Openness@Microsoft

Available Today: Hortonworks Brings Open Source Apache Hadoop to Windows

MSOpenness — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:30:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

Today Hortonworks announced the general availability of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows, the industry’s first 100 percent open source Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows.

This marks an important milestone in Microsoft’s partnership with Hortonworks and our overall big data approach, reflecting a deep investment in ensuring customers have choice and interoperability when building and running Hadoop-based solutions.

Today’s release helps to accelerate the adoption of Hadoop by expanding the number of supported platforms, delivering an open source Apache Hadoop-based distribution that is enterprise-ready and interoperable across Linux, Windows Server and Windows Azure.

Customers looking to transition to the cloud in the future will be able to seamlessly migrate from HDP for Windows to the Windows Azure HDInsight Service, taking advantage of the elasticity and low cost of Hadoop in the cloud whenever they choose.

You can download HDP for Windows today from Hortonworks or learn more about the Windows Azure HDInsight Service by visiting the Windows Azure site.

Office Web Apps: More to Love, Coming to Your Favorite Devices

MSOpenness — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

The Office team recently shared plans for some of the upcoming investments Microsoft is making to deliver a great Office experience on the Web, including broad cross-platform device support.

When Microsoft launched Office Web Apps in 2010, the apps were companions to the Office desktop experience that enabled lightweight, on-the-go content creation and review. Since then, browser technologies and speeds have advanced and development infrastructure has matured, making the Web a better productivity platform.

With these improvements, Microsoft’s goal is to deliver Office Web Apps that people can rely on to create polished Office documents from start to finish, all from the Web and on virtually any device.

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Northwest Open Source Hackathon: Making Open Source Projects on Windows Easier

MSOpenness — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Posted by Garrett Serack
Senior Software Developer, Microsoft Open Source Technology Center

This past Friday, developers filled the room for Outercurve’s first annual Northwest Open Source Hackathon. With a special focus on the recent NuGet 2.5 release, the event brought together developers from open source projects like NuGet, CoApp, and Orchard, along with engineers from groups across Microsoft.

All too often, open source developers work together ‘virtually’ – we collaborate, design and code – all without working in the same room together. Hackathons bring us face-to-face, which helps us work on big ideas.

“Hackathons and plugfests in general are a staple of the open source community,” said Sam Ramji, Outercurve’s Board President. “Developers get together and test out new product ideas. New developers who are interested in contributing to one of the existing Outercurve-hosted projects get a chance to work with the architects of the projects directly.”

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Open Door Policy: Interview with Outercurve’s Sam Ramji

MSOpenness — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Open Door Policy is a new series on the Openness blog that profiles industry thought leaders and individuals within Microsoft who are leading efforts to collaborate more openly, promoting interoperability and making it easier to develop and manage mixed IT environments.

The first annual Outercurve Open Source Conference and Hackathon is taking place in downtown Bellevue this week. We took the opportunity to speak with Sam Ramji, Outercurve Foundation board president and former Microsoft open source strategist.

Read on to learn more about Sam’s perspectives on how collaborating more openly can drive innovation and help to solve real world problems.

Hi Sam, please tell us about the Outercurve Foundation and your role with it.
The Outercurve Foundation, or Outercurve.org, is a not-for-profit open source software foundation. Outercurve is focused on open source governance, for the sake of more successful open source projects on all platforms. I’ve had the privilege to serve as the President of the Board of Directors for the last three years. Because Outercurve is a not-for-profit foundation, it’s all volunteer. My full-time - my day job, as it were - is as the Strategy Officer of a startup called Apigee, which is an API platform company based in Silicon Valley.

And where were you before that?
I led open source strategy across Microsoft - I took over open source technical strategy in 2006, and open source market strategy in early 2008, which was a pretty extraordinary role, because we were able to work directly with Bill Gates on technology strategy and had a field organization spanning 80 countries. We worked on open source interoperability and with a range of open source technology projects to help them either run extremely efficiently on top of Microsoft platforms, especially Windows Server, or to improve interoperability between Windows and Linux.

That was before it was really publicized that Microsoft was moving in a more open direction.
That’s right. We were doing open source at Microsoft back when that was innovative and scary. [chuckles] My manager and predecessor in the role was Bill Hilf, who’s now the GM of Product Management for Windows Azure. Our purpose was to solve big problems, and that’s always scary – it challenged the way Microsoft did business. Bill is a great leader and was willing to take on the way things were.

What's the scope of this week’s Outercurve Open Source Software Conference?
The conference itself is focused on bringing together the community of developers who work on projects that they’ve chosen to host with Outercurve.org. There are some very, very well-known projects like NuGet, Orchard, and WiX, which have tens of millions of downloads, hundreds of contributors, and thousands to millions of users. All of those project leads and contributors are getting together to share notes, talk about what’s working, and how to improve things. There are also lots of people who are aren’t working directly on those projects who want to learn about how to do more open source development, how to create and manage projects and, frequently, how to work with Microsoft’s open source teams.

Scott Guthrie [Corporate Vice President, Windows Azure], who’s a well-known guy and a great technology leader, will be talking at the conference as well. He’s been, along with Bill Staples [Director, Windows Azure Product Management], one of the visionaries at Microsoft in shipping products that incorporate open source. And he’s done that both in the .NET division and now also in Windows Azure, adapting some of the technology that my team had built to host open source projects directly on top of Microsoft technologies. He’s bringing together all of the knowledge-sharing and excitement about open source development, especially as it relates to Microsoft technologies. In this case it’s one of the flagship components of Windows Azure – running Linux on Azure, Wordpress on Azure, PHP, and so on.

What can you tell us about the hackathon this Friday and Saturday?
Hackathons and plugfests in general are a staple of the open source community, and this one’s no different. Developers will be getting together and testing out new product ideas. Also, new developers who are interested in contributing to one of the existing Outercurve-hosted projects will get a chance to talk to committers - the architects of the projects - directly, and start to get set up on systems, trying to figure out how to build and run it. Once you’ve got that up and running, you’re set to understand how that code works, and you figure out how to do it better and contribute for the benefit of everybody else on the project, and anybody else who might need it.

Folks will be working on NuGet, Orchard, CoApp, maybe a little bit of WiX, probably Maven, maybe ChronoZoom. It’ll run the gamut - from package management and installation of software, to content management systems, all the way to some really fascinating, innovative stuff like ChronoZoom, which was the UC Berkeley-led project that allows you to zoom in and out into the history of the universe in a very satisfying, visual way with a ton of depth of information. They won a major award at South by Southwest this year.

Sounds like fun. So, more generally, why do you feel being open is so important at Outercurve and at Microsoft?
A couple reasons. We are still in - to quote Bill Gates when he was talking about the concept of search about five years ago - ‘the first ten yards’ of open source as an industry. That is, if you imagine the end state of open source as the end zone on a football field, we’re still in the first ten yards. The ways to have smart engineers collaborate, whether you classify them as software vendors, consumers, corporations, governments, are just beginning to be explored. The crucial nature of Outercurve is that we’re promoting a very friendly environment for learning how to do a great job managing the evolution of open source software projects.

Unfortunately, too many projects have come up with great ideas and had quick success and then disappeared from the history books, mainly because what the “rules of the road” were - in other words, open source governance - have been really poorly understood. The projects that succeed do so because they kind of worked it out, but the vast majority of projects are not successful. So what we do with them at Outercurve is work directly on open source governance: what are the processes, what are the promises, what are the licenses, how do you correctly approach an open source project to make it successful, both non-commercially as a community, and commercially, as a product that’s being used by large companies or governments.

What has been your most memorable Outercurve experience?
It was a huge moment when NuGet launched, really quickly gathered steam, and suddenly Microsoft announced that the project was so useful and so impactful to the developer experience that they’d be shipping it as part of Microsoft Visual Studio. That was an amazing moment - I was on an Outercurve board of directors conference call and suddenly the announcement hits, and now all of a sudden we’re part of this leap forward in the maturity model, both for what Outercurve was able to contribute and what Microsoft was able to take action on.

How do you see the spirit of openness changing the way Microsoft does business?
What makes me happy is I’ve seen Microsoft relax into a spirit of pragmatism. When I joined Microsoft in 2004, there was a level of anxiety around open source in general. There was the idea that as an engineer at Microsoft, if you even looked at open source code, you would be “tainted,” and that’s not a very good word, is it? It would drive more anxiety. The fear was that if you were tainted, you’d no longer be able to contribute to Microsoft products. That’s not good for your career.

That was 2004, and it’s no longer the case. Now, you don’t have these concerns about what open source is and isn’t, you can just go and develop some experience. You can meet some open source people. You can find out that they’re great software developers who just want everything to work better. Now Microsoft is saying: “Here’s where we can contribute, here’s where we can use open source effectively. We can offer great platforms like [Windows] Azure that any open source developer can run any open source code on, including Linux, directly on top of a Microsoft product.” In 2004, that was like the idea of cats and dogs living together, but in 2013, it’s more like, “Oh, this makes sense. We know how to do this.” It’s nice to see the increase in the peacefulness there.

During your interactions with the world outside of Outercurve and Microsoft, do you find that people are surprised at the company’s commitment to openness?
There seem to be three main schools of thought: There’s a group that’s never been a part of the Microsoft ecosystem. They’ve never used .NET, don’t really ship software on Windows, and so on. Frankly, they don’t really seem to care one way or another. There’s another group, though, that’s totally shocked - they pay attention to Microsoft and use its products. But they have this sense of insularity - they work with Microsoft products and people, and that’s it. Sometimes I’ll run into someone I haven’t seen in a long time, and they’ll ask what’s new. I’ll tell them about Outercurve, or [Windows] Azure, and they’ll be flabbergasted. They can’t believe Microsoft would do that.

There’s a third contingent, probably the largest, it’s the pragmatists. The software developers and the startup people who say, “We just want to make the world better. We want to see more software doing better things” There’s this analogy we use—if you’re building something and your carpenter shows up and says, “I’m a screwdriver carpenter,” and he doesn’t know how to use drills, or saws, or all the tools at his disposal - you’d kick him out. So these people see Microsoft is not trying to be screwdriver carpenters, they’re running PHP, or Python, working with GitHub, and they say “Wow, it’s about time. It’s great to see Microsoft doing this.”

Have any life experiences affected the way you work? Or vice versa, has your work influenced your life outside of it?
Three things stand out for me. One, it made me very curious seeing open source as a basis of human collaboration - it’s worked so effectively in software - I want to see it on a larger scale, in businesses, in economies. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the economics of openness, where you can see linkages between openness and increased GDP for economies. You look at what their laws are, the points of entry and exit in their economies, the barriers or lack thereof in foreign investment, and there’s a pretty strong correlation over the last forty years. I think it was a US ITC (United States International Trade Commission) study. At a macroeconomic level, that’s fascinating.

At a smaller level, I spend a lot of time these days with Apigee working on open APIs. As opposed to source code, it’s the ability of enterprises to share a tremendous amount of data and business process openly on the web via HTTP with other partners, some of whom they’ve never met before. You’d be surprised what comes out of collaboration: better business results, faster time to market, new ideas, happier customers.

There’s a great quote from James Governor at RedMonk. He says, “20th Century business was about increasing barriers to entry, but 21st Century business is about lowering barriers to participation.” The company that can be the most collaborative gets backed up by market share.

The big experiences I had in open source development were with Microsoft, going out and meeting open source developers from communities, places with previously bad Microsoft relationships. If the internet is to be believed, you’d conclude that these are very angry, frustrated people and if a Microsoft person showed up would’ve been torn apart, thrown to the lions. But in fact, going out and being open, listening, paying attention, I found that open source developers were just great developers who want to make things work.

When someone showed up, even from a company with a history like Microsoft, they just want to talk, share points of view, figure out if there’s anything we can collaborate on to make things work better. When you meet someone face to face, you’d be surprised at how much you can do together. That was a visceral experience for me that changed how I look at people. I don’t tend to expect the worst anymore.

What’s your favorite piece of hardware or software that you’ve ever used or worked with?
I’m totally fascinated by Raspberry Pi. It’s on a piece of hardware that’s very open, relatively cheap, and easy to hack on. It’s ushering in era of open hardware. If you asked me a year ago, I would’ve said the Arduino, but Raspberry Pi is even more interesting. And the proof of that, the power of openness, is that a six-year-old built a supercomputer out of 64 Raspberry Pis and a bunch of Legos. The Legos were there for airflow, and the computing was just Raspberry Pis. It’s mind boggling - if a six-year-old can do these kinds of things with open technologies, then we can have some pretty high hopes for the future.

There’s also an article from last week about OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) dropping off a bunch of tablets in an Ethiopian village, and the kids using them to teach themselves English, and they even hacked the tablets.
It’s so amazing that they hacked the tablets. There was that big debate a while back about whether tablets would inspire people to program or if they would just make computing more accessible. There’s that kinesthetic experience with the tablets which you don’t have with a regular computer, which should make computing more approachable and we should see more computer literacy. The idea that the kids are hacking the tablets is very exciting.

That also reminds me of one other very exciting piece of technology, the Kinect, and particularly the NUI, Open NUI, and the open source projects that have sprouted up around it. One of the key guys in that community is a fellow named Josh Blake. The amazing thing we’re seeing is these people building these Minority Report kind of experiences, in environments we haven’t seen. The example that leaps to mind is surgeons in operating rooms. People are building these Kinect-based systems, and the surgeons can now just turn toward the computer from the patient and move their hands around in three dimensions, and have the computer understand their gestures. No need to leave the operating room to access a computer and then scrub back in.

The combination of the Kinect, as a really innovative piece of hardware, and the openness that that team has shown toward open source development and open innovation is really transformative. I would hope to see Microsoft make nurturing the open Kinect community a very high priority.

Thanks for your time today. Any closing remarks?
I’d just like to close by saying that there’s a tremendous quantity of value that open source is going to bring for the rest of the century. The most important thing we can all do is to understand it better, figure out how we can use it and how we can collaborate more openly so that we can solve large-scale problems.

WebMatrix 3 Now Available: Publish Cloud-Based Web Sites and Open Source Apps

MSOpenness — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

This week the Windows Azure team released WebMatrix 3, the current version of the popular free web development tool, which includes support for popular open source apps and the ability to publish your site to the Cloud using Windows Azure Web Sites.

WebMatrix allows you to create websites quickly, using ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, or HTML5 templates. You can also take advantage of the latest web standards, like CSS3 and HTML5, and popular JavaScript libraries such as JQuery.

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Announcing a New SUSE-Microsoft Collaboration on Cloud Technologies

MSOpenness — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:05:00 GMT

Posted by Alfonso Castro
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Microsoft Open Solutions Group

Today is a step forward in the collaboration we started more than six years ago with SUSE. As part of Microsoft’s sponsorship of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, I am thrilled to announce that SUSE and Microsoft will extend their existing work in connecting Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V with SUSE Cloud.

With more than 1,000 customers benefitting from our joint efforts, Microsoft and SUSE are helping enterprises move forward by providing choice and delivering significant value to our mutual customers. For several years now, Microsoft and SUSE have worked side-by-side to deliver unified solutions, integrated tools, and first-class support for mixed Windows and Linux environments, supporting interoperability from the datacenter to the cloud.

Today’s news is both a continuation and a sign of growth in our interoperability journey. Adding support for Windows Server Hyper-V in SUSE Cloud is the logical next step on our roadmap, as well as an improvement in the sense that it complements our joint cloud efforts.

Organizations can now standardize their open source based clouds on the same Microsoft hypervisor technology they will also use in public clouds, such as Windows Azure, or on the Windows Server machines used in their datacenters.

Since we shared the stage at OSBC last year, our joint efforts have also delivered the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center, which facilitates Linux server patching through Microsoft’s management tools, as well as support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers and openSUSE images on Windows Azure Virtual Machines.

We look forward to our continued journey, supporting interoperability for our mutual customers. For more on this announcement, please see the SUSE blog.

Today’s NuGet 2.5 and CoApp Releases Make Open Source Projects on Windows Easier

MSOpenness — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Posted by Garrett Serack
Senior Software Developer, Microsoft Open Source Technology Center

Hundreds of thousands of open source applications run on Windows today, but a lot of open source software can still be hard to find and deploy on Windows because many developers work on projects independently. Today’s release of NuGet 2.5 and the beta release of the CoApp PowerShell Tools go a long way to address this challenge, removing the duplications of effort by providing a central repository of high-quality, commonly-used open source libraries and languages.

Rewind to last year. CoApp (an open source project I launched three years ago) got together with the NuGet team, folks from Visual C++ team, and community members, to outline how we could align our efforts to support packages for all developers on Windows – not just.NET – across all of our products, including Windows Server, Windows desktop, Windows Store apps and Windows Phone.

That collaboration has since resulted in significantly improved support for building quality open source software on Windows, helping developers easily find the resources they need without having to do it all themselves. With the integrated CoApp tools and NuGet 2.5, C/C++ developers can now create and maintain their open source software and projects with the simplicity that Windows .NET and Web developers have already enjoyed in recent years.

I’m looking forward to next month, when we have an opportunity to collectively kick the tires on these releases at the Northwest Open Source Hackathon. Stay tuned on the blog, as I’ll be reporting back on the results of our two days of coding and camaraderie.

For more details on how CoApp and NuGet are improving support for open source developers, please see the Visual C++, NuGet and CoApp team blogs. Let us know in the comments what you think of these new resources.

Spotlight on Microsoft Research: Accessing Usable Environmental Data at the Speed of Thought with FetchClimate

MSOpenness — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Sources of data exist all around us, especially when it comes to environmental research. With more sensors and devices than ever capable of capturing robust amounts of data, new technologies are needed to analyze this information and make insightful observations.

Microsoft Research (MSR) has been working on methods to compile, analyze, and apply big data for a number of years. Today we’re showcasing FetchClimate, another noteworthy example of how a combination of big data analysis and open science can help scientists and non-scientists alike better understand the world around them.

We recently chatted with Drew Purves, head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge to talk about the FetchClimate tool for environmental data that he and his team have brought to life. Read on to get Purves' perspectives on the importance of openness in his team’s work and how with FetchClimate it’s very fast and easy to “get useful environmental information in a very open way.”

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Join Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. for an Anniversary Celebration

MSOpenness — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

What do Microsoft and open source have in common? More than you may think, unless you’ve already been following the work of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech), since the wholly owned subsidiary was created one year ago this month.

MS Open Tech focuses on building bridges between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, including open source solutions. From providing building blocks for interoperable cloud services to launching community-driven services like VM Depot to working with many organizations on open standards, MS Open Tech fosters greater choice for customers with heterogeneous environments.

Later this week, on April 25th, MS Open Tech will gather with many members of open source communities to celebrate the unlikely pairing at the Microsoft BizSpark Lab in Silicon Valley. An open panel discussion will include some storytelling about the road traveled thus far, with high expectations for the months ahead, reiterating how unlikely pairings can have real staying power (think cats and the internet).

RSVP here to be a part of this Thursday’s festivities. Happy one-year anniversary, MS Open Tech!

Lync 2013 Mobile Apps Available for Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad and Android

MSOpenness — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

The Lync 2013 team recently released a series of mobile apps that bring robust communication features, including voice and video, rich presence, instant messaging, and conferencing, to your Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Lync is a powerful tool for connecting with colleagues around the globe or a co-worker in a cubical around the corner. These new mobile apps extend the enterprise Lync experience to wherever you are, all from a single, easy-to-use interface.

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