MUMBAI: Microsoft has said its decision to share trade secrets about its software products is not a mere tactical response to anti-trust challenges in European Union, but a step forward in the way its software will co-operate with rival products and multiple devices. However, the company remains opposed to the open source movement’s fight against intellectual property, a top official said. “We recognise that increasingly our products have to live happily and co-exist with many, many other products in all those domains,” Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie told ET. “We are comfortable with competing in an inter-operable environment.” The world’s largest software company, which is in the midst of an attempt to acquire Internet rival Yahoo, said it will ensure open connections, promote data exchange, support common standards and engage with the open source movement. As a first step, the company published more than 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows protocols, agreed to licence them without discrimination and allowed open source programmers to build distributions on top of these protocols.