Someday in the distant future, children will be hugging their Microsoft Robot Friend, browsing the Weboverse on Internet Explorer 29, and going to a rock concert held by Steve Ballmer’s head, and they’ll have never known the nasty Microsoft we grew up with. Starting today, Microsoft has dropped a bit of a bombshell on the computing community by jumping on the “open” bandwagon and altering the way they do business with third-party developers. According to a wordy press release issued by the company, Redmond will begin embracing an open attitude by publishing documentation for all of its “high-volume product” APIs free of charge, will detail patents it holds and applications that cover its protocols (to avoid nasty, Linux-like mixups, we assume), and will provide a “covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.” Sound like big news? They’ve got a lot more to say on the matter — click here and learn all about cuddly new Microsoft.

(I never thought I’d put a post in to both the categories, “Free Software” and “Microsoft”.)