It seems that Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer concerning some interesting decisions that have been made concerning Redmond’s approach to its latest mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone 7 certainly looks intriguing

The issues seem to arise from the lack of a native developer kit [NDK] to accompany the Windows Phone 7 software developer kit [SDK] with which it’s likely the folks from Mozilla have been looking to put together a browser. An NDK, simply put, would allow developers to write portions of their own apps for a mobile OS in native code… something it seems Microsoft isn’t up for with Windows Phone 7. If nothing else, that much is in line with Microsoft’s wish to keep Windows Phone 7 a little more closed, especially given the recent news that it wouldn’t support apps not downloaded from its own online marketplace.

Still, the biggest issue with the open letter to Microsoft’s CEO isn’t one of content, but of form. While the general rule with an open letter is to be either as absolutely formally unoffensive as possible or as inflammatory as possible, very few manage to be written entirely in a kind of… almost slang that makes the whole issue seem strange. The post itself runs,

“Dear Steve Ballmer,

Hola, amigo. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been puttin’ out fires left and right. I have a great idea. Vlad and the mobile team here have Firefox acting pretty awesome on Android using their NDK.

What’s this got to do with you? Well, you have this new Windows Phone thing going on. Tufte slammed it a little, and maybe the cropped UI is kind of busted. I’ll give it a shot though. I think a head to head comparison makes you look pretty good. It makes the iPhone UI look like it’s made of ugly jelly beans. I’m kind of surprised – the allegedly cool Cocoa Touch stuff is reminding me of 90s Unix window managers. Oh wait, that’s what it is. Haha.

So, anyway, you guys don’t have an NDK for Windows Phone. But I think there’s an opening here for everyone to do what they’re best at. I suggest you clone the Android DNK API, and add some stuff to make it better. Microsoft rocks at that. We’ll port Firefox, and I’m sure a bunch of games will come along too. It’s gonna be awesome.”

Of course, you don’t write a post like that without getting a bundle of negative feedback fairly quickly… so Sayre has since posted a bit of a retraction, apologising and basically writing up a list of all of the things that he understands could have irked people from the open letter.