2007, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved two Microsoft Shared Source licenses - the Microsoft Public License (MPL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (MRL). OSI approval is an endorsement of the each license’s compliance with the Open Source Definition (OSD).

What are related sources of information?
Full Announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/interoperability/

Blog by Bill Hilf, General Manager of Platform Strategy:
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/02/19/interop.aspx