Microsoft Expands Commitment to Open Standards and Interoperability

REDMOND, Wash., June 27, 2001 — Following its announcement last month of the shared source philosophy, Microsoft Corp. today announced it will work with Corel Corp. to build a shared source implementation of the C# programming language and common language infrastructure (CLI) specifications that it submitted to ECMA in October 2000. Designed to be used for academic, research, debugging and learning purposes, this implementation will run on FreeBSD and Microsoft® Windows® and will be published as source code under Microsoft’s Shared Source licensing framework.

“First, we took the core Microsoft .NET technologies to the W3C and ECMA standards bodies for standardization. Now, with Corel, we’re creating an implementation under our shared source philosophy,”
said Craig Mundie, senior vice president of Advanced Strategies at Microsoft.
“This shared source implementation of these standards demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to open standards in .NET and will provide a native XML Web services programming environment across operating systems.”

First discussed by Mundie last month at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Shared Source offers a balanced approach to providing source code access to customers and partners while maintaining the intellectual property rights needed to support a strong software business.

By creating this shared source implementation, Microsoft is highlighting the company’s commitment to education, open standards, community and interoperability through .NET. Further, as more organizations and industries move to an XML Web services environment, the implementation will make it easier for developers to build interoperable XML Web services or to create alternative implementations of the ECMA standards.

“We’re very excited to be working together with Microsoft on this project,”
said Rene Schmidt, chief technology officer at Corel.
“By selecting Corel to assist with this initiative, Microsoft is recognizing our development strengths, particularly in the multiplatform arena, as well as our demonstrated commitment to open standards. The combined strengths of our development teams will help lay the building blocks for the next generation of Internet technologies.”

“This implementation provides a working, standards-based foundation for distributed computing that is interoperable across multiple languages, operating systems and devices,”
said Hal Abelson, professor of computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Microsoft has an unprecedented opportunity here to establish the Web service vision as a fundamental element of computer science education, by enabling students and teachers to use this implementation as open source software that everyone can learn from, build upon and share.”

More information on .NET is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ . More information on Microsoft’s shared source philosophy is available at http://www.microsoft.com/sharedsource/ .

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