by Frank Chism on April 15, 2008 05:40pm

It’s multicore time. Do you know where your parallelism is?
Do you know where your parallelism is? Well you better find it! This is because you must or your users will not see the doubling of performance that they have seen for the last seven or eight generations of microprocessors. Why? Well the chip makers ran out of physics, clocks just couldn’t go a lot faster every few months the way they used to and more cores, even if they double or triple the performance of the processor do not lead to a faster feeling system if all the applications are serial. So, is your application serial? It better not be.

Two examples from my own life demonstrate the user and buyer frustration we are about to hit head on. First my sister, a long time Mac user, bought a new dual socket dual core Mac. On paper this system was easily three to five times “more powerful” then her previous system, a dual processor Mac. Her first complaint was, “It doesn’t feel faster. It certainly doesn’t feel ‘wicked fast’ compared to my five year old system.” I pointed out to her that what she had was more power, not more ‘faster’. I told her to try doing more than one thing at once. It took awhile for her to get the hang of this, but one day recently she called and started raving about how ‘powerful’ her new system was compared to her old one. What she had learned how to do was to get three or four long running tasks to run in the background while continuing to do her interactive day to day tasks without any noticeable degradation in interactive performance!

As a second example, for Christmas I built my wife a new dual core system because she was complaining about her system being too slow and crashing all the time. It was a thing of beauty with twice the CPU, twice the memory, and five times the capacity and twice the bandwidth of her old disks. The processor was two generations newer with a 20% faster clock and over four times the memory bandwidth. I was ready for a big hug and profuse thanks for my intelligence and craftsmanship. Boy was I in for a disappointment. What I got was, “It isn’t any faster.” I am a victim of the core war!

The lights are on, but there’s no parallel home.
Well my personal tragedy was nothing compared to what will happen to any software developer or corporation that depends on their fortune or fame to flow from people using their product and liking the experience. That is, it will be tragic for those who do not start to think parallel for every step of every phase of every program that they write and design in parallel not try to graft it in afterwards. Just as with security, and network awareness, you don’t get good results trying to add in parallel later. You must start in parallel and continue in parallel and only go serial as a last drastic measure and then only for the shortest possible time. Sadly, even in my own backyard of High Performance Computing the number of programs that have tried to graft in parallel rather than design it in is appalling. What they end up with is often what I call the ‘Silence of the Lames’. That is, a lame parallel port that doesn’t scale or doesn’t speed up their program nearly as much as is possible.

Now you might say that this only works for scientific programs with massive amounts of data. Well, sorry Charlie, if your product is something as ‘serial’ as a document processing program like Microsoft Word, you had better be thinking how you can use those extra cores to improve the user experience. Why? Well as I said in the beginning: Code parallel or die!

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail.  - Benjamin Franklin

That’s all for now. I enjoyed writing this and hope to hear from some of you about what you think of my ‘Parallel Imperative’ and what you can personally do about it.
So, never stop studying and I’ll blog at you later.

- Frank

by jcannon on May 27, 2008 02:09pm

Over the course of the past year, we've highlighted various community and open source projects on Codeplex. This morning, I wanted to do the same with a very cool open source project that I came across over the weekend called Family.Show. Family.Show is a genealogy project that visualizes family mapping and relationships. The project was released in July 2007 and it's currently at version 2. While the project is backed by Vertigo Software, it is Open Source and licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Here's a small screen grab from the project home page:

Over the weekend, I used some free time & a family BBQ to start building my own family tree. Frankly, while I'm impressed with the application and it's ease-of-use, I was more amazed at the interest and enjoyment everyone in my family experienced using it. Everybody from my 83 year old grandmother to my 19 year old sister were excited to explore and add to the family tree. It gives new meaning to the collaborative potential of open source :>

See above, the Cannon family tree (yikes) - but infinitely fascinating to self-described family historians. It's worth noting that Family.Show also supports the import/export of GEDCOM standard files, so your work can interchange with other genealogy software packages as well.

I encourage anyone interested to download & tinker with it. Additionally, here are some additional resources:

1. Visit the Codeplex project home page
2. Family.Show at MIX07
3. Watch a Channel9 Video with the core development team

-Jamie

by jcannon on May 29, 2008 01:59pm

Abstract: In the UNIX and Linux world, vi and EMACS  have long held positions as the best-developed editors for handling large amounts of code or other text.  More recently, an improved vi clone has emerged named VIM (Short for Vi, IMproved).  VIM features syntax highlighting, a vi-like command-line interface, and many powerful features for editing large text projects.  It has quickly become one of the favorite text editors outside the Windows world. This analysis looks at using VIM with Windows PowerShell, with considerations for code signing.

Download VIM, Powershell & Signed Code.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

by jcannon on May 28, 2008 10:54am

As many frequent readers of Port 25 are aware, Microsoft is committed to the long-term growth of open source. This includes technical collaborations, business partnerships, industry participation – and community outreach.

As we continue to grow our investments around open source, we’re looking to add a new Community Manager to our team. This position will be part of the Platform Community team and will be responsible for growing Microsoft and open source communities together. More specifically, this individual will be a core contributor to our long-term open source strategy & how we increase the potential of all developers, everywhere.

There’s no better place to start than the very community we work with. As a result, I’m posting this job to Port 25 – the full job description follows below. This is a community & marketing position, located in either Redmond, WA or the San Francisco Bay Area.

To inquire about this opportunity, please apply online and shoot me an e-mail.

Position: Senior Marketing Manager – Open Source Community
Join the team leading one of the companies most exciting & dynamic initiatives, driving Microsoft’s overall community strategy around Open Source Software. As a Senior Product Marketer on the Platform Strategy team, you will have the opportunity to bring our platforms to life by fostering community and thought leadership designed to promote better connections between Microsoft and Microsoft technologies with open source communities. This strategic position will work across Microsoft’s worldwide business groups and segment teams as well as industry influentials to help drive interoperability between Microsoft and open source software.

Your core responsibilities will include assisting in defining and driving core marketing initiatives – most specifically online & offline community-building. You will have the opportunity to help drive the strategy for customer-driven marketing designed to further the dialogue on the value of the Microsoft platform to open source audiences. You will work regularly with technical R&D teams and business strategy owners to define customer requirements and drive customer-ready evidence to arm customers and partners with the benefits of Microsoft platforms and open source stacks. Your work will be a cornerstone for a global thought leadership website and will be regularly featured in industry press around the world. You will also be responsible for ensuring that WW field sales & marketing teams have the right message and content to effectively communicate value to customers.

In addition, you will act as a visible external evangelist for Microsoft with respects to our Open Source strategy, helping to drive a balanced dialogue to the IT Pro and Developer audiences in both one-to-one and one-to-many events. You will regularly work with industry analysts to help shape and inform our market strategies and execution as well as supporting regular press engagements with senior management and executives. Finally, you will serve as a key point of accountability and representation to worldwide executive leadership with respects to our community outreach efforts. This involves regular opportunities to engage executive management with regards to strategic direction, priority setting and progress updates.

Qualifications
The candidate should have strategic marketing capabilities coupled with a strong gene for execution. Excellent analytical skills, as well as the ability to work with and influence industry influentials and analysts are important. Building collaborative relationships across the organization, motivating and leading that organization to achieve collective impact will be essential. The candidate must also be a highly motivated self-starter, with a strong competitive spirit. Familiarity with the Linux & OSS market / products is a plus, but not required for those candidates with strong aptitude. A BS/A is required, MBA preferred with experience in a related field working on projects that require strategic thinking, broad market impact, and business / technical marketing message development & delivery.

by jcannon on June 05, 2008 12:36pm

Over the past four years, we’ve been working with Sourceforge on a number of unique programs to help connect developers with the code and communities that interest them. In 2004, we started the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolkit project on Sourceforge, licensed under the Common Public License. WiX is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. In 2005, we started the open source ODF Converter project. Then, in 2007, we launched the ‘World of Choice’ destination to provide helpful connections to free community and software offerings available from Microsoft.

Developers have told us these interactions are important and that it’s important that we continue collaborating with open source communities. We understand that the language of that collaboration is code. As a result, I’m excited to share that this year, Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards (CCA), joining O’Reilly and the Linux Foundation in supporting the recognition of world-class open source developers and projects.

For the uninitiated, the CCAs are an annual appreciation of open source projects that allow any OSS project to be nominated and voted on by the Sourceforge community. This joint collaboration will result in two important additions to this year’s Community Choice Awards:

1. The CCAs are now open to open source projects that are hosted on Codeplex. This means that projects hosted on Codeplex, and licensed under the MS Public or Reciprocal License, are eligible for nomination, voting and recognition.

2. As a part of our sponsorship, we’ve also worked with Sourceforge to create a new category for ‘Best Project for Educators’: Whether you're working in grade school education, high school, or college, teaching is difficult. Open source can help! This award goes to the project that makes it easier to educate and share knowledge together.

This is an important program for Microsoft – we believe strongly in supporting developer choice and collaboration. Open source is all about choice and collaboration. I can’t think of a better venue to support and cheer the fantastic work that these individuals and communities do every day. Education is another important theme from Microsoft. Worldwide, access to knowledge is a serious social and economic issue. Technology can be a key to closing this gap. We want to recognize development work being done in this area.

So here’s how to get involved: If you’re a project contributor, maintainer, or user – visit http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08/ - Select ‘Nominate’ and get started recognizing your favorite OSS Projects. You can ‘Search’ for projects too – Sourceforge has developed a clever widget that returns results across forges. In the case below, I searched for ‘XNA’ and received multiple Codeplex results.

This summer, winners will be recognized at OSCON in Portland, OR. If you will be in town, you’re welcome to attend.

This is an exciting time to be a developer. Let the recognition begin.

by jcannon on June 06, 2008 12:35pm

Abstract: Secure remote access to UNIX and Linux systems is generally accomplished through SSH. The most frequent implementation of that protocol is OpenSSH, originally written for the OpenBSD project but now ported to a wide variety of platforms. This paper will show how to use OpenSSH with the Kerberos portion of Active Directory to automate authentication.

Download OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

by Sam Ramji on June 06, 2008 04:48pm

A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code.

This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy.  I take it extremely seriously.

I have directed the project to be unpublished from Codeplex immediately, including removal of the project’s use of the Ms-PL.  If the team chooses to publish the source code and follow Microsoft policy, then the project may be re-published in the future.  If not, we will remove all references to Sandcastle from Codeplex.

I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake.

We are strengthening our controls on Codeplex projects and the governance process that we use for Microsoft-led external projects to ensure that this type of error does not happen again.

Our policy regarding use of the term Open Source is clear:  Open Source refers to projects using OSI-approved licenses.

by jcannon on June 11, 2008 11:22am

Abstract: SSH has largely replaced Telnet for remote administration of UNIX and Linux systems, but has not yet been used much on Windows. SSH is generally considered to be more secure than Telnet and the Berkeley remote commands (rlogin, etc). This paper uses SSHWindows, a minimal package of Cygwin and OpenSSH. It is available from http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net. The paper is written such that an average Windows system administrator can get an SSH server up while understanding how to make use of security features.

Download Remote Administration of Windows Systems with SSH (PDF)

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

by jcannon on June 17, 2008 02:10pm

Abstract: Microsoft Terminal Services provides an important set of functionality for remote administration and centralized application management.  This service allows administrators to log in remotely and with full access to the system. Similarly, users can log in and run specific applications, which are centrally managed by IT personnel. The standard client for Linux systems is rdesktop. Rdesktop is shipped with many Linux distributions and this paper briefly looks at common security considerations around using this client application in Windows environments.

Download Security Considerations for rdesktop and Windows Terminal Services

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

by anandeep on June 18, 2008 11:17am

I have always been fascinated by clusters.  Some people envision working with desktops or workstations when they think of “working with computers”.  For me working with computers was always with a large collection of computers in a back room somewhere.  And how cool if you could make all those computers collaborate with each other working to solve cool things like genome mapping, movie special effects, simulations of car crashes or simulations of molecules being formed!

So you can imagine I jumped at the chance to work with the Windows High Performance Computing team.  This is the same team that builds  Windows HPC Server 2008.

I think most of the people working in the team are from the “large collection of computers in back room somewhere” school. Would be really different in the Mac software division I assume!

I work with the Open Source Software Lab and we are all things “Open Source” to the rest of the company.  The HPC Server team wanted us to make sure that their product played nice with Linux infrastructure and vice-versa.  The usual suspects like AD, Samba, LDAP. CIFS etc were involved.  We had to make sure that these recurrent interoperability themes were addressed in the HPC environment.   I also got a chance to dig into ROCKS, OSCAR, MPI stacks and job schedulers etc etc.

This was a very rewarding experience not only for the technology exposure that I got but the pervasiveness of knowledge of Open Source within the team.  They were far ahead of the other product groups in this regard and  “got” the Open Source ethos. In fact, prior to my interactions with them they had released an open source MPI stack based on Argonne National Lab’s MPI implementation.

The other reason was that a lot of their customers were relentlessly open source!  The conventional wisdom is that HPC applications and infrastructure require a lot of tinkering.  Of course, there are some applications like FEM and CFD and that are well understood, but the general feeling was that complete control and access to the underlying infrastructure is a must for getting the most performance out of a cluster.  And performance is the main thing in “High Performance Computing”.

Linux is seen providing that access by HPC customers and there is a large base of Linux for HPC in academia, the national labs and other institutions that use large clusters for doing their thing.

But is this really true?

I think that HPC has gone through a typical evolution – it starts with a few people who have a pressing need.  There is a cross disciplinary team formed that builds software to do their job and a community grows around it.  The community reaches critical mass and people start making building tools to make it more convenient.  ROCKS is an example of this.  Great skill, knowledge and ability is needed to get the job done.

However, these skilled people now become overloaded.  The tools and the infrastructure that they created become so popular that everyone, including people who do not have background that was assumed before, wants to use it for their ends.  So the community responds and builds standardized, easy-to-use infrastructure pieces that start to fit seamlessly together.  Some control is lost, but ease-to-use is the primary focus.

The infrastructure for HPC has reached that stage (ROLLS with ROCKS). Windows HPC Server 2008 is built for this ease-of-use too.
However, the applications have not reached the stage of ease-of-use.  They have to be coded with a lot of domain knowledge and have to built from scratch to truly scale while running on clusters.  That means that the application writers demand more control of the underlying infrastructure and want more access to it than the users and maintainers want.

I am going out on a limb and making a prediction here – soon end users will be able to specify instead of coding applications, be it genome comparison or physics simulation.  This is similar to accountants finding spreadsheets.  There will probably be a few different models for different types of applications but that stage will come pretty quickly. 

The infrastructure that runs these user-specified applications will be adaptive and will take these specifications and automatically tune them for high performance on the clusters.

This is where the perception of needing control to the lowest levels will be moot.  The best adaptive infrastructure will be the one adopted.

Bold enough for you?

by Paula Bach on June 30, 2008 12:14pm

I would like to invite CodePlex developers to participate in research. If you have been reading my blog posts here on Port25, then you will know that I have been investigating how to integrate usability into open source software development. Now I am seeking research volunteers. 

I am looking for developers who are working on projects hosted on CodePlex. The projects could be in the planning stage, alpha, beta, or stable. As a volunteer, you would be asked questions about your activities performed on CodePlex. The interview should not take longer than 60-90 minutes.

Data from the research will be used to help design support for usability on CodePlex and analyzed as part of my dissertation at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. I work with Dr. John M. Carroll at Penn State and Rob DeLine at Microsoft Research. One part of the study data collected from CodePlex users will inform the design of new usability support features. The other part of the study is to understand how developers work on open source projects. This research has been approved by The Pennsylvania State University Institutional Research Board, IRB #27804. As such, data will be used for the above research purposes only.

If you would like to participate, (participation is voluntary) or have any questions, please email codeplexresearch@live.com.

by Sam Ramji on July 02, 2008 10:00am

I am very pleased to announce that the Microsoft SandCastle project team has reconfirmed its strong support for the Ms-PL  and is preparing to release all source code for the Sandcastle project immediately.  This was a non-trivial effort and I applaud them for it.  I think these actions demonstrate Microsoft’s desire to abide by the OSI’s Open Source Definition with regard to source code when releasing open source projects on CodePlex.  The project itself is a valuable one, and I received many comments and emails about this.

Some people felt it was draconian to pull the project from CodePlex, others thought that didn’t go far enough; some were upset because they loved the project and couldn’t find it; some thought we were holding ourselves to a higher standard than necessary.  I believe that as we continue to build our practices across the company to participate in open source development, we must strive to achieve the highest possible standards.

This has also called our attention to our governance and processes on Open Source.  Scott Stein (Director of Open Source Programs) led an exhaustive effort across our code hosting properties, with great support from Jim Newkirk, Jonathan Wanagel, and Sara Ford of the Codeplex team as well as Steven Wilssens of Code Gallery, and found other cases where Microsoft-led projects had been licensed under the Ms-PL but hadn’t shared the source.  These have also been unpublished and will go through the same review process.  What we’re finding is that the positive intent and excitement underneath sharing source code is something that exists in teams across Microsoft, and that we have a great opportunity to help more teams build their skills in following Open Source best practices.

So congratulations to Anand Raman and the SandCastle team for responding gracefully to the situation and coming through with flying colors!

Cheers,
Sam

by jcannon on July 16, 2008 09:59pm

Our community knows that open source businesses are important to Microsoft. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that open source was a key theme in the recent Windows Server 2008 Launch. You can read more about that here.

One of the individuals we highlighted was Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO at Mindtouch. Mindtouch develops an open source collaboration platform. Today, I'm excited to have Robert Mason, Mindtouch Platform Engineer, update us on the progress Mindtouch has made in delivering a first class open source experience on Windows. Take it away Bob....

---

 

Hello! It’s great to be asked to guest blog here at Port 25. Last you had heard from us, we had written about MindTouch Deki from the start being written in C#, but running solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment. Well, that’s all about to change… I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

MindTouch Deki is an open source collective intelligence platform. In other words, it is an enterprise wiki that sits atop a web-services framework and enables mashups, dashboards, and dynamic reporting from disparate systems and databases. MindTouch Deki provides a unique collaboration tool for enterprises and workgroups. Rather than taking the less useful approach of other collaborative and Enterprise 2.0 applications by providing a simple walled-garden / point application, MindTouch has developed Deki with the collaborative intuition of a highly polished and robust enterprise wiki, but is also able to federate and mashup application and data silos. It was developed on Microsoft .NET using C#, and, until today, has only officially supported installations on Linux using Mono.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Download the MindTouch Deki MSI today. We're very excited to at last be offering support for Microsoft IIS 6 and 7 on Vista, Windows Server 2003, and 2008. MindTouch Deki has enjoyed a groundswell of adoption with daily downloads in the thousands; by (finally) introducing an easy and officially supported means of installing on Windows Server and Windows Vista we are expecting great things! Now, Systems Integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by "adding the 2.0" to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collaborative surface atop the existing infrastructure that they've already deployed.

Write MindTouch for more information about our web-oriented architecture or for a high level explanation read about our technologies at the website. Finally, expect to see more Microsoft-related updates from MindTouch in the coming months… Subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at www.MindTouch.com to stay up to date on new Microsoft related products and offerings.

Thanks,
Bob Mason

by Bryan Kirschner on July 18, 2008 01:09pm

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in participate08. participate08 is a one-day summit held in coordination with the O'Reilly Open Source Conference(OSCON). It is designed to facilitate dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities and help explore opportunities for greater participation in the design, development, and deployment of software in the modern IT environment.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (...that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

Sometimes we have to focus on what I’ll call day-to-day issues: like what if a Microsoft team releases an application under an open source license (the Ms-PL) without making the source code available? (The answer is: the team, whose disconnect with our policy was 100% accidental and unintended—stepped up to strongly affirm their commitment to OSS best practices and voluntarily released it with source code, to their great credit.) These are important. Most of the time (as in this case) things turn out positively. But participate08 is focused on the big picture, or macro level issues—the future of distributed innovation in software and beyond; being a part of that sort of discussion with folks like our panelists is just mind-blowingly cool.

In the morning, we’ll be holding a small group, facilitated “executive session”—in the afternoon, the panel will star in an open session where we hope to have a great dialogue among the panel—and with the audience. If you will be at OSCON I hope you’ll join us in E145 at 1:30 PM!

 

by Bryan Kirschner on July 23, 2008 04:39pm

Now that we’ve had our first “participate” event in conjunction with OSCON here in Portland, I wanted to share a few thoughts. This was a great experience and a great event—or, really, two consecutive events, the morning case study discussion and the afternoon panel.

First I’ll talk about the case study and then build on comments from some folks who’ve “beaten me to the blog.” In the morning Karim Lakhani from Harvard led the group through a case study about a fast-growing company (Threadless t-shirts) built on community contribution and distributed innovation. This was basically like being in a Harvard Business School class with a bunch of super achievers, complete with questions and counter questions (John Wilbanks from Science Commons blogs about it here). Stepping back and taking a look at a whole bunch of concepts and practices that underlie open source in the software domain in another context (t-shirt design), IMO, really opened the floodgates on discussion—a discussion Karim (with regret) had to close as the buzz in the room kept right on going well over time and into lunch…

In the afternoon I was part of a panel discussion and Q and A that started back in the software domain specifically. The one thing I would definitely do differently is to couple the morning case study and the later panel discussion more tightly. Not everyone who could be part of one was part of the other this year, and the real “ah ha’s” for me came from being a part of both. Here’s what I took away overall.

I introduced the morning session by noting that we’re at the ten-year mark since the folks who founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) rallied around the term “open source.” At last year’s OSCON, Bill Hilf announced we had launched http://Microsoft.com/opensource , our first public, official, company-wide statement of policy and strategy on OSS. So (I said): “If you look at that span of time from 1998 to 2007, no one can accuse us of being precipitous, and no one can flatter us for being first adopters.”
But there’s a benefit to being slow: other people don’t stand still stuff. That includes folks like Karim and another professor on our panel, Siobhan O’Mahony, doing research. I can’t emphasize enough the contributions their work and that of many others of their peers made to our first step in informing and building acceptance of that step into participation in 2007. We read it all.

And this is where I’ll offer a different perspective than Zack—in his blog he said he felt the afternoon session (on which I really appreciated his participation and contributions) he felt a bit like “it was outside looking in” on open source and “academic.” With regard to the first point, one of my goals for next year is definitely to figure out how we integrate the “inside look out” (at another domain) like we did in the morning. With regard to the latter, here’s the interesting thing to me: “academic” can be pejorative when it means “divorced from any substantive decision-making”—that is, you’re just studying for the sake of studying. And I can where Zack is coming from: MySQL is one of the oldest OSS-based businesses. Zack was quite clear he knows how they manage their dev process and a bunch of other things. Unlike the folks at Threadless and perhaps many younger OSS-based companies, Zack and MySQL’s leadership team don’t even have to wonder about what to do if they are offered a big contract or billion-dollar buy out from a big established vendor…they’ve been there, done that. I respect that.

But if like Zack (and Matt Asay, who couldn’t be at partcipate08…Matt, I’ve read your blogs for years, you’re a thoughtful guy, I would bet money you couldn’t help but love the morning session…save a date for 09!) you are encouraging Microsoft to make more code (or whole products) open source: on the Microsoft side “academic” insights are highly relevant and actionable. Siobhan almost literally wrote the book on how established companies work with foundations and communities. Karim’s understanding of distributed innovation spans from the early days of OSS’ popularity through Wikipedia and beyond (we learned on Monday that there is a vibrant online user innovation community around custom granola recipes…).

Their research and practitioners like Allison (and others) abstracting out how what-worked-in-her-experience might apply to another technology or audience are directly relevant to diverse Microsoft teams figuring out how to “go open” in ways that are sustainable because they engage a community and make business sense—there are some great examples (here and here and here). But if there’s one qualification for being the first person in the history of the universe with the title of “Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft” (…thanks Bill and Sam…) it is this: the humility to understand it would be foolish to try to figure out how to expand this list company-wide on our own, without learning from everyone who has gone before.

So here is the real a-ha for me: John Wilbanks’ job is a lot harder than mine. He is approaching the Science Commons domain with a far less robust body of knowledge and shared understanding across communities than we have in OSS. Some of that may be ten years of “open source” versus a shorter timeframe for applying these concepts to science—but what I tried to articulate at the end of the panel was this: I believe “open source” has achieved a fascinating and valuable thing. It has achieved a balance as an construct which is not just a reductive, narrow focus on source code licensing (which is a component) nor a vague, fuzzy, wishy-washy platitude or marketing slogan (which is a risk and something I know the OSI worries about). It has enough cohesion, flexibility, and surface tension to be something you can study scientifically and discuss with a shared understanding of how it relates to software or t-shirts or science, and have an intuitive “know-good-practices-when-you-see-them” dimension.

I think the OSI and other leaders in open source contributed to this by striving to maintain fidelity to a core set of values while being flexible rather than doctrinaire. And here at OSCON this strikes me: last year at OSCON 2007 Bill Hilf also announced we were submitting two Microsoft Shared Source licenses to the OSI for approval. This was a milestone I see as not just instrumentally useful to provide clarity to users of these licenses; I see it as fitting as a matter of respect and recognition. And this year we took another step forward with participate08 here at Tim O’Reilly and Allison Randal’s OSCON 2008. I see this as fitting not just instrumentally as a matter of convenience (--lots of the right people happen to be here--) but as a matter of respect and recognition. I hope to be back for participate09.

I am going to close this blog entry on that thought but for one picture that really is worth a thousand words. Once we get the notes and the whiteboard photos assembled I’ll share more about the discussion, but this image will stick with me a theme for why so many folks did come to think hard and contribute as a part of participate08—and why I am grateful they did:

(photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)