Microsoft wants so very much to be open that it's created a brand new subsidiary to shoulder the work.
Called Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., the company will be run by a longtime Microsoft standards player, Jean Paoli. The point is to "advance the company’s investment in openness -- including interoperability, open standards and open source," Paoli said in a blog post announcing the spinoff.
Microsoft didn't much like open source when it first started getting mainstream attention over a decade ago, but in recent years, the company has realized that it needs to cooperate with open source technologies -- especially in the data center and on mobile devices -- or risk being left behind.
In recent years, Microsoft has contributed code and even hosted open-source projects. Last month it emerged as a top contributor to the Linux project.
With the subsidiary, Microsoft seems to think that staffers will be nimbler and less hampered by management on the product development side. In the past, critics have accused the company of gaming standards bodies to give its products an edge.
"This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and accept contributions from the community," Paoli said. "Over time the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds."
Critics may still be skeptical of Microsoft's intentions, but the company has made some real steps toward openness, says Mike Cherry, an analyst with the research firm Directions, on Microsoft. Whether the new company will really help things remains to be seen. "At the end of the day we have to wait to see some action," he says.
According to his LinkedIn Profile, Paoli has been "involved in the XML community" since before there was XML. (He worked on a non-Internet precursor language called SGML.) He leads a team that works on all kinds of open standards and software, including HTML5, HTTP 2.0, Node.js, and MongoDB.
Microsoft couldn't immediately be reached for comment on its new company.
