Microsoft signed a security-related agreement Monday with the federal government of Germany, where the software giant has seen numerous challenges involving open-source products.
The agreement, signed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Interior Minister Otto Schily, commits Microsoft to working with several security-related bodies and supporting a German standard for secure legal transactions. As part of the deal, Germany will license extensible markup language (XML) dialects used by Office 2003, the latest version of Microsoft"s market-leading productivity package.