In a major shift in its approach to the open-source community and intellectual property, Microsoft announced Thursday four broad principles for openness and interoperability.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the principles — to supply open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products, to improve documents portability, to enhance Microsoft’s support for industry standards, and to open communications with the IT industry.

The move is a direct aftereffect of the European Court of First Instance’s decision in October that Microsoft must supply open access to its APIs and protocols.

Making Peace with EU

“It’s a fundamental recognition on Microsoft’s part that the company has more to gain by working within the requirements of the European court’s decision than to continue beating its head against the wall,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in a telephone interview.

“The EU courts have said Microsoft is going to have to abide by its market’s rules. There comes a point where a company

needs to examine and re-examine what its doing,” King said. “As the IT industry increasingly goes global, companies have to learn to play by the rules of the markets they want to compete in,” whether that means the openness the EU requires or the complicity in censorship that China requires.

To open connections to Microsoft products, “We will document APIs and communication protocols,” Ballmer said. “Developers will not need to take licenses to access that data.”

Ballmer said Microsoft is immediately publishing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade-secret license. It will additionally post documentation for Office 2007 protocols “in coming months,” Ballmer said. Bob Muglia, senior vice president for the server and tools business, said that documentation will come online no later than June 2008.

Preserving Data

“Documents and documents have a lifetime that now exceeds the lifetime of…

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