by KarriD on March 05, 2008 11:32am

My name is Karri Dunn, I am joining the Port25 team focusing on developer interests.  I am a 10 year veteran at Microsoft.  I’ve always been in dev or IT Pro groups at Microsoft and have participated in many programs, offerings, and product launches.  As an example, I was part of the first Imagine Cup (a worldwide student developer contest sponsored by Microsoft) and to see what the students developed was mind blowing.  I’m most fascinated by the cool stuff for developers and students like XNA, Photosynth, etc.  

Students in Singapore created a grocery store website, software app, and hardware.  Shoppers could build a grocery list from home or office on a website and then download the list onto the shopping cart/basket display once in the store. Carts/baskets were equipped with scanners so shopper could check off items on list.  The software was also fitted with a coupon feature – when a shopper scanned an item from the list and place the item in their cart, a competitor coupon would show up on the scanner incenting the shopper to purchase the competitors product instead of the product they’d placed in their cart. There were also check out features speeding up the checkout process.

These are real examples of why DreamSpark is important to the Port25 community and to the future of open source and Microsoft.  Microsoft Expression Web (one of the products available) supports PHP as well as ASP.Net.  XNA Game Studio will enable students to get involved in the hundred-plus-and growing shared and open source game projects on Codeplex.   It is one more step toward greater participation.

Below, I want to call out a couple cool aspects of DreamSpark (see links for complete details.

·         Partnerships help make it better:  International Student Travel Confederation (ISTC) The ISTC is a non-profit organization that aims to secure and inform students of cheap or tax-free travel. Working in more than 100 countries around the world, the ISTC’s mission is to increase international understanding through the promotion of travel and exchange opportunities among students, young people, and the academic community. ISIC and Microsoft are working together to offer DreamSpark as an additional benefit for purchasing and owning and International Student Identification Card.
 

·         Open source interoperability helps make it better too:  Microsoft is partnering with Shibboleth, an open source authentication and authorization infrastructure product, which can be used for student verification.  This product is one way in which Microsoft is verifying student status and eligibility to receive Microsoft DreamSpark program benefits.  Shibboleth is an existing middleware solution that is widely used by universities.  Its use provides access to a network of institutions and students, enabling immediate connection to over 10 million students, with a path for other academic institutions to sign up.  Shibboleth also enables sites to manage the authorization decisions permitting the sharing of specific information between an identity provider database and an external party (such as Microsoft) – such as binary notification of whether the site user is a student or not, without releasing other student information. 

Details of the DreamSpark Program:

The Microsoft DreamSpark program, available at http://channel8.msdn.com, launched in 10 countries - Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.  For more information on the products and how the program will expand to high school students, please visit PressPass for more details.

Products: Students will be able to download any of the following software products via Channel 8:

·         Keep in mind, software is being provided to students for non-commercial use in particular academic activities but can be used on CodePlex and Imagine Cup.

If you’re a student, come back and let me know how you use DreamSpark to learn, create, and

by jcannon on March 12, 2008 03:43pm

At last years, OSBC, Microsoft hosted its first annual Open Source ISV Forum. In large part, the event was focused on facilitating  a discussion around enabling open source innovation on Microsoft technologies, and to help potential partners reach new customers with those innovations.

For frequent readers of Port 25, it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Microsoft is building bridges with open source partners. Over the years, Microsoft has helped thousands of partners grow successful businesses by providing a strong platform – both technically and operationally – to build on. This model has been successful for one reason: choice. Choice in applications, choice in licensing and support models, and choices in how customers deploy the solutions they’ve chosen.  It is simply good business sense to extend this tradition to open source communities as well - and we’re committed to doing so.

That’s why we’re excited, in just under two weeks, to hold the second annual Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum on Monday, March 24th. Similar to last year, we’re holding it in conjunction with OSBC to ensure we’re reaching out to the right folks at the right time, and participating in the larger dialogue that OSBC provides of putting open source to work. Sam Ramji will be kicking the day off with a session entitled, "Open Source, Interoperability, and Microsoft: What it all means." That'll be followed with sessions on venture capital funding, partnering, sales and marketing assistance- and a professional networking reception afterwards.

I encourage you or your company, if you are attending OSBC, or live in the San Francisco area, to register and attend. It’s free for the day, and will promise to be a valuable, open and insightful dialogue on the choices, and challenges, of going-to-market with open source.

by Garrett Serack on March 24, 2008 04:45pm

Howdy ya'll,

I was recently in Boston, and managed to spend a couple of days at Drupalcon, where Port25 was a silver level sponsor for the event.  The herd was over 800 attendees--all focused on Drupal.  Needless to say, I was duly impressed.

What's Drupal?

Drupal, written in PHP, is an open source content management platform. It's equipped with a powerful blend of features, and supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven portals.  Drupal has been rapidly displacing a large number of other PHP based content management systems, and has an active community along with broad vendor support.

Over the last year or so, Microsoft has been working hard to improve PHP's support on Windows.  With the hard work from the SQL Server team, who recently published a new CTP of the native SQL Server PHP driver, the FastCGI work that the IIS team has done, and of course Zend, who we've been coordinating with--PHP is rapidly getting the support and attention it deserves.

So... Drupalcon?

Ah Yes. From the humble beginnings in 2004, where 10 people attended the first Drupalcon, it's grown into a massive bi-annual event (one in North America, and one in Europe) with over 800 attendees, plus sponsors. I was truly stunned at the sheer size of the event--I would have assumed a much larger affair.

Kieran Lal hosted a session early on Monday morning, in which he told how to get the most out of Drupalcon--and really, it was applicable to any conference, and I really enjoyed it. Between that session and the first keynote, I hung out, and got to know a bunch of folks. 

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Drupalcon was really quite special--of all the conferences I've been to, Drupalcon was home to the most friendly folk I've ever seen.  Everybody was really fun to talk to, and they all were excited to hear about Microsoft's effort in making PHP run great on Windows.

I spent about 45 minutes talking to Larry Garfield about expanding support for databases in Drupal.  Larry has done a tremendous amount of work for Drupal 7 on database abstraction--it's going to be pretty cool, trust me.

I managed a few minutes of Kieran Lal's time, which was quite amazing, as he seemed to be doing a million things at once during the conference, and barely had a spare moment to catch his breath.  We talked about the future of Drupal, and how Microsoft could get involved, and I think we're both pretty excited about the future. 

Dries Buytaert gave his traditional "State of Drupal" presentation (video can be found here), which contained a couple real eye openers:

- Drupal 6 had over 100,000 downloads in the first month of release, that's 2x over Drupal 5. Wow. That's
pretty amazing.
- Drupal 7 (and beyond) appears to have one of the most well thought out plans in place--I can't recall another open source project that has such a detailed road map.

Then, I came home...

Aside from the jet-lag and the shortness of the trip, I enjoyed the conference immensely.  We've been playing with Drupal in our lab over the last several months, and it's clear that the time has been well spent--Drupal is not only an emerging phenomenon, but the future looks even brighter.  I reckon you'll be seeing many more posts from me in the future about it.

by jcannon on April 01, 2008 02:26pm

We wanted to thank the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for the commitment and willingess to work together - and today, making public the Microsoft Open Source Initiative: The Microsoft Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community. Quote the latest OSI Board Blog: "In the OSI board election held at the end of March, we've [Microsoft] gotten a controlling majority of board seats."

You can find more information at http://www.opensource.org and sballmer's first blog post.

by jcannon on April 14, 2008 03:14pm

John Lam brings word of a Ruby meet-up at the MVP Summit happening today at 2PM at the International Meeting Place at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle.

Quote John: "I’m going to be at the Convention Center from around 1:30 onwards. There are a lot of central public meeting places at the convention center. From where I sit at my desk this morning, it looks like the “International Meeting Place” on the second floor will do just fine. I’ll hang out there and I’ll be happy to demo / talk about IronRuby, OpenSource and whatever else *you* want to talk about. Follow me on twitter (john_lam) if you want up to the minute updates on where we’ll be just in case this location doesn’t work out."

More details here

by Bryan Kirschner on April 25, 2008 06:12pm

The same week that Brad Smith (Microsoft’s General Counsel) keynoted at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), we held our first Microsoft-wide Open Source Day (which Jamie and Mario both blogged about). We all noticed folks expressed interest in what was presented and discussed at Open Source Day, so we’re going to try to share what we said and what we learned with the Port25 community.

I was one of the presenters and facilitators for Q&A and panel discussions. The thrust of my presentation was ensuring everyone understands why Microsoft cares about open source, how Microsoft engages with open source communities, and what this means to you as a Microsoft employee (see the succinct, if not terribly exciting, slide below…).

If you read Port25, and you know about Codeplex, and Microsoft.com/opensource, and you’ve seen the cool stuff the open source heroes are doing, you probably have a good idea about the former two items. It’s the “you” part for which Open Source Day represents a major milestone, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.

Here’s why Open Source Day—kicking off a continuing dialogue with hundreds of Microsoft employees, and, by extension, the people they work for, who work with them, who they have lunch with etc, etc—is a transformative event. There have been pioneers working on open source and Microsoft “growing together.” At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll put them into two groups: people like me, Sam Ramji, and Bill Hilf, and other members of the Port25 team, for example, whose full-time job is thinking about open source in one way or another. With no disrespect to what is one heck of an open source all star team (there are many I could highlight, but we’ve got some nice videos for Tom and Hank…), it’s still a relatively small number of people relative to 80,000 plus employees around the world.

The next group is larger and its people who just did smart things: I’m oversimplifying, but open source wasn’t necessarily their one-and-only-job, or even specifically in their job description. There’s the Shared Source team, the Codeplex team, and bunches of people across the company (once again I’ll stick to the latest videos…Jim, John…shoot, it’s killing me to leave people out…Rob, Sara…). One of the best parts of being in “Group 1” is just discovering what “Group 2” is doing…far more often than not, just because it made sense for their product or team…and for open source partners or communities.

But we’re still not fully tapping “Group 3.”…. until now. From KDE to BSD, Office to MSR, there are a lot of people at Microsoft who came in to the company with experience and passion for some form of participation in open source. And there are lots of people who, in the course of their work and lives, wonder “why can’t my team / group / product do <insert idea about growing together with open source.” I know because Open Source Day broadened out the discussion to more people than ever before—and with more clarity about what is not only possible—but encouraged by the company. Open Source Day is a pivotal point in freeing the many, many smart passionate developers and program managers and others from any lingering concern that engagement with open source is something they need to worry about “more than” doing something else. (Yes, anything still has to make sense for customers, partners, and shareholders…like everything else--but open source engagement and strategy is a “first-class citizen.”)

These statements weren’t made specifically “for” Open Source Day. Brad’s comments are from his OSBC keynote. Ray’s are from his talk at the Microsoft MVP Summit. But they sum this up better than anything I had in my slides:

Ray Ozzie in response to a question about Microsoft and Open Source (read the whole thing here):

Well, my position toward Open Source generally is that it's a part of the environment. It's very useful for developers to be able to get the source code to certain things, to modify them. …Microsoft fundamentally as a whole has changed dramatically as a result of Open Source in terms of as people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and other systems has increased. …Open Source is a reality. We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically, depending on how you look at it, will take certain aspects of what we do, and we'll Open Source them where we believe there is a real benefit to the community and to the nature of the growth of that technology in Open Sourcing it. …e live in a world together with Open Source, and we have to make it possible for you to build solutions and for customers to build solutions that incorporate aspects of both.

Brad Smith at OSBC (read the whole thing here):

…Before I say anything else, I do want to say this: We at Microsoft respect and appreciate the important role that open source software plays in our industry. We respect and we appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open source developers make in our industry. We respect and we appreciate the important role that open source software plays for our customers, customers who almost always have heterogeneous computer networks with software and hardware and services that, as you all well know, come from multiple vendors. That is not what you have always heard from us, and I recognize that. But I did want to start by saying that…

And the beauty of Open Source Day is this: Brad Smith and Ray Ozzie are pretty darn important, but, basically, they are in “Group 2.” What they’ve really done is catalyze and energize the hundreds—thousands—of people in Group 3 to take Microsoft and open source into a new era. I just hope those of us in “Group 1” have the energy to keep up!

by Sam Ramji on April 29, 2008 05:59pm

I have the privilege of interacting almost every day with technical and business experts who are creating the future of software—including both core engineering teams at Microsoft and thought leaders across a broad spectrum of open source communities. Especially in the last few months, I’ve been able to take more time to articulate where I think this is going – such as writing how open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and participating in Infoworld’s roundtable on the state of open source.

I think that many people are seeing that the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is being changed fundamentally (and for mutual benefit).

Today, Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson announced that System Center will have the ability to deliver automated management across heterogeneous IT environments, such as UNIX and Linux. What I see as a best practice for commercial and community engagement with open source technology plays a big part in this.

Specifically, Microsoft will deliver an agent infrastructure and management packs (MPs) for monitoring Linux and UNIX platforms for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Early partners like Xandros and Quest are delivering cross-platform MPs for MySQL and Apache, and Oracle, respectively. Microsoft and Novell are collaborating on the SUSE Linux Enterprise MP.

The agent infrastructure Microsoft is building to interoperate with UNIX and Linux is built leveraging industry standards and open source such as WS-Management and OpenPegasus. Pegasus is an open-source implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards coded in C++, designed to be portable, and licensed under an MIT license, and work is underway to integrate with the newly DMTF ratified WS-Management standard. Pegasus already ships as part of major Linux and UNIX distros.

It simply makes great technical and business sense to cooperate with the OpenPegasus community to build upon an industry-standards based, cross-platform technology. Just as important, however, is preserving the virtuous cycle of contribution, benefit, and subsequent contribution: Microsoft is joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee. The agent technology—being built will be contributed back to the community under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), an OSI approved open source license.

I greatly appreciate Allen Brown's positive comments (Allen is the President and CEO for The Open Group) and the support and education we’ve received from the sponsors and maintainers of Pegasus. He said:

“We are pleased to have Microsoft join the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and welcome their commitment as a positive step for the global open source development community. Since The Open Group initiated the OpenPegasus project seven years ago, it has been deployed across a wide range of IT platforms worldwide. We look forward to Microsoft’s active participation in the continuing development of the project.”

Today’s announcement and the business and technical decisions made by the System Center team are a great example of the fact that commercial innovation, industry partnerships, and open source participation can all work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. My enthusiasm and excitement—and my applause for the System Center team, partners like Xandros, Quest, and Novell, and the OpenPegasus community—is tempered solely by my conviction this is not the only or last example of the best of Microsoft, partners, and open source growing together. This is a great day – and there are more great days to come.

by Paula Bach on June 09, 2008 05:29pm

I am back in Redmond. For those of you who don’t know, I spent last summer here in the open source software lab conducting research on integrating usability into open source. My last blog talked about how I have made some changes to my research program. One change is to situate the research argument within the broader scope of how open source has been changing. My favorite paper discussing this is titled “The transformation of Open Source Software” by Brian Fitzgerald and is only available if you have a subscription to the MISQ journal, but you can download an audio mp3 version read by Fitzgerald himself here. He coins the term ‘open source 2.0’ and characterizes software development in open source and compares it to proprietary, and shows that open source software development has elements of proprietary software development and proprietary has elements of open source. Any of the big open source projects with paid developers, and my favorite example, Mozilla, with paid UX professionals, is an example of the former, while Microsoft is an example of the latter. When I first met Bryan Kirschner (now director of open source strategy at Microsoft) he introduced me to the idea that API developer communities are a lot like open source communities.

The most interesting part of my research is that it is situated right in the middle of open source hybridization. A hybrid open source software development model combines a business model, either open source or proprietary, and open, two-way community input. The basis of my argument for the research is as follows: open source software development has been so successful that proprietary companies have been paying attention to incorporating open source strategies into their business model and very successful open source projects have had business models created around them. Both of these phenomena share some characteristics of software development, but taking a well-developed model of usability and transplanting it into a hybrid software development environment will be challenging because the hybridization landscape is still being cultivated. Because Microsoft has been successful with integrating usability activities into its production of software, it makes an interesting case to investigate how one of their hybridization strategies, CodePlex, integrates usability.

I am working with the CodePlex team to develop usability support for CodePlex. This means that the CodePlex community will have a say in how we design the support. Traditionally, open source projects are challenged for usability resources so the support has to range from being able to support code-centered and usability-interested developers to the possibility of usability professionals. The project addresses three main challenges for usability in open source: merit and trust, chasm between work activities, and incommensurable tools and methods. If you have a project on CodePlex and are interested in participating in this research, then please contact me: codeplexresearch at live dot com.

by Sam Ramji on October 16, 2008 04:20pm

It has been a month or so since the Codeplex announcement of server support for SVNBridge, which enables TortoiseSVN to talk to Team Foundation Server, and the team is looking for feedback now this has been out for a while. I also recently interviewed Codeplex's Sara Ford on this, and wanted to share her responses with you.

Sam Ramji: So, Sara - this has been a top request for some time.  What are the most interesting comments you've received requesting this feature?

Sara Ford: There have been countless requests and comments for this feature, but one of the more memorable ones when we first announced the SVNBridge project last year is "It's so crazy it just might work," was one.

Many of our users view CodePlex, when compared to other open source hosting sites, as Team Foundation Server (TFS) versus Subversion (SVN). Now, our users can use either TFS or SVN clients against any of our projects. It's like soccer fans and American football fans are unexpectedly findings themselves in the same arena, conversing for the first time.

Sam Ramji: What made it hard to deliver this feature?

Sara Ford: When we first started investigating this, we were skeptical that it could be done, since TortoiseSVN and Team Explorer are so different.  But once we began comparing the protocols used for Subversion and Team Foundation Server, we were surprised by how much of it could easily be translated.  So a lot of things started working quickly, but there were a couple of areas that didn't map directly, and those represented the bulk of the effort to get all the kinks worked out.

Sam Ramji: What can Subversion fans expect next from Codeplex?

Sara Ford: Well, as always, we look at the features users have voted the highest on the CodePlex Issue Tracker. Now that we're closing our number one most requested feature, we're asking our Subversion fans to visit our Issue Tracker and start voting for what they want to see next!

Sam Ramji: It's interesting that now we have Subversion support in Visual Studio through the AnkhSVN project, and SvnBridge support from Codeplex on the server side. You can probably do round trips via SVN from Visual Studio to Codeplex.  Interesting?  Or just plain strange?

Sara Ford: VisualSVN and AnkhSVN are both popular plug-ins for Visual Studio that provide integrated IDE support for Subversion, and several users have mentioned they've tried them against CodePlex and they work great!  We really like the idea of providing the broadest support for different clients and tools, so users can pick the tools they prefer.

by Peter Galli on October 20, 2008 05:05pm

The AJAXWorld Conference and Expo  got underway in San Jose today, under the broad theme of "Rich Web Technologies for Enterprise Web 2.0 & Social Web."

Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, delivered the keynote address today, while Brad Abrams, the Product Unit Manager for the AppFx team here at Microsoft, will also be presenting a couple of sessions over the next few days.

While Microsoft is not announcing anything new at the show, Abrams will point to the cumulative effect of all the work that has been done so far. He will talk about how JQuery will ship with future versions of Visual Studio, as well as how standards based JavaScript, CSS, and HTML are all now supported in Visual Studio 2008.

Attendees will also get to see how JQuery interoperability and usage is now on the same page with ASP.NET Ajax, as well as demos of the cross-browser, cross-platform Silverlight plug-in, which works on Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, and on both Macs and Windows machines.

Abrams tells me he also plans to show off a couple of Silverlight sites running on Linux with the Novell Moonlight implementation of Silverlight, as well as a demo of its Silverlight tools for Eclipse, which underscores how developers can use the tools they want to leverage Silverlight.

He has also posted a lot more detail on his talk, which was titled "Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch," in this blog post.

Also, Bryan Kirschner of the platform strategy group, will be delivering a keynote address on how Microsoft participates in a world of choice at GOSCON, the Government Open Source Conference, in Portland tomorrow.

In addition, two other colleagues from Microsoft will also be participating. Stuart McKee, the National Technology Office for the U.S., will be on the Government Open Collaboratives Panel with Brian, and Kathleen Connor from Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, will also be speaking.

by Bryan Kirschner on October 28, 2008 01:33pm

The city of Matsue, Japan is using Ruby to promote regional economic development. One of the unexpected highlights of the recent GOSCON, was a gentleman from Matsue coming up to me after I had given my talk about open source and Microsoft and saying "I am using IronRuby. I love it." 

It was a nice moment because - even in the best of times - public sector IT typically has resource constraints that make it tough for them to think aspirationally about technology.  And right now isn't the best of times. 

But if you step out of the current challenges for a moment, it was a reminder that whether you're a developer at Microsoft or at the Census Bureau, you have the potential to contribute to something people would love. (Why do people at the north end of my zip code take 5 minutes longer to get work? On a percentage of the mean basis, that's huge. Does the disruption of the grid by the lake have that much of an impact? Yes, I am a long-time GIS nerd.  Ironically, there is a nerd GIS - although, sadly, it is an acronym and not a density plot of nerds per square mile...).

On a more practical level, "open government collaboratives" was a theme of the conference.   This is a consortium-based approach to development -f or example, multiple cities cooperating to develop a web toolkit for libraries.  (Brian Prentice and Andrea Di Maio at Gartner call this "community source.")  The good news is that both open source and Microsoft can play useful - and complementary - roles in this. 

Open source has demonstrated a set of practices, and open source communities have developed a pool of technologies - Plone, for example, was a popular CMS that government collaboratives customized.

I wound up speaking to a couple folks about things like enabling single-sign on with Active Directory into their Plone-based systems.  This is exactly what Sam Ramji describes (in graphic detail) as our open source strategy: as the application ecosystem (including open source applications) on Windows grows, products like Active Directory become more relevant. (In the case of Active Directory, and System Center, those applications don't need to be on Windows.)

I started my talk with two simple declarative statements: open source is neither a fad, nor a magic bullet.  Microsoft products are neither a fad, nor a magic bullet (mildly interesting diff for a slow day: live google).

More importantly, over and over again, this was the right starting point for a face-to-face conversation with the IT managers attending GOSCON.  For most, this is where they are as well - considering all the tools in the toolbox, trying to determine the "best tool for the job."  That can be challenging, but it's a bilateral, constructive challenge we can work together on-to find a solution set that developers and users will love.

by anandeep on November 29, 2008 05:55pm

As I stated in my last blog,  I am attending the premier Indian Open Source conference, FOSS.IN, in Bangalore.   This conference had some very technical talks (which I will also blog about) but, like any other Open source conference, it was the people who were the most interesting.

There seems to be a large PHP contingent here.  I met some folks from Piazza, a company that does PHP applications.  Of course they asked the million dollar question - "Microsoft has an Open Source group?"  But, very quickly, they soon started talking about how they could work with Microsoft technologies.  They hadn't realized that we had a relationship with Zend, and that Microsoft would treat PHP as a first class language. 

Once they heard about this, they excitedly started thinking of .NET applications that their customers were asking for, and how they could build them.  These developers were not based in Bangalore, but in a small town in Kerala.  They followed the true Open Source model of living and developing from where they wanted, and did not have to work in a large overgrown city with corporate offices.  This is a BIG thing in India - and I am seeing this for the first time.

The other PHP linkage I made was with Damian Hickey,  CEO of Zacware.com.  Zacware is making an e-commerce server called Freeway, which is PHP based. His was more the traditional Open Source business, and his firm had already reached out to Microsoft's representative in Queensland, Australia to see how they could make this application run on Microsoft platforms. 

We had a long discussion about community and how Microsoft could approach Open Source.   Again, the theme of opening a two-way conversation came up.   Damian's development team is in India and I was able to talk to his PHP dev lead, who was also excited to work on .NET.

I had asked one of the organizers why I hadn't heard of a well known contributor to the Linux kernel who hailed from India. I was promptly told that Balbir Singh and Ankita Garg were the two names to know.  I ran into Balbir - who works for the IBM Linux Technology Center - and we had some good discussions on kernels  and people we knew in common.  Turns out he knows Tom Hanrahan, my current boss.  (Tom, I mentioned you in my blog. I hope you are noticing for my review next year!)

I then chatted with Amit Shah from Qumranet (now Red Hat). He gave a talk in the conference on how he parleyed an interview question from Qumranet into a career in hypervisors.  Again, he was keen to work with Microsoft, especially when he heard about our virtualization Interop efforts with Xen and Novell. 

I also met a passionate young student, Abhishek, who very politely asked me all the tough questions about Microsoft. These involved questions on patents, open sourcing  Windows, and OOXML. I answered them, presenting my own point of view.  The reaction? He said he had been waiting to talk to someone from Microsoft who was so open about this stuff, even if he didn't agree with me on everything.

What did I learn about Microsofts role in Open Source in India? Our role here is to be the two way conduit, but we also need to engage the community with the same kind of passion for our own (Microsoft's) stuff that they have for Open Source.  Anything less will appear fake.

More to come.

Anandeep

by Peter Galli on December 09, 2008 01:40pm

I'm on the road with Robert Duffner, our Senior Director of Platform Strategy, talking to tech press in New York, Boston and San Francisco this week.

So, imagine my surprise when top Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley ran an article about a new open source content system known as "Oxite."

The alpha code for Oxite, which is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites, and which already runs MIX Online, was recently released on CodePlex, our open source project hosting site.Oxite is licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

While we were surprised by Mary Jo's blog, this is a great thing as it shows just how many open source projects are taking place under the covers here at Microsoft. Having a range of our developers across Microsoft working on a variety of open source projects targeted at different communities of users, is exactly the goal of our group.

Stay tuned, as I expect to be surprised a lot more going forward and, as I do, I'll bring these projects to your attention, however they come to my attention.

by Peter Galli on January 06, 2009 06:18pm

Over the past year, Microsoft has stepped up its participation in initiatives supporting Free and Open Source Software projects like Apache, Samba, and PHP.

by Peter Galli on January 19, 2009 02:00pm

As Microsoft continues the drive for interoperability between different implementations on various platforms, the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team is, for the first time, participating as a code contributor to an Apache project: the Stonehenge incubator project.

Microsoft first talked about Stonehenge at ApacheCon 2008,  which was held in New Orleans last November.  Since then, it has been approved as an incubator project within Apache Software Foundation, and WSO2 and Microsoft have already contributed code for a web-services based sample application, known as StockTrader, to this effort.

That code can be found here, along with the contributions from WSO2.

Stonehenge has attracted some very prominent committers so far, Kamajit Bath, a Principal Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team and the lead for Microsoft's participation in Stonehenge, says in a recent blog post.

"I hope that the momentum will be sustained, and I am looking forward to seeing code contributions from other folks and seeing the StockTrader sample application enhanced with new features. I also hope that new sample applications will be developed to cover other areas of the WS-* standards that are not best represented by the StockTrader application. I look forward to participating in this discussion with the Stonehenge community," he says.

There are three Microsoft committers on the Stonehenge incubator project: Greg Leake, who wrote the original StockTrader application; Drew Baird, who worked to get it ready for contribution to Stonehenge; and Mike Champion, who will play an active role in this effort.

In a recent blog post, Champion says Microsoft have heard from customers that they want sample applications based on real-world scenarios and challenges, as these will help them realize the potential of these technologies that have been developed and standardized for the last 8 years or so.

The initial response from the Apache community has also been quite favorable, and "I have a personal commitment to invest in helping make Stonehenge a success, and look forward to digging in," he says.

Champion also notes that Stonehenge is being championed by Paul Fremantle, co-founder and CTO of WSO2, "which has been a great partner in helping to improve and demonstrate the interoperability of the WS-* standards across platforms."

He cites, as an example of this, TechEd 2008, where Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 and Greg Leake of Microsoft demonstrated how separate WSO2 and Microsoft components implementing a mutlti-tier stock trading application can interoperate and be substituted for one another, he says in the blog. 

StockTrader is also just the starting point for the broader goals of Stonehenge, which aims to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.

Stonehenge can also help wire up the ‘last mile' between the standardized web services infrastructure that is now implemented across key platforms, and a new generation of service oriented applications that will span them, he says.

Existing WS-* interoperability work such of the sort done by WS-I and in our "plugfests" will continue to solidify the platform-level interoperability.  The new work, exemplified by Apache Stonehenge, should attract a wider community of users who can exploit the hard standardization and platform interoperability work without having to wallow in as many nasty details as in the past.

For Bath, projects like Stonehenge are important in enhancing interoperability between different software implementations. While standards organizations do a great job and the roll out of various WS-* standards is a testimonial to the fact that they can work efficiently, interoperability work doesn't stop at the end of the standardization process but, rather, that is where it really starts, he says.