Free Data

You have to be real careful when you invest in some vendor's technology. Will they help or hinder getting you where you want to go.

Microsoft I gather is *real* scared of google, and so they try emulating a bunch of googlesque capabilities. As usual I have not read a lot about them, but this one about "live data" and "data wants to be free" caught my attention.

See, calendar information seems to me to be the data that *most* wants to be free, but isn't yet as free as it should be. Is calendar information now free from Microsoft?

Or is there motto: "Data wants to be free, and will be, unless we can lock it up in a proprietary server, obfuscate it in proprietary formats, and extort you to pay for a lot of client licenses to get to it using tools of our choice"?

Maybe things have changed -- please correct me if I am wrong, or explain why you don't need fully functional calendar information to be free.