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Not exactly. They want the communications protocols to be open. That's a big difference. It's about interoperability.

Yeah, but "open" doesn't come without a price. There's a license fee associated with the protocol information. Microsoft obviously wants to prevent open source licensors from gaining access to the protocols and then releasing the information publicly; either in source code or documentation form. If OSS licensors were to do that, MS suing them wouldn't help a whole lot, because the code and/or documentation would be widely disseminated and undoubtedly incorporated into countless projects; if not directly, then through careful analysis of the code. Personally, I don't blame MS or IBM or any other big company that wants to keep its IP private. Handing it over to OSS folks would be like injecting it into the public domain without reasonable compensation.

Ya know, if Microsoft thinks it is so wrong to use open protocols, perhaps they should rethink their usage of TCP/IP. After all, if open protocols are bad, they should feel good about eliminating them from their products as possible.

Perhaps they could get some of those folks they offshoring to china to work on their new networking protocols.