Microsoft: Indigo patents would not affect interoperability

Microsoft said its willingness to file patents on its planned Indigo Web-services technology will not affect the software’s ability to interoperate with other vendors’ software.

Developers, meanwhile, will not need to pay license fees to build an application that calls on Indigo, the company added.

Planned for inclusion in the Longhorn client version of Windows in 2006, Microsoft bills Indigo as a new breed of communications infrastructure based on Web services, with interoperability being a key attribute. Asked if the company planned to seek patents on Indigo, the company responded in a prepared statement.

“Patents are a normal part of doing business — one that is essential for organizations to protect their intellectual property and be transparent about the products and technologies they build,” the statement said. “To that end, Microsoft may file patents on Indigo as it does on many of our products.”

“The important point is that any patents Microsoft files for Indigo won’t affect Indigo’s ability to interoperate with other vendors’ software,” the statement also said.

Any patent filings would be extraneous to the WS-* Web-services standardization work that Microsoft is involved in, the company said. Indigo is built on the WS-* architecture, which “fulfills the need for standards that ensure interoperability between Web services, independent of their underlying platform,” according to Microsoft’s statement.

“In fact, our goal is that when Indigo ships, it will be the most interoperable Web-services framework available.” Microsoft said.

The practice of filing patents for software technologies has come under fire of late, although Microsoft certainly is not the only vendor adhering to the practice. In the spirit of the open source movement, Sun Microsystems and IBM recently released some patented technologies for use by developers. Microsoft has its “Shared Source” program, which allows selected parties to view its source code.

Microsoft’s intention to possibly seek patents on Indigo should not make much difference to open source developers, according to one analyst responding to an email inquiry.

“Well, I think it’s a consistent stance for Microsoft. [I am] not sure how much open source and Microsoft go together as concepts in general,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “But I don’t think open source folks are any more encouraged or discouraged by this move.”

Indigo was always meant to be a Microsoft-specific product line and the company already owns patents on pre-existing technologies included in it, Schmelzer said.

While Microsoft has not been a big player in open source, a Novell-sponsored endeavor known as Mono breaks the mold a bit. Mono provides an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net framework and enables .Net applications to run on Linux or Unix.

But Mono proponents do not plan to capitalize on Indigo at the moment. “Right now, there are no plans to do anything with it,” Novell spokesman Kevan Barney said. “It’s just not defined enough.”

“As far as the IP [intellectual property] issues around Indigo and Mono go, it’s really a moot point because the Mono project has no plans to engage with Indigo,” Barney said.

A Java-based counterpart to Indigo is not likely, Schmelzer said. “Will we see a Java-based Indigo? Probably not in my lifetime.”

Sun officials at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week, however, demonstrated an upcoming version of Java, known as Java Enterprise Edition 5, which features development of Web services with just a few lines of code. This is functionality that also has been touted as a key benefit of Indigo.

In addition to the Longhorn client, Microsoft has expressed intentions to enable Indigo to function in other Microsoft products such as the planned server version of Longhorn in 2007.