by Sam Ramji on December 19, 2007 11:03pm

First, let me say thanks to Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell for their decades of hard work and their optimism.

Back in March, Jeremy invited me to talk about Samba and Microsoft, and how we could work together.  It turned out that our first opportunity to meet was actually at the annual Samba developers’ conference, SambaXP in Gottingen, Germany in late April.  I spent three days there listening to the Samba Team's reports on work they were doing, their observations relating to Microsoft protocols, and at breakfast with Tridge, Jeremy, and other team members we established a potential roadmap for collaboration.  Frankly, I think my commitments were viewed with disbelief by some but with cautious optimism by Tridge and Jeremy – as well as by Dan Shearer and by John Terpstra, a man of vision and entrepreneurial spirit.

I worked with legal and engineering teams at Microsoft once I returned from Germany, and over a few weeks in May I got consensus that we could help the Samba Team by delivering on the roadmap.  This included donating software licenses (MSDN Premium subscriptions) to the core team, building a test bed and beginning to share testing tools, preserving the UNIX extensions in CIFS to ensure that the work Jeremy and Steve French were doing would continue to be compatible with Microsoft implementations, accepting Samba Team’s observed bugs in Microsoft’s CIFS implementation and vice versa, providing some technical support on CIFS questions, and sending Microsoft engineers to the CIFS Conference @ Google in September 2007.

About the same time, Tom Hanrahan of IBM’s Linux Technology Center and the OSDL joined my team at Microsoft. His experience in working with Linux – and with Tridge – made it clear that we could sustain the work required to support the roadmap. Apart from his three decades of software engineering and management, one of Tom’s greatest assets is his combination of patience and perseverance; we knew it would take time and progress would be slow, but worthwhile.  We’re still early in the process of doing joint testing and engineering with the Samba Team, and have many milestones to achieve (for example, shared test suites & frameworks).  Thanks to Tom’s work with key engineers and managers in the company, we have already made progress and are committed to the long term.

Based on the dialog we’d established with Tridge and Jeremy, when the European Commission published the terms that would satisfy them in regards to Microsoft protocols, I saw an opportunity to continue aligning our work with the Samba Team.  The terms were good, but the Samba team wanted Microsoft to make some changes to fully conform with the existing practices of the Samba developer community. Jeremy and Tridge saw the opportunity as well, and thus began a 6+ week process of improving and correcting the agreement to arrive at terms that both dramatically expanded their access to protocol information and enabled the Team to continue developing Samba as they have in the past.  Attorneys and technologists (always an odd combination) on both sides worked hard to refine the language and do so in a clear and cooperative way. The discussions were masterfully led by Microsoft’s GM of Protocol Programs, Craig Shank (ex-Lineo!) and Samba’s Andrew Tridgell.  

Today the Samba Team announced that they’re satisfied with the agreement, and are taking a Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) trade secret and copyright license.  This will give them access to Microsoft specifications for the protocols in WSPP (such as file, print, and user and group administrative services) and allow the Samba Team to create, use, and distribute implementations.  I expect that this will significantly improve the process of Samba development, and produce better quality interoperation between Windows and Linux/UNIX environments.

What this process has shown me is that if we focus on technology, and patient, diligent execution, we can make real progress together.

This is a historic moment, and one that I’m proud of.  But it is only a moment, and now it’s time to get back to working on interoperability, one day at a time.

Cheers,

Sam

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by MichaelF on August 10, 2006 12:10pm

The second person we interviewed during the LANG.NET symposium is John Lam.  John is the creator of RubyCLR and most recently he created an Avalon Ruby Editor (we capture a short demo near the end of this video.  Let me acknowledge now that, yes, I need to work on my skills capturing demos on film.)

John has his own blog:  http://www.iunknown.com and he has an entry about his time with us in the lab here.

Credit to John's Blog for the photo below, from his visit to the Open Source Software Lab

by Sam Ramji on July 25, 2008 06:16am

I’m writing this from Portland, Oregon where one of the world’s largest Open Source conferences is taking place: OSCON.  This year’s event is focused on a theme of “ten years of open source,” referring to 1998 as the year that Eric S. Raymond, Danese Cooper, et al coined the term.  The Day 1 keynote theme was the past, Day 2’s theme was the present, and Day 3 (today) is focused on the future.

In my keynote address this morning I’m announcing three areas of contribution:

PHP on IIS + SQL:  Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications.  The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team.  ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD.  This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

We have tested over 100 community PHP applications and found them to run on IIS with no changes required.  Hank Janssen and Garrett Serack of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have been championing this work from the beginning, and I thank them for it.

Open Specification Promise:  Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP).  This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use.

I am grateful to Andy Oliver, the creator and maintainer of Apache POI, for contacting me back in June with a hope that Microsoft could supply the necessary rights for POI.  These include: rights for Office Binary document formats; Open XML; and the right to intentionally subset, have partial implementations, or defects in implementation of these specification.  Andy offered his thoughts here.

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

Jim Jagielski, Chairman of the ASF, had this to say about the sponsorship:

"We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top level projects in use and development within the ASF," said ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski. "The ASF Sponsorship program is an excellent way for companies and organizations to show their commitment and enthusiasm towards the ASF and The Apache Way, and helps to ensure that highly innovative, freely-available and community-based/consensus-developed software can continue to flourish and thrive within one of the most successful and respected communities in Open Source. Microsoft's sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft 'gets it' regarding the ASF."

It’s critical to understand two things about our sponsorship of the ASF: what it is, and what it is not.

It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology.  We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP.  We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF.  We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.

I offer my personal thanks in the learning process that has led to today’s announcements to Allison Randall, Jeremy Allison, Andrew Tridgell, Mike Schroepfer, Andi Gutmans, Wez Furlong, Andy Oliver, Jim Jagielski, Brian Behlendorf, Cliff Schmidt, Sally Khudairi, Gianugo Rabellino, and Justin Erenkrantz.

Cheers,

Sam

Congratulations to all the people involved in the PhoneGap community for the recent release of version 1.3 of their HTML5 open source mobile framework!

This release includes many new features, and you can find more details here. You may remember that we announced back in Sept that Microsoft was helping to bring Windows Phone support in PhoneGap: I am happy to say we can now check
this box!

We’re also pleased to note that all features in PhoneGap 1.3 are now supported for Windows Phone, as you can see on their site here.

  
Also, beyond the core PhoneGap features, developers can enjoy a selection of PhoneGap plugins that support social networks - including Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Twitter - and a solid integration into Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.

We have also developed further plugins to give HTML5 developers a feel for Windows Phone’s unique features like Live Tile Update and Bing Maps Search.

Please check out Jesse MacFadyen’s blog, PhoneGap’s dev lead, on his experiences developing PhoneGap on Windows Phone.

For more technical details of using the framework, see Glen's and Jesse’s technical walk thru blogs. For a quick a spin of what PhoneGap and Visual Studio allow you to do, see this WP7 and Android camera app created in 3 minutes! Phonegap bits are located here; plugins are here.

Looking ahead:

As mentioned in PhoneGap’s announcement blog post, the next PhoneGap 1.4 release will be from the Cordova incubation project at Apache.  We at Microsoft are proud to be members of this project and to offer technical resources.  We welcome the involvement of Adobe, IBM and RIM and look forward to collaboratively growing PhoneGap at its new home in  Apache while helping evolve an open web for any device.

Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 in IE9 has been instrumental in achieving this level of support. We are also building on our HTML5 investment through initiatives like bringing jQuery Mobile support as we outlined few weeks ago. Partnering with open source communities to bring this level of openness continues to be an important goal here at Microsoft.

So, stay tuned for more news on our support for popular mobile open source frameworks on WP7.5!

Abu Obeida Bakhach

Interoperability Strategy Program Manager 

From Jean Paoli

Since we launched Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) as a subsidiary, project ideas have poured into our team from inside and outside the company as we shipped many open source projects and participated in many open standards activities.

After a few months of existence I want to provide you some insights on how we are functioning internally: we are working on many projects and are hiring ten full time employees: we are hiring developers, technical program managers, standards professionals and  technical evangelists! We will be posting the jobs descriptions in a few weeks (and will update this blog with a link to apply).

We have also been thinking about how to scale in order to be able to work across the many projects that could be interesting to MS Open Tech, Microsoft, and to the industry as a whole.

I am pleased today to introduce the MS Open Tech Hub (the Hub):

We created the Hub as new engineering program for MS Open Tech engineers: It is a collaborative place to build open source projects, exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices, and marshal and temporarily assign resources from Microsoft to MS Open Tech (in addition to MS Open Tech full time employees) based on the needs of specific projects.

As the photograph above shows, the entire MS Open Tech team is excited and energized around the announcement of the Hub.

The number one goal of the Hub is to build, accept contributions or contribute to open source projects. Based on the needs of open source projects, engineering resources from Microsoft teams may be temporarily assigned to MS Open Tech to participate in the Hub, where they will collaborate with the community, work with the MS Open Tech full time employees and contribute to MS Open Tech projects. This collaboration will further help us exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices for open source.

The goal of the MS Open Tech Hub is to create a pool of talent where developers, testers, architects and others push boundaries, explore the toughest questions, and advance our investment in openness. The Hub brings together some of our best and brightest engineers to join together, work with the open community and toward the ultimate goal – building, accepting and contributing to interoperability, standards and open source projects.

For example, the Entity Framework team joined the MS Open Tech Hub, and brought today’s open source Entity Framework project to life. This team was able to quickly organize engineering and open development resources to be ready to start collaborating with the open source communities. EF will join the other open source components of Microsoft’s dev tools and frameworks – MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax – to help increase development transparency for this project.

Get to know our team and find out what they like about collaborating in the Hub.

We’ve learned through the years that great ideas happen when smart, passionate and creative people come together in a collaborative environment that enables new ideas to flourish.

A few photos of a typical day in the MS Open Tech Hub

Jean Paoli
President
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

by Peter Galli on July 06, 2009 12:27pm

I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs.

ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments.

"The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers," Scott Guthrie,  the Corporate Vice President for the .Net Developer Platform, told me July 6.

It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions.

You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications.

The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created the implementations, the type of copyright licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated business model.

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

You can find the terms of the Microsoft Community Promise here.

I told you this was good news!

I’m really excited to be able to give you an update on our strategy and product roadmap for Big Data, especially around our embrace of Apache Hadoop as part of our data platform.

As you may remember, at the PASS Summit last October we laid out our roadmap for Big Data, with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kummert announcing plans to deliver enterprise class Apache Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

Even more importantly, he announced that Microsoft will be working with the community to offer contributions for inclusion into the Apache Hadoop project and its ecosystem of tools and technologies.

Now, this week at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, Dave Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, will give a keynote address on Wednesday morning where he will talk about how we are demonstrating our progress on this front as we strive to help organizations derive new insights from Big Data.

In a blog post today, Campbell notes that Microsoft has been working hard to bring the simplicity and manageability of Windows to Hadoop based solutions, and we are expanding the reach with a Hadoop based service on Windows Azure.

“Hadoop is a great tool but, to fully realize the vision of the modern data platform, we also need a marketplace to search, share and use 1st and 3rd party data and services. And, to bring the power to everyone in the business, we need to connect the new big data ecosystem to business intelligence tools like PowerPivot and Power View,” he says.

Microsoft is working closely with the community and ecosystem – including partners such as Karmasphere, Datameer and HStreaming – to deliver an open and flexible platform that is compatible with Hadoop and works well with leading 3rd party tools and technologies.

“We have recently reached a significant milestone in this journey, with our first series of contributions to the Apache Hadoop projects. Working with Hortonworks, we have submitted a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation for enhancements to Hadoop to run on Windows Server and are also in the process of submitting further proposals for a JavaScript framework and a Hive ODBC Driver,” Campbell says.

As Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft’s Senior Director for Open Source Communities said last October, these moves benefit not only the broader Open Source community by enabling them to take their existing skill sets and assets use them on Windows Azure and Windows Server, but also developers, our customers and partners.

“It is also another example of our ongoing commitment to providing Interoperability, compatibility and flexibility,” he said at that time.

You can read Campbell’s blog here and learn more about what we are doing for Big Data here.

by Peter Galli on July 21, 2009 06:15am

Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience. 

By Gianugo Rabellino
Senior Director Open Source Communities
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

As I write this, I’m exploring the public preview of VM Depot, a new service from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.

The preview launch of VM Depot today is an introduction of things to come: you can already easily deploy different Linux-based virtual machines that include custom and curated installations and configurations. (We have the latest, full-fledged distributions of Debian, Alt Linux and Mageia for your hacking pleasure.) You can comment on them. You can rate them. And, what’s more, you can remix them to your liking and possibly share the results with other members of the community. Or why don’t you go ahead and just create a new one from scratch with your favorite software? For ultimate speed, you can quickly deploy images already customized for specific business scenarios. All this is just a few clicks away, completely free of charge and just waiting for your input to make it better. To learn more, see Getting Started with VM Depot.

VM Depot is another illustration of how the Azure platform is effectively open. As complex as it may seem, VM Depot was relatively easy to build as it relies exclusively on published Azure APIs. As we explore the meaning of openness and interoperability of cloud platforms, I can now say that Windows Azure is at the forefront of the debate and provides compelling proof that documented APIs can do wonders to enable building amazing new applications that leverage the cloud.

Some days you can’t help smiling. I had a big smile on my face back in June when Microsoft announced it was making preconfigured Linux images available in Windows Azure gallery and today I have another reason to be happy as I see how Microsoft Open Technologies is helping open source communities work even more collaboratively with the Windows Azure platform.

VM Depot wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a number of partners who have contributed images and packages for this preview launch, including Alt Linux, Basho, Bitnami and Hupstream. Here what they have to say about VM Depot:

"Ease of deployment is one of the key discussions we have with all of the companies leveraging Riak for their highly-available, scalable data storage needs. The VM Depot indicates that Microsoft Open Technologies is dedicated to supporting the needs of today's enterprise with the Windows Azure Platform" - Tyler Hannan, Director of Technical Marketing, Basho Technologies, Inc.

“The launch of Azure Virtual Images and now the VM Depot demonstrate that Microsoft is serious about building out its cloud computing platform. We are thrilled to be a part of this new marketplace, which simplifies deployment of the top open source applications to the enterprise-ready Azure platform, taking Windows Azure to a whole new level.” – Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock, developers of Bitnami

“The demand for cloud computing is there, and Hupstream had the skills to adapt a distribution to the specifics of cloud computing, and provide support as needed. We also wanted to make Debian and Mageia more accessible, and cloud platforms are the simplest way to get started. This was also an opportunity to establish a conversation between actors that traditionally shun each other. Notably, we had excellent collaboration with Microsoft engineers and other community members, while working on a common goal: expanding the reach of developers with Linux.” – Romain d'Alverny, Managing Partner & Engineer at hupstream

I have been doing a fair amount of traveling for MS Open Tech lately where I’ve met a number of great people from the open source community. After a wonderful holiday break, we’re off to an exciting and busy New Year. I know I will use every free moment this month to peek at the VM Depot dashboard and see our latest creation take its first baby steps. Expect more in the upcoming weeks and please help us make VM Depot the best place for open source communities to work together and build shared images for the cloud. See you there.

From the floor of the PHP Tek Conference in Chicago, with my colleague Peter Laudati, we’re excited to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP version 3.0. This Open Source SDK gives PHP developers a “speed dial” library to take full advantage of Windows Azure’s coolest features. On top of many improvements and bug fixes for this version (see the list from Maarten Balliauw’s preview), we’re particularly excited about the new service management possibilities and the new logging infrastructure.

Beyond the new features, we also feel that version 3.0 of this SDK marks an important milestone because we’re not only starting to witness real world deployment, but also we’re seeing more people joining the project and contributing. We’ve been talking a lot to Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen who is the lead developer on this open source project and he also shares the same sentiment: “It’s interesting to see the Windows Azure SDK for PHP mature: people are willing to contribute to it and incorporate their experience with the SDK and the platform.”

The most compute intensive part of Facebook app www.hotelpeeps.com is powered by PHP on Windows Azure

My colleague Todi Pruteanu from Microsoft Romania worked with Lucian Daia and Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec to help them get started with PHP on Windows Azure. The result is impressive.  The most compute intensive part of the Hotel Peeps Facebook application is now running on Windows Azure, using the SDK for PHP, as well as SQL Azure. Read the interview of Alexandru to get the details on what and how they did it (you can also check out the case study here). I like this quote from the interview: “HotelPeeps Trends running on the Windows Azure platform is the epitome of interoperability. Some people think that a PHP application running on Microsoft infrastructure is science fiction, but that’s not the case.”
Another interesting aspect is also the subsequent contribution by Zitec of an advanced “logging” component to the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. This new component provides the possibility of storing logs from multiple instances in a centralized location, namely Azure Tables.

More contributions from the community

As the SDK gets more widely adopted, there is an exciting trend toward more community involvement. For example, Damien Tournoud from the CommerceGuys who is working on developing the Drupal integration module for Windows Azure, recently contributed a patch fixing bugs related to inconsistencies in URL-encoding of parameters in the HTTP_Client library.  As we continue to improve the SDK to ensure great interoperability with popular applications like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! we look forward to engagement more deeply with those communities to make the experience even better.

New! Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP

Today we are also announcing the Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP.  It is a new project hosted on github that will be the primary repository for all sample php code / apps that developers can use to learn how to take advantage of the various features of Windows Azure in php.  Today we are releasing two samples to the repository: the Guestbook application (example of how to use the Windows Azure storage objects – blobs, queues and tables as well as a simple web/worker pattern) and “Deal of the Day” (more on this one later).  We look forward to feedback on the samples and I am also hoping to see some forks and new samples coming from the community!

New features to easily manage auto-scaling of applications on Windows Azure

As I mentioned the version 3.0 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP includes a new “service management” library, which provides easy ways to monitor the activity of your running instances (Windows Azure web roles & workers roles virtual machines), and to start/stop automatically instances based on usage. Then it becomes easy for you to decide which parameters (CPU, bandwidth, # of connections, etc.) and thresholds to use to scale up and down, and maintain the optimum quality of service for your web applications.

The scenario is simple: let’s say you are running an e-commerce site and you want to run daily promotions to get rid of overstocked items. So you’re going to offer crazy deals every day starting at 8am, each deal being advertised to your subscribers by an email blast. You will have to be ready ready to absorb a major spike in traffic, but the exact time is difficult to predict as the news of the deal may take some time to travel through twitter.  When the traffic does materialize, you want the site to run & scale independently – providing service assurance but also minimizing your costs (by shutting down unnecessary capacity as loads go down).  This is the scenario for the “Deal of the Day” sample application.

What’s the “Deal of the Day” (DotD) sample app and what to expect?

Deal of the Day (DotD) is a sample application written in PHP to show how to utilize Windows Azure’s scalability features from within PHP. We’ve kept is simple and built it in a way that’s easy to deconstruct and learn from.

As a sample application, DotD did not undergo extensive testing, nor does the code include all the required error catching, security verifications and so on, that an application designed for real production would require. So, do expect glitches. And if you do witness issues, send us a screenshot showing error messages with a description. I’ll get a prize to the first 100 bug trackers!

However, to give you an opportunity to see the sample application working, we’ve decided to deploy a live version on Windows Azure to let you test it for real and give the chance to win actual fun prizes! (and sorry for our friends outside of USA, but prizes can be shipped only to a US address )

Wanna play? Just go this way: http://dealoftheday.cloudapp.net/
Looking for the code, just get it on GitHub here: http://bit.ly/iPddwx

Architecture of the DotD sample app

The DotD sample app is comprised of several pieces which fit together to create the overall experience:

• Storage –responsible for containing all business data (product information & images, comments) and monitoring data (diagnostic information). All data is stored in Windows Azure Tables, Queues, and Blobs.
• Web Roles – Point of interaction of the application with visitors. Number of active Web Roles varies depending on the load. They are all the same, running the core of the applications logic, producing the user interface (HTML) and handling user inputs. All Web Roles share the storage elements described above.
• Worker Roles – Worker roles sit in the background processing events, managing data, and provide load balancing for scale out. The diagram shows two Worker Roles, one for managing the applications “scalability” (adding/removing Web roles) and one for asynchronously processing some of the applications tasks in the background (another way to achieve scalability)
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Global content distribution that provides fast content delivery based on visitor location.

Each of these parts is essential to the performance and scalability of DotD and for more details I invite you to read this introduction article, and then to dig deeper by reading part I (Performance Metrics) and Part II (Role Management) of our “Scaling PHP applications on Windows Azure” series. We will expand the series with additional in depth articles, the next one will be around monitoring the performance of your app.

We look forward to your feedback on the SDK and the Sample Kit.  Once again the URL is https://github.com/Interop-Bridges/Windows-Azure-Sample-Kit-4-PHP

Cheers!

Craig Kitterman
Twitter: Follow @craigkitterman
Web: http://craig.kitterman.net

I finally had the chance to sit down with Morten at MIX11 in Las Vegas last week to discuss the work he is doing on WordPress with Windows Azure to solve some common challenges with multi-site WordPress installations using traditional hosting.

In Morten's words: "I am building a garden just for me and my clients...I control it...but the security and management of the garden is run by a very large company...they also will make sure that it works!"

Read Morten's blog on http://www.designisphilosophy.com and find him on Twitter @Mor10

Enjoy!

Craig Kitterman
Twitter: @craigkitterman
http://craig.kitterman.net

by billhilf on May 18, 2007 09:22pm

It’s been an interesting week, with people offering a range of opinions about what they think is happening in Redmond.  Despite a lot of pontification, our strategy regarding intellectual property and open source has not changed – and it is not frivolous litigation or fear.

IDG did an article – it’s a far more accurate reflection of Microsoft’s IP strategy than the Fortune article from earlier this week.  Andy Updegrove also has a thoughtful article on his site, and Gartner’s lead open source analysts have been clear to customers: “don’t panic.”
Our strategy remains the same:

1. Our IP bridge makes lawsuits unnecesary.
2. We will continue to offer this licensing bridge to commercial software distribution companies.
3. This IP bridge enables Open Source developers to develop software free from concerns about patents.
4. We will continue to grow Open Source applications and technologies on the Microsoft platform.

Microsoft was created by developers, for developers and is only successful through developers and customers.  Developers who write Open Source software are participating in a worldwide community of practice and a spirit of collaboration.  These are noble characteristics and Microsoft both applauds and supports this work.

We continue to champion projects like JBoss, Zend (PHP), and SugarCRM, as well as Firefox, openwsman, Bandit and thousands of others.  We are building relationships and a track record here and we ask that you judge us on these actions.  We will work with commercial and non-commercial developers to increase the availability and quality of open source on Windows and interoperability with Windows.

Our IP strategy has not changed.  Where we have unique and valuable intellectual property (as indicated by our high scores on the science strength of our patents) we will seek to license it to commercial entities (such as Samsung and Fuji Xerox).

It’s not us versus the free world.  It’s about commercial companies working together around IP issues – it’s business as usual.

- Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji

by MichaelF on May 24, 2007 06:15pm

It's happened to me and I'm sure it has happened to you:  your software won't load and your data is now trapped inside your PC.  The problem may be a hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable.  Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost.  This paper describes how one can use Linux to recover data from a non-functioning Windows machine.

Attachment: datarecovery.pdf

Today, at BSDCan 2012, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix announced upcoming native support for FreeBSD support on Windows Server Hyper-V.

This move continues our commitment to extend support across platforms to the Windows Server Hyper-V solution, making it easier for more customers to realize the benefits of server virtualization and more easily adopt cloud computing.

This will allow FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. The drivers and associated source code will be released early this summer under the BSD license, and will initially work with FreeBSD 8.2 and 8.3 on Windows Server 2008 R2.

You can read more about this on the Openness blog.

Joe CaraDonna, the Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, says in an interview that he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft and Citrix to deliver Windows Server Hyper-V support to FreeBSD.

“I think the combination of these virtualization technologies helps round-out the FreeBSD virtualization story, and makes the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”

He also notes how committed Microsoft is to open source initiatives: “we decided from the very beginning that we were going to open source the code under the BSD license. No strings attached. They were as eager as us to support the project, and then give the code away. How cool is that?”

You can read the full interview here.

Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio.

The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.

The theme looks just gorgeous, doesn’t it?

The CSS and Javascript theme adapts to the current theme used in Windows Phone and applies the right styling to the jQuery Mobile controls.This allows mobile HTML5 web sites and hybrid applications to naturally integrate into the Windows Phone Metro style experience. This offers developers the choice of rapidly integrating the theme into their existing application but also to contribute to this open source project through GitHub.

You can see an extensive demo of the theme on this page and you can learn more on this site where we are publishing new articles, references and source code sample for developing with Apache Cordova and the Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile.

This is another milestone in our continuous engagement with the community. Our team has been working closely with the Windows Phone division to support the mobile HTML5 and JavaScript open source communities over the last year to bring popular open source projects to Windows Phone:

• A few months ago, we sponsored the development of full Windows Phone support for PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova), the open source framework that lets applications be built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other mobile platforms using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.
• At the same time significant improvements were brought to jQuery Mobile (read more about this in our previous blog post): feedback from the community has been great and was partly responsible for our decision to expand our engagement with jQuery Mobile and sponsor this work.

We believe it is important for developers to have choices when targeting Windows Phone, and we also want them to be able to deliver a good experience to the users of their applications, especially when making the choice of using Web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) to target multiple mobile platforms by picking solutions such as Apache Cordova.

To do so, developers already enjoy a selection of Apache Cordova Plugins that give their application a Windows Phone touch such as Social Share, Bing Map launcher and Live Tile. Now developers can use the new open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile to give their mobile apps and websites the Metro style look and feel, and offer the final users an experience similar to the one they get with native applications.

As usual we are very interested in hearing from developers and gathering feedback about the experience of developing HTML5-based applications and websites on Windows Phone. Let us know what other features, tools and frameworks you’d like to see.

Abu Obeida Bakhach
Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation