Microsoft to open up 'M' language

Microsoft will reveal on Tuesday its intent to open up its planned "M" application modeling language via the company's OSP (Open Specification Promise), according to the company.

The company will offer up parts of M via OSP, Microsoft's Steve Martin, senior director of product management for the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, confirmed at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Monday.

With OSP, the company promises not to assert legal rights over patents on implementations of affected technologies. M is part of the company's Oslo platform for software modeling and is to be used for building textual domain-specific languages. The announcement is planned for Tuesday at the conference, Martin said.

A Microsoft official revealed the plan in a blog entry on Monday. Specifically, the M language specification, including MSchema, MGrammar, and MGraph, will be published under OPS, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft senior director of platform strategy.

"This will facilitate the interoperability of the Oslo declarative modeling language, codenamed 'M,' with prominent industry standards like WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols, and security standards," Ramji said.

Other parts of Oslo include a modeling tool codenamed "Quadrant" and a repository. The company has expressed intentions to release a preview of Oslo technologies at the conference.