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by Peter Galli on May 06, 2009 02:03pm
Microsoft will announce on May 7 an initiative to help government agencies and developers publish and interact with their data in Windows Azure, the company's cloud computing platform.
One of these is the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), a cloud-based approach to housing public government data in Windows Azure, making it accessible in a programmatic manner via open standard protocols and application programming interfaces.
The source code for OGDI is being made publicly available through CodePlex, Microsoft's open source hosting site, so that developers may reuse it and provide feedback. Sample code is also being provided for technologies widely used on the Web, including PHP, Python, Flash, JavaScript, and Silverlight.
This initiative helps to provide government with tools focused on increasing responsiveness and access to critical services, streamlined processes and services.
For their part, Microsoft and its partners have developed a robust enterprise architecture approach that enables agencies to meet the technology requirements of government mandates with a familiar set of tools - built on an enterprise-ready, scalable, and easily-managed software-powered architecture.
So, in short, the goal of ODGI is to reduce the cost of publishing government data, and simplifying data access by leveraging cloud computing and open standards.
More information on Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative can be found here.
To see an implementation of a data service in Windows Azure, using a sample of publicly available government data, visit this reference beta site.
These moves are part of Microsoft's ongoing open government efforts aimed at helping government organizations meet goals of transparency, participation and collaboration, particularly as an ever increasing amount of data becomes necessary and available.
As such, new methods need to be opened up to allow interaction with that data, and Microsoft's OGDI is designed to help public sector entities meet these goals.
This software, which underscores the importance of programmatic access to government data rather than having to download it, will give developers the ability to write programs that access data via Web-friendly programming methods without having to download or host the data; and let them write applications using any technology via open standards.
It also provides easier access to a broad array of government datasets, enabling the building of new and unique applications, while governments will be able to automatically refresh data without having to buy and maintain servers.
Cloud computing is the ideal platform for government data, and the technology is finally available to make it happen, says John Miri, Senior Fellow at the Center for Digital Government.
"The qualities that government looks for in an information management platform - things like flexibility, scalability, security, performance, and cost efficiency - are all better in a cloud model. As we see demands for government to become more transparent, collaborative, and interactive, a shift like this in technology architecture just has to happen, " he says.
For governments to become truly open, citizen access to public data in standards-based and interoperable ways is essential at all levels of government.
Given that most federal, state, local and education entities implement the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), they can meet open government goals of oversight, transparency and accountability through cloud and on-premises solutions such as Microsoft Stimulus360, which helps public sector agencies track, measure, and share information about federal stimulus programs through graphical dashboards and maps.
by Peter Galli on May 04, 2009 06:08pm
As Microsoft continues to engage in active dialogues with a variety of communities, including academic institutions, Sam Ramji - Microsoft's Senior Director of Platform Strategy - talked to a group of Computer Science students at Michigan State University (MSU) on Friday May 1.
Given that Friday was the last day of school for students, the good attendance at the talk underscores the level of interest in hearing about Microsoft's Open Source strategy.
Ramji was invited to give an address as part of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Spring Colloquium Series, where he talked about the evolution of Microsoft's Open Source strategy and what an increasingly diversified technology landscape means for future software engineers.
Ramji told the students and academics that the company firmly believes that Microsoft, Open Source companies and developers, computer science students and others, all play an important role in the overall future of information technology.
He also talked about how Microsoft sees heterogeneity as a reality for the business world, and building technology and partnerships to embrace this reality is a part of a companywide commitment to greater openness and transparency.
Ramji also spotlighted some innovative Open Source projects the company is supporting at universities across the world, including PlugBlog, which is focused on Windows Live Writer and is being developed by students from Croatia.
The primary goal of the project is to help developers and companies that run blogging services integrate with Live Writer by providing them documentation, samples, screencasts and Visual Studio templates. The project is also focusing on developing a set of Live Writer plug-ins as well as documentation to enable developers to build plug-ins more easily.
He also talked about the KDE Education Apps, an Open Source project from undergraduate students from computer science, computer information systems and design courses at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil.
This project takes a small initial group of education applications and ports them to run on the Windows version of KDE.
The third project he talked about was OpenMP to MPI, a development framework for writing distributed memory applications, and works very well for developing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications for Windows HPC Server 2008.
Typically, though, developers have had to choose between writing for a single system SMP environment, which is what OpenMP was designed for, or writing for a distributed computing cluster environment , where MPI is the standard.
This project, which is taking place in India, translates OpenMP code to be deployable using MPI, so that application developers can develop using OpenMP but deploy in a cluster environment if they choose to.
Ramji also stressed how Microsoft works in partnership with the worldwide academic community and is committed to utilizing the power of Microsoft software and technologies to help inspire, encourage innovation and expand opportunities for students and educators in a heterogeneous technology world.
He also mentioned the Open Source Technology Center, Microsoft's open source technology research and development organization, which supports and promotes the creation of regional programs, such as the Interoperability Labs in the Philippines, Germany and Brazil.
But, while students were interested in hearing more about how to establish a Microsoft-sponsored Open Source project at MSU, what was clear from their questions was their concern about finding employment in the current tough economic environment.
During, and after his talk, Ramji talked to worried Computer Science students about what Microsoft looks for when recruiting new staff, how to craft a compelling resume, and what the benefits are for working at the company.
by Bryan Kirschner on April 28, 2009 03:37pm
The first time I went to a LinuxWorld conference as a Microsoft employee, a guy passing by me saw "Microsoft" on my name badge and stopped. "Microsoft? What are you guys doing here?" he said. "I loved Microsoft. You put my kids through college."
As it turns out, he owned a small IT business during the late ‘80s and early 90s, which thrived building applications during the headiest days of the "PC revolution."
The last time I went to an OSBC as a Microsoft employee, I MC'd the third annual Open Source ISV "Day 0" event hosted by Microsoft. I told that story in my opening remarks. At the reception at the end of the day, one of the attendees came up to me and said: "You know, I'm one of those guys who's been doing technology for 30 years. And today's event felt like Microsoft in the early 90s. It's the first time I've gotten that from Microsoft in a long time."
It seemed a very fitting way to bracket one of the most challenging but also rewarding periods of my career: one that had its roots and the fertile soil for its success in my friends and former bosses Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji. They created space for me, the latitude to go out and figure out a way forward for Microsoft and open source, by first listening to customers, developers, and sys admins face-to-face.
That opportunity culminated in my becoming the first person in the company (but not the last!) to hold the title "Director of Open Source Strategy" and shipping the first company-wide statement of policy and position on open source.
But, by this time, you've probably figured out something's changed. I've moved on become Vice President for Corporate Strategies at Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner Research.
There are a few things I have always gotten excited about: technology is one. Politics is another. Learning new things is a third. These add to a strong desire to spend all of my time playing MMORPGs. But since that isn't economically viable, they fortunately also add to up a consistent interest in understanding interesting, often controversial, convoluted, and conflict-ridden-situations and figuring new ways forward.
I did this in the public sector, working on community policing, where I sprinkled in some work on political positioning, messaging, and communications. And then I brought that background to Microsoft ten years ago.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner connects all the dots in a new and exciting way. The founder, Stan Greenberg, is widely known for being the pollster and strategist for Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela. GQRR has a big political consulting practice, and a smaller (but expanding) corporate consulting practice. Continuing and accelerating the growth of the latter is my new job.
I've been around Port 25 since its very beginning. Pre-beginning, actually. I owe a huge debt to everyone inside Microsoft but, even more importantly, outside Microsoft who helped make it what it is today.
My new boss, Jeremy Rosner, was the subject of a movie called "Our Brand is Crisis." Port25 will always be with me as a powerful and tangible part of a big shift from "Microsoft and open source" looking more like a "brand" that equals "crisis" to one that looks more like...well, like Port25. Which is what it should be.
So...thanks. I certainly still expect to be engaged on issues of openness and technology.You can now find me at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
by Peter Galli on April 23, 2009 09:00am
A lot has been written by the press and blogosphere since the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit was held earlier this month, particularly about the panel that included Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Sun Microsystems' Ian Murdock, and Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.
The panel was entitled "Why Can't We All Just Get Along," which struck me as not only divisive, but also a little outdated given the level of collaboration that already takes place between proprietary and open source software vendors alike.
For example, Microsoft and Sun already have a long-standing working collaborative relationship; Microsoft also has a technical collaboration agreement with Novell, an agreement with Red Hat to test and validate our respective server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors, and a number of arrangements in place with other open source companies.
The panel discussed this in greater depth, looking at how collaboration, cooperation and competition exist: not just between proprietary and open software vendors, but also between Linux and open source ones.
This prompted panel moderator Zemlin to suggest that the three make an even greater effort come together and collaborate where it makes sense.
Interestingly, the Summit also spurred renewed discussion about whether there need to be more critics in the Linux community, with one blogger taking Zemlin to task for what he described as the "tall claims" he made at the Summit.
Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also used the panel to remind the Linux and open source communities of his offer for them to reach out to him and others within Microsoft and share their frustrations, problems and issues, so that they could be better educators and advocates on this front across the company.
Ramji also, again, stressed that Microsoft's customers want interoperability with open source software, including for PHP on Windows, but that making this happen sometimes took time.
Sun's Murdock seconded this, talking about internal inertia and how Sun also had had to deal with hearing from customers and developers that they wanted interoperability with technologies other than their own.
At Microsoft, there are cross-group, company-wide open source discussions and initiatives underway, with each group given the autonomy to decide for itself how this plays out with regard to their product set and business model.
While Port 25's mission is to be the voice of the open source community at Microsoft, it is far from the only voice on this topic. There have been blogs across the company on open and interoperability initiatives, from groups including security, Live and the Mac Business Unit, to name just a few.
It is also important to remember that Ramji and other executives like Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server & Tools business, have often said that open source is a journey that Microsoft is on and that much more needs to still be done. Many groups across the company are already responding to that call.
by Peter Galli on April 22, 2009 01:37pm
Microsoft is sponsoring research at the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) to develop an open source Network File System client for Windows. This will enable Windows to better interoperate with this emerging Internet storage protocol for fast file sharing.
NFS is a commonly used protocol for sharing files among networked computers and storage hardware, particularly with UNIX and Linux-based software. NFSv4 is the latest version of this software and adds support for parallel access to file servers, object-storage, and storage area network infrastructures.
Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business and a University of Michigan alumnus, expressed excitement about the project, saying that NFSv4.1 is an important standard for accessing parallel file systems in the high-performance computing market, where access to vast amounts of data is critical in areas like scientific or technical computing systems.
"We believe that customers want to be able to choose the technologies that best meet their needs and that also interoperate with existing systems. Ultimately, CITI's work will help change the way customers can combine their systems by enabling computers running Windows to directly and easily access NFS file shares on servers running Linux, Solaris, and AIX operating systems."
CITI, which is a research unit in the College of Engineering, developed the open source Linux-based reference implementation of NFSv4 that is already included in all Linux distributions. However, Peter Honeyman, a research professor in the division of Computer Science and Engineering and principal investigator of this project, notes that Windows is a critical component in the University's research cyber-infrastructure, responsible for the control of instruments in laboratories across the university, in medicine, engineering, geosciences, bioinformatics, and many other disciplines.
"So this project is especially important in helping university scientists and engineers fill a gap in the storage fabric. This partnership also shows how the university can serve as a living laboratory for the development of interoperable enterprise scale systems that meet the needs of industry and academia," he said.
by Peter Galli on April 15, 2009 05:54pm
I noticed today that my colleague Jeff Jones in the security group is launching a metric project that appears to be leveraging some of the good bits of open techniques.
I touched base with him briefly and he gave me a little more information about Project Quant, which is being undertaken along with Securosis, an independent security research firm.
Project Quant will be working on the metrics of patch management and is as much an experiment of a new research process as it is one of security metrics, said Securosis founder Rich Mogull in a blog post.
"For this project Jeff wanted to be involved, but also asked for an open, unbiased model that will be useful to community-at-large (in other words, he didn't ask for a sales tool). Rather than us developing something back at the metrics lab, Jeff asked us to lead an open community project with as much involvement from the different corners of the industry as possible," Mogull said.
While he also acknowledged that it is risky for Securosis to allow direct involvement of the sponsor, the company is hoping that the process works the way it thinks it will and which also happens to match Microsoft's project goals.
So, this is what's expected to happen: a project landing site has been set up at Securosis that will contain all material and research as it is developed; every piece of research will be posted for public comment and no comments will be filtered unless they are spam, totally off topic, or personal insults.
All significant contributors will also be acknowledged in the final report, although there will be no financial compensation for contributors and the project itself will retain ownership rights. All material will also be released under a Creative Commons license, with spreadsheets released in both Excel and open formats.
"In short, we are developing all research out in the open, soliciting community involvement at every stage, making all the materials public, acknowledging contributors, and eventually releasing the final results for free and public use. The end goal of the project is to deliver a metrics model for patch management response to help organizations assess their costs, optimize their process, and achieve their business goals. Let us know what you think, even if you think we're just full of it," Mogull said.
For his part, Jones told me that while he has been zealous in past reports about using repeatable methodologies, pointing to his source of public data, and outlining his assumptions step-by-step, he would like to take transparency one step further by developing models and methodologies first, in an open and transparent manner, so that everyone can agree on the pros and cons before the methodologies are applied.
"I think being completely open and transparent will help credibility since, similar to open source, everyone can scrutinize every step of the analysis ... creating open models and potentially getting community involvement just seems to be the right process," he says.
I plan to interview him at greater length in the next few weeks, so look for a follow-up blog then.
by Peter Galli on April 10, 2009 02:50pm
The candidate specification of the ECMAScript language standard - known as ECMA-262, was published on April 9.
ECMAScript is the scripting language used to create web pages with dynamic behavior, and is more commonly known as JavaScript. It is a component of every web browser and is an essential aspect of interoperability.
The ECMAScript standard is "one of the core standards that enable the existence of interoperable web applications on the World Wide Web," Ecma International, which develops standards for Information and Communication Technology, said in a media release.
This candidate specification, the PDF of which is available here, will now undergo interoperability and web compatibility testing, and will likely be submitted to the Ecma General Assembly for ratification as an Ecma standard before the end of 2009.
ECMA is inviting technical experts to review this candidate specification and submit feedback here by July 15, 2009.
This latest revision of ECMA-262 will now be known as ECMAScript, Fifth Edition and not under the previous working name ECMAScript 3.1.
The Fifth Edition codifies de facto interpretations of the language specification that have become common among browser implementations and adds support for new features, ECMA said.
The ECMAScript, Fifth Edition candidate specification has been developed by Ecma TC39, whose membership includes all major browser vendors.
These members will now create and test implementations of the candidate specification to verify its correctness and the feasibility of creating interoperable implementations and for web compatibility testing to ensure that the revised specification remains compatible with existing web applications.
TC39 members Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have each committed to participating in this testing process, which should be finished by the middle of July, and that a final draft of the specification can be agreed upon in September for submission to the Ecma General Assembly for final approval in December 2009.
ECMA also expects this to result in a fast-track submission to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for revision of ISO/IEC 16262.
"We expect the Fifth Edition to benefit all web developers by helping improve browser interoperability and making enhanced scripting features broadly available," said Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft's ECMAScript architect. Read more about all this on Microsoft's JScript team blog.
The last major revision of the ECMAScript standard was the Third Edition, published in 1999 and work on future ECMAScript editions continues as part of the ECMAScript Harmony project.
by Mark Stone on April 10, 2009 09:45am
Discussions of the PC market usually break down into "desktop" vs. "server", as if these are the only platform categories. However, the developer's dev box -- call it a "workstation" to distinguish it from desktop -- is really a separate platform. Remember, when Linus Torvalds created Linux it wasn't because he needed a better desktop operating system, or a better server operating system. What he wanted was something that could run the gcc compiler. He wanted a developer workstation he could use at home. Of course the developer workstation market influences other markets. Developers who develop on a platform are more likely to develop for a platform. So winning developer mind share is often about giving them what they want in the way of development environment. And in this regard, open source developers are something of a different breed. Microsoft has a great set of developer tools; I've certainly known developers who swear by Visual Studio. But there's something of a disconnect between graphical tools favored by Windows developers and then command line tools favored by traditional open source developers; I've also known developers whose first order of business with a new Windows workstation is to GNU-ify it. Ironically, the Internet has a convergence effect, drawing these two camps together. Put developers online, and they can collaborate. Put developers online, and they can not only develop, but they can build, deploy, and test. The workstation has become not so much a computer as an environment. The developer's toolkit includes version control, build management, automated testing, and the need to do all these things as a team rather than an individual. Developer environments have evolved rapidly to adapt to these changes. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) seems to understand this evolution as well as anyone, and a number of ASF projects focus specifically on tools for the developer environment (Ant, Buildr, Continuum, Gump, and Maven come to mind as a few examples). What's interesting is to see the .NET developers following suit, and wanting these same sorts of tools for their development environment. What's surprising is that this .NET effort is very grass roots driven. "Panday" is a Filipino word meaning "blacksmith", and can also be a reference to the graphic novel super hero of the same name (the graphic novel is also originates from the Philippines). This provides an appropriate metaphor for the name of the NPanday project on Codeplex. The NPanday project is one of several affiliated with Microsoft's Open Source Lab in the Philippines, and is part of the effort to bring to .NET some of the capabilities found in other open source development environments. The aim of NPanday is integrate Apache Maven into the .NET development environment.This would enable .NET developers to take advantage of Maven-compatible development infrastructure. Projects like NPanday are important because they offer developers more choice of tools in a Windows development environment. The more familiar those tools are to open source developers, the more open source development will be done on and for Windows. NPanday is also an important project for interoperability, making it easier to integrate .NET development with other development done using Maven.
by Peter Galli on April 02, 2009 04:41pm
Microsoft is embarking on a 15-city road show to help customers learn more about available solutions that may address their unique interoperability needs.
This is just another of the many ways Microsoft continues to respond to customers working in heterogeneous environments, a mission that was enhanced by the announcement of our Interoperability Principles last year.
The road show is being organized by Microsoft TechNet, and will stop in cities from Mountain View on the West coast to Denver, Atlanta and Chicago as well as Philadelphia, Boston and New York on the East Coast.
The rationale behind these events is simple: many customers work in heterogeneous environments that include Microsoft technologies as well as those from MySQL, Apple and Linux. As such, integration becomes vital in order for their core business applications to maintain business flow and efficiency.
Each event will last four hours, during which three sessions will be offered: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Interop with Linux and OS X; running Open Source Software on Window Server 2008; and SQL Server 2008 and PHP Web Application Infrastructure.
This program aims to increase understanding of the heterogeneous IT landscape and discuss practical interoperability solutions.
It also complements Microsoft's existing engagement in interoperability at many levels - through its ongoing participation in industry and internal development projects and standards bodies, as well as its publication of technologies under open licenses and strong collaboration with customers, governments and partners.
We hope you'll join us at one of these events!
by Mark Stone on March 30, 2009 04:15pm
We should never forget that a key motivator for open source developers is fun. For student developers -- where open source really starts -- this is especially true.
We’ve been looking at several potential student projects in Croatia, and for the past several months have been lending some support to the PlugBlog project.
In many ways this is a classic open source story. Croatia is not a large country (population 4.5 million), nor does it have as highly developed a technology sector as, say, Scandanavian countries of comparable size. Combine that with a distinctive language of Slavic origin, and you have an environment in which there is very little motivation for commercial software providers to offer Croatian localization. Thousands of languages and dialects world-wide struggle with this same problem: they simply lack the critical mass and market opportunity to warrant commercial software localization.
Into this breach steps open source. Several local blogging sites in Croatia do, of course, post blogs in Croatian. But bloggers would like to have the client tools to compose in Croatian as well. Given the popularity of Windows Live Messenger as an instant messaging client, there was a natural opportunity for open source development to create a localization pack enabling Live Writer composition in Croatian. This is precisely what PlugBlog aims to do.
One of the interesting twists on life in the era of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is how enabling SOA is of open source. Plugins for Live Writer can easily be open source independent of the source code status of Live Writer itself, because these plugins need only make web services calls to the Live Writer API. Indeed, a quick search of Codeplex shows more than 60 open source projects dealing with Live Writer. This is the kind of thriving little sub-community that SOA makes possible.
The developers working PlugBlog are students, and they are doing this work as a student project. As such, it has a clearly defined project plan and specific milestones for the project. The work they are doing will provide a valuable localized tool to Croatian bloggers, but it will also serve as an example of how other languages could integrate localization with Live Writer. This is all great, but you can’t stop developers from doing something just because its fun.
So I was surprised to see a check-in on this project that creates a connector for passing data from Skype to Live Writer. This wasn’t on the project plan. Talking to project coordinator Boris, he mentioned this was an extra they threw in in their spare time. Given the huge popularity of Skype in Eastern Europe this shouldn’t have been surprising, and indeed if anyone had mentioned it during project planning it almost certainly would have been part of the original design.
But this too is part of the beauty of open source: user-driven innovation fills the gaps overlooked originally. I look forward to more Skype integration and more pleasant surprises from the Croatian team.
by Mark Stone on March 25, 2009 10:00am
On Monday Microsoft and SD Forum held the 3rd annual Open Source ISV Forum. In a day of interesting talks, I was particularly struck by Larry Augustin's talk. As an emphasizing example of the growth of open source projects partnered with a commercial endeavor, Larry mentioned DotNetNuke.
DotNetNuke is, of course, freely available for download and licensed under an open source license. But there is also a professional edition and a range of complimentary commercial services for those who want service, support, or customizations. The business model is classic open source: the free download seeds the market with potential customers, and as some of those run up against the limits of what they are willing to do on their own, they make inquiries about the professional edition. Thus open source creates an inbound channel of qualified sales leads, without the overhead and expense of a sales force working in the field.
This is a great business model, but it's important to think about the actual decision-makers in this adoption process. What's distinctive about DotNetNuke is that it's one of the few mature, open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) that is not written in PHP. It is, as the name implies, ASP.NET based. And this reminds me of a prdocut management position I was in some years ago when (a) the only mature CMS choices were PHP-based, and (b) PHP on Windows was not yet a viable alternative.
The company in question was in a typical position: they were not a technology company, but needed a strong web presence for their business and to connect to the online community of their customers. They had a home-grown CMS solution that wasn't scaling, wasn't secure, and wasn't stable. My product management team put together a good comparison chart of various CMS choices, many of them open source. I sat down with the web development manager to review the choices.
"Some of these are good systems," he said, "but I have a team of .NET developers, and these are all PHP-based. I don't have head count to go out and hire a PHP dev for this project."
Note the decision-making process at work here:
The person with the first vote in the process is not a CIO or any other traditional "IT Decision Maker". It's one dev, talking to his manager. If your software gets vetoed at that level, or -- worse -- never even gets a try-out, then your product isn't in the decision-making process.
A lot has changed in recent years. PHP is now much better supported on Windows, and .NET projects like DotNetNuke are available and much more mature. This is as it should be. For open source to spread to its full potential, it has to be available in the technology adoption decision-making process. And that availability starts with being available to the hidden technology decision-maker: that lone developer who will look at software written in a framework they understand for a platform they work with.
by Vijay Rajagopalan on March 18, 2009 01:15pm
In October 2008, when Microsoft announced the general availability of Silverlight 2.0, and, as part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to interoperability, Microsoft and Soyatec unveiled the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (Eclipse4SL).
Today, Microsoft and Soyatec are expanding our interoperability collaboration by releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the eclipse4SL project that includes support for the Macintosh platform. Mac and Windows developers can now collaborate on Silverlight projects using the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDEs. We have also added several new features to the project that should please all developers like C# code generation and improved XAML auto-completion (check out our Interoperability Team blog for more details and a demo)
As an open source initiative sponsored by Microsoft (funding and architectural guidance) and led by Soyatec (development), the eclipse4SL project is released under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge.net and was submitted by Soyatec it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. Since its inception the project has received lots of feedback and made significant progress. eclipse4SL has been among the “Top Rated” projects on www.eclipseplugincentral.com for weeks:
(Screenshot taken on 03/16/2009)
For more information, visit the Eclipse for Silverlight web site, or join the discussion at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/.
Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect in the Interoperability Strategy Team at Microsoft.
by Mark Stone on March 18, 2009 10:10am
Several years ago I was helping a musician friend of mine set up a web site to use as a promotional site for his live performances. I opted for a simple, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) that wouldn’t require any special knowledge for him to post new information, and would be – famous last words – easy for me to set up and maintain.
Not having done professional web development for some time, I quickly found myself on the phone to one of my PHP guru friends. After editing three configuration files (two for the web server, one for PHP itself), and adjusting to make sure we had the right version of PHP running with the right version of MySQL, we finally got everything working, and the CMS properly installed and configured.
This small example has several instructive lessons:
So there’s something very liberating about seeing Microsoft offer better tools and facilitate better community collaboration so that web developers can spend more time on creative work and less on component complexity.
I’m referring specifically to the Microsoft Web Platform: Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (WebPI) and Windows Web Application Gallery, announced today at MIX ’09.
WebPI provides a single online destination and a single process for downloading and installing Microsoft’s freely available web products. By itself this may seem like no more than much-needed common sense, a good effort by Microsoft to help web developers get all the components they need working together more easily and more effectively.
What makes this development really interesting is the Web Application Gallery, an opportunity for web developers to participate and collaborate in a knowledge marketplace of shared components. In other words any web developer who follows certain basic guidelines can add their product to the Gallery, and be part of this ecosystem/community of shared web development activity. This is an opportunity not just to market your work, but share ideas and innovations with other web developers, and indeed let them build on your work.
Does that sound reminiscent of an open source community? It should. While there is no requirement that Gallery code be open source, the spirit behind this effort is very much one of collaboration. The Gallery is based on the idea that web developers collectively can advance their work more than each can individually.
Nor is this a playground strictly for Microsoft technologies. There are two supported web development frameworks in the Gallery: .NET and PHP. Opening up the world of PHP applications for Windows is an exciting prospect. There is at least the possibility that something like Word Press on Windows Server will be a point and click install. We aren’t there yet. WebPI installs SQL Server by default, and MySQL is still a manual install. Many web developers won’t – or shouldn’t – care about the difference, but to some it will matter.
But this is definitely a step along the right path, one step closer to making PHP an operating system-agnostic language. Because a PHP developer should care only about building great apps.
by Mark Stone on March 16, 2009 02:05pm
I’m going to tell a story that starts in Indiana, but really it’s about Brazil.
Once upon a time “scientific computing” was nearly synonymous with “Fortran”. Today, though, just about any high level language can be used to write High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These days that language choice also includes C#.
At Indiana University, the Open Systems Lab has pioneered work to implement Message Passing Interface (MPI) support for .Net, so that MPI applications can be written in C#. The project is MPI.Net, and you can find it on Codeplex. It is open source, about three years old, has reached a 1.0 release, and is compatible with two other important open source projects, OpenMPI and Mono. The principle developers behind the project are Andrew Lumsdaine at Indiana University and his former student, Douglas Gregor, who is now on the faculty of Rensselear Polytechnic Institute.
This is the kind of open source work that’s really exciting to see because of the way it expands choices for the developer and the end user. A C# developer should not be closed off from writing HPC applications if that’s what they want to do. And a research scientist should not have to think about whether their lab is running Linux or Windows Server. Both of these individuals are working enough layers above the operating system that somebody else’s operating system choice should not be a constraint.
So I was very excited to learn that students in Brazil at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul were doing work on MPI, and excited to talk with them about their work. One of their projects is MPI#, also open source and also hosted on Codeplex.
MPI# builds on top of the work of MPI.Net, adding some functionality not yet present in MPI.Net. Specifically, quoting from the project description:
The goals of this project would be to build upon MPI.NET in order to complement it with the features that are missing, mainly regarding collective communication. Either they could benefit from C# native support for such communication, either they could be programmed on top of the provided MPISend/MPIRecv encapsulations. C# and .NET features such as fault tolerance or dynamicity support would be studied, in other to turn the MPI# implementation robust in large, dynamic and heterogeneous platforms.
Two of the students working on MPI# are Ismael Stangherlini and Fernando Afonso. They are graduate students in computer science, working on projects affiliated with the Brazilian Interoperability and Open Source Software Development Nucleous. When I talked to them about their work on MPI# I was curious what their communication with Indiana University had been like. Their response: they had never been in contact with Indiana University; they simply downloaded the code for MPI.Net and started working on their own.
That’s the magic of open source: that they can, in fact, just download the code on their own and start coding against it. They may make an important contribution to MPI.Net. Or their code may be entirely disregarded. Or they may move on to other projects and somebody else may or may not pick up where they left off. At this stage it’s too early to tell. But the fact that all of these scenarios are possible demonstrates why, as a methodology, open source is so nimble and adaptive. A top-down product development process, or a top-down standards development process can only execute on the innovations envisioned by the few at the top, and at the speed of the slowest decision-makers in the process. But a bottom-up open source process enables every innovation that anyone at the grass roots level can see.
by Mark Stone on March 12, 2009 09:15am
"Open source at Microsoft." My friends still find that phrase surprising. Yet for those of us who have worked so long on open source, if we really believe the principles we have espoused, shouldn't this be the expected outcome?
In 1994 I did my first Linux install. It was an early version of Slackware, running the 1.0.8 kernel. The term "open source" was still several years in the future. While I never really accepted the basic premises behind the ideology of the Free Software movement, the methodology we later called "open source" seemed obvious and sensible. Share knowledge, collaborate with others, expect and encourage others to evolve your ideas and share their innovations. In other domains, we call this the Scientific Method. Without the ability to openly share ideas, the process of scientific discovery would come to a grinding halt, and we'd be stuck in something like the medieval era of alchemy.
So I am pleased, but not surprised, at the progress open source has made in the last 15 years. And I'm happy to have had a front row view to a lot of it. That journey has taken me through O'Reilly, as the executive editor for their open source group, to Editor-in-Chief of the brief-lived Journal of Linux Technology, to a long stint at VA Linux Systems (now SourceForge) initially leading the web arm of their open source evangelism efforts and later running their developer relations program. Along the way I worked with Chris DiBona and others to get a couple of important books out on open source (Open Sources, and Open Sources 2.0).
SourceForge's developer relations program introduced me to a lot of technology companies eager to reach out to SourceForge's community of open source developers. About six years ago one of the companies we worked with was Microsoft. I worked with Stephen Walli (then at Microsoft) and others to help get Microsoft's first open source projects up on SourceForge. At the time this was a big deal. Few at Microsoft had much familiarity with open source licensing, and there was unease about opening up intellectual property in this way. And Micrsosoft had no experience with the long term benefits of "paying it forward" with this kind of investment in the open source community.
Today is a different story. Microsoft has its own open source project hosting site, Codeplex. Codeplex is growing steadily, and hosts about as many projects today as SourceForge did in 2002. Microsoft has OSI approved licenses that are used by many projects. And Microsoft has an entire group under Sam Ramji that works, among other things, to improve open source offerings on top of Windows.
Some view this turn of events at Microsoft with suspicion and hostility. I do not. Indeed, it would be hypocritical for any true open source believer to view Microsoft that way. If we genuinely believe that the collaborative practices inherent in open source are an important part of software development methodology, then we have to believe that (a) the world's largest creator of commercial software would benefit from contributing to open source, and (b) the world's largest creator of commercial software would be smart enough to recognize those benefits. So it should seem natural, not surprising, that Microsoft's evolution has turned in this direction.
Six months ago I was curious -- fascinated even -- watching Microsoft's recent open source efforts from the outside. For the last six months I've had the privilege of working first-hand with Sam's team, and getting an inside view of what open source is like at Microsoft. I've also had the distinct privilege of getting to know some of the developers and projects on Codeplex. Mine has been an unusual journey from SourceForge to Codeplex, but one I'm happy to have made. And I look forward to sharing some of my experiences with these open source projects here on Port25.