Senior company officials told journalists during a telephone press conference on Thursday that Microsoft would expand its interoperability principles, particularly with respect to open source software.

Brad Smith, Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie

Microsoft’s move comes less than six months after Europe’s Court of First Instance upheld a decision by the European Commission to fine the US company for breaching European antitrust rules.

In March 2004, the European Commission ruled that Microsoft’s refusal to provide interoperability information to competitors amounted to an abuse of its dominant market position. It fined the company €497 million and asked it to make a number of changes to its business practices.

In October last year, Microsoft agreed to comply with the Commission’s decision.

As part of that compliance, officials announced during Thursday’s call that the company would implement four new interoperability principles.

Officials pledged to ensure open connections for high volume products, promote data portability for high volume products, enhance Microsoft's support for industry standards, and foster a more open engagement with the software industry in general, as well as the open source software community in particular.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said that the move would affect the company’s IP rights in several ways. First, developers will no longer need trade secret licences to obtain Microsoft’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high volume products. “Instead, developers will be able to access this information in the same way that they access any other page of content on the Web,” said Smith, referring to the 30,000 pages of technical documentation that Microsoft posted on its website on Thursday.

The new principles also provide for “royalty-free use of the patent rights relating to Microsoft's APIs in these products, so that any other software that calls on these APIs in Microsoft's products can do so without any concern about patent issues”.

Finally, the enhanced interoperability principles are expected to affect patent rights relating to Microsoft’s communications protocols. Microsoft said that the new patent framework committed it to making patent licences for the protocols available on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and at very low royalty rates. It will also provide a patent covenant not to sue open source developers for development or noncommercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.

But the European Commission seemed sceptical about Microsoft’s announcement. In a statement , it said: “This announcement does not relate to the question of whether or not Microsoft has been complying with EU antitrust rules in this area in the past. The Commission would welcome any move toward genuine interoperability. Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today’s announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.”

But Smith said that this time is different:

“This has been a continuing evolution, not just, I might add, for Microsoft, but in our view for the entire information technology industry. That said, I believe that today's step is certainly qualitatively, and quantitatively different from any step that we as a company have taken in the past.”