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by Paula Bach on September 10, 2007 04:59pm
Developing software has been an engineering discipline with formal methods. The evolution of software methods has ranged from the now outdated waterfall method to formal specification languages with precise semantics. Despite having methodologies, software engineering continues to be difficult. Yet despite having what seems a lack of software engineering methodology, open source software development can produce stable, useful software. In 2002, Fred Brooks gave a talk at CMU discussing the design of software. You may remember Fred Brooks from such publications as The Mythical Man Month and No Silver Bullet. In the talk at CMU, Brooks focuses on the social issues surrounding software engineering. Likewise, Microsoft Research (MSR) recently initiated a new group called Human Interactions in Programming (HIP). This group studies the social aspects of software engineering. Their joke is that they “ build tools as if software were made by people … working together. This quote, taken from the technical report, outlines some social issues software developers experience in their day-to-day work. Another way to look at my dissertation project is as an extension to looking at social issues in software development. While the HIP group at MSR studies human interactions among software developers, I extend that and study the human interactions among software teams (or project members): developers, project managers, and usability experts in both proprietary and open source software development environments. As I mentioned in my last blog, I am studying the role of usability expertise in both software environments through surveys, interviews and observations. I have previously reported on the open source software survey and observations. In this blog, I am reporting on the interviews I conducted internally at Microsoft. I spoke to eleven employees who are working on various projects at MSFT in various roles including program managers, developers and user experience researchers and designers. I spoke to junior and senior staff and well as leads. Program managers are responsible for the feature that their team designs and builds. Developers write code. User experience designers create mockups and give feedback in design meetings and user experience researchers collect field data and conduct usability studies. Travel Interlude I wrote the above section before I left Redmond and now I am back on campus at Penn State. I had to hurry back and drove straight through from Redmond to Minneapolis. We left Redmond in the afternoon and stopped in Spokane for dinner and left at dusk. Spokane looks like it is growing and as such has some money injected into its economy. We drove through the night passing through Idaho and through Montana the next day. We passed through North Dakota late in the afternoon and stopped in Fargo for dinner. After dinner was the biggest rain storm I have ever seen – and I am from Vancouver, Canada where it rains a lot. I was driving southeast to Minneapolis on I-94 and slowed down to 10MPH because the rain was pelting down and blowing so hard across the road that it was like a whiteout. I could barely see five feet ahead. We made it to Minneapolis (avoiding the I-35W bridge area) at about 1AM and checked into our hotel. The next morning we awaked late, had breakfast, did some grocery shopping at a favorite natural food coop called the Wedge. I used to live in Minneapolis when I worked at Unisys and Promedicus--a startup that made decision support systems for physicians that died with many other dotcom startups. It was nice to be back to The Cities. After our deserved travel break we went to Madison, WI to visit an old college buddy of my husband’s. They used to play in a band together. His buddy Frank still plays. We stayed there way longer than planned, but it was fun to catch up. We ended up reaching our next destination really late. We ended up in South Bend, Indiana (home of Notre Dame) when the sun started to rise and the birds began chirping. We were so tired the next day that we forgot things in the hotel, including a credit card! We did not notice it missing until we got to Toledo. Luckily it was the last leg of our trip and we made it back to State College, PA around 11PM and slept in the next morning ready to move back into our townhouse on campus. End of Travel Interlude. Now that I am back on campus, I have had some time to reflect on the interviews. They uncovered a variety of interesting things. Overall the eleven people I interviewed were very enthusiastic about the research and most wanted to see results. Again, I have not analyzed anything formally yet, but all of the people I interviewed mentioned that communicating design changes was very challenging especially when it comes to usability issues. It seems like the biggest challenges relate to power relationships (not their words) among the team members and the ability of the person with usability expertise and training to gain trust with decision makers. A prevailing problem is that some people tend to think they are usability experts even when they are not trained and if they are more pushy or otherwise in a position to make the final decision, usability might be compromised. Of course many other factors weigh into the usability of a product, but overall it seems that the usability experts are being heard one way or another. In comparison to usability in open source, a large proprietary software company has more resources for bringing usability expertise into products, but the social dynamics appear to be as complex as in open source. The only difference may be the characteristics of the dynamics. In my observations online of open source usability discussions, most of the interactions seemed to be devoid of such social dynamics, except for one group about one issue. So in comparison, open source might not have the same kinds of power relationships because the roles are not as differentiated. As I continue to investigate the characteristics of usability expertise I will see what open source interviews turn up. Stay tuned.
by Sam Ramji on September 26, 2007 09:35pm
While at OSCON this year Sam and I got the chance to spend some time with Simon Peyton Jones, researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University. Earlier in the week Simon had presented a tutorial on Haskell titled: A Taste of Haskell at the O'Reilly event.
Taking advantage of the opportunity to have some time with Simon, we found a (sometimes) quiet hallway to talk about Haskell, functional programming and other topics.
Attachment: haskell.mp3
by Sam Ramji on October 18, 2007 04:21pm
Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - an open source community - supported by a non-profit foundation - dedicated to building an open source development environment. In this podcast, Mike joins us to discuss some history around Eclipse, the larger open source community - and his varied background in accounting and computer science. Mike also touches on the architecture of participation's impact on the foundation and the development team behind the Eclipse platform.
For interested Eclipse users, Sam will be speaking at this year's EclipseCon 2008 - stay tuned to Port 25 for more information as that draws closer.
Attachment: http://port25.technet.com/videos/podcasts/milinkovich.mp3
by jcannon on October 30, 2007 04:43pm
Today's post returns Port 25 to our more regular technical analysis that examine common technical scenarios when running Windows and Linux together, or Windows and other popular open source projects. This week, the lab looks at at disk recovery options using GRUB and dual boot scenarios.
Abstract: Those of us who dual boot have seen it happen. Somewhere down the line, we overwrite the bootloader (or configure it to ignore one of the operating systems) and suddenly we can only boot into one of the operating systems. Probably the most common causes of these issues involve the use of fdisk /mbr and Windows installations overwriting GRUB or LILO (but it happens with Linux too). In this paper, I will assume that you can only boot into Windows, and that you have decided to use GRUB as your bootloader. A few of these notes are distribution-specific and those portions will be clearly marked. However, most of the process will work on any Linux distribution which conforms to accepted standards.
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.
Attachment: DualbootRecovery.pdf
by jcannon on October 31, 2007 03:22pm
It's been awhile since we've featured any books or authors on Port 25 - you may remember Jeremy Moskowitz on Windows/Linux Integration, and then Linux in a Windows World with Rod Smith. That doesn't mean our library shelves have gone empty though ~ so today we're going to run a small giveaway of some extra copies of .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit we came across. It's a great book on how to open .NET to work with Java and comes with some useful tools on CD - including the The Mind Electric GLUE web services. GLUE provides developers that want to build Java Web services with an easy-to-use, compact implementation of all of the core Web services standards, including XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. It allows any Java object to be instantly published as a Web service and third-party Web services to be consumed as if they are local Java objects. To Win: All we ask is that you submit the best example of open source interoperability on Windows. It can be a project running on Windows (like Apache), a language (like PHP or Java), or a commerical application - like MySQL. Send them directly to port25@microsoft.com and we'll pick the best 6 stories. We'll close the competition next Friday, November 9th at 12 noon EST. Good luck!
About the book: Discover how to build applications that run on both the Microsoft .NET Framework and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)—and extend your customer reach and system shelf life. Whether your background is in .NET or J2EE, you’ll learn to implement many of the interoperability technologies available today, including Microsoft, Sun, and third-party compatibility tools. Interoperability expert Simon Guest takes a balanced look at the pros and cons of each cross-platform technology presented, including best practices, workarounds, and examples of interoperability solutions in action. You also get interoperability software on CD—plus a wealth of code you can use in your own solutions.
Discover how to:
by Sam Ramji on October 25, 2007 09:14pm
It's taken awhile, but without further delay - we're excited to post Sam's discussion with Allison Randal that took place at this year's OSCON event in Portland, OR. Allison discusses the importance of participation in the open source community and her perspective where Microsoft sits relative to the principle that everyone deserves to participate.
From her biography on the O'Reilly site: Allison Randal is the Program co-Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention and Energy Innovation Conference. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.
by Bryan Kirschner on November 09, 2007 12:42pm
I blogged awhile back about “Microsoft and open source growing together”—more in the sense of concurrency rather than causality. Today I’m blogging about the latter. I’ve found the graphic below to be one of the most powerful visual representations of a basic fact that is often forgotten. The surface area of the globe below represents the total number of the people working in the technology ecosystem and all the economic activity in that ecosystem. The little square in the Redmond, Washington area is shown—at scale—Microsoft’s relative size by number of employees and annual revenue. It’s 0.05% of the total ecosystem, according to a Harvard Business School study.
The point this drives home for me, in a very intuitive way, is that any smart technology company would be foolish not to think about participating in that larger ecosystem with business partners, developers, and user-innovators. There’s simply a vast amount of passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit outside the boundaries of any one firm.
I was reminded of this profound point when I watched Sam’s interview of Allison Randal (IMHO, one of those people in that broader ecosystem whose passion and intelligence anyone would be a fool to ignore). There was a phrase used in that interview describing her perspective on the open source community: “the principle that everyone deserves to participate.” Today Microsoft and Novell announced something that couldn’t be a better example of companies thinking hard—and being willing to take some risks—to participate in that broader ecosystem, guided by the principle that everyone deserves to participate.
The size of that little block in Redmond may be small relative to the total ecosystem, but—no bones about it—Microsoft is a successful company, and as a result Microsoft invests a lot ($7B a year!) in R&D. Among the results of those investments are accessibility technologies: User Interface Automation (UIA) is which is an accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products. What Microsoft and Novell announced today is about working together to bring UIA to a broader developer and user community, enabling creation of accessible products across both Windows and Linux platforms. On the Microsoft side, Microsoft will make available its User Interface Automation (UIA) specification, which is an advanced accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products for people with one or more disabilities, for implementation regardless of platform, in the open source and proprietary software communities.
On the Novell side, Novell will develop and deliver an adapter that allows the UIA framework to work well with existing Linux accessibility projects--Novell’s work will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform while enabling UIA to interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), which ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise, and Ubuntu Linux. On a strictly emotional basis, it feels pretty good to come to work on a day when the big news is about create a cross-platform solution that will provide people with disabilities greater access to computer technology. But since I cited Harvard Business School to explain why participating in the broader community was a business imperative, let me take a little more of a hardcore business approach: Any technology company that wants to stay in business needs to think about reaching beyond the boundaries of their little “box” in the graphic above. Any technology company that really wants to succeed, in ways nobody—whether their shareholders or their competitors—could have predicted needs to think about both reaching beyond the boundaries of their box and making that big globe even bigger. If you can figure out how to grow participation in that larger ecosystem—well, there’s that much more passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit out there to engage with. Today, Microsoft and Novell just took a step toward making that big world even bigger by working together across the boundaries of each firm, and across the traditional lines between proprietary and open source software development. It feels really good to come to work today because of this single event—it feels even better to me because I am very confident this is an example of Microsoft and open source growing together—causality, not concurrence. This is the shape of things to come--remember you read it here on Port25 first.
by jcannon on November 27, 2007 06:41pm
For those who've been participating on Port 25 since the beginning, you may have noticed two recurring themes. One, Microsoft has a focus on generativity - or the ability for technology to be extensible to others, be they community or commercial developers. Windows, Office - the Live APIs - are all examples of the ability for technology to serve a purpose, and allow others to build new purposes simultaneously. The other is a focus on supporting and growing business partners. Over the past two years, we've talked to great partners like Centrify, BitRock, Quest and Mindtouch. In fact, the latter re-enforces the former.
Today is no different - we're glad to have Mindtouch return with a guest blog from Aaron Fulkerson, Mindtouch Co-Founder, with an update on their .net-based open source, cross-platform wiki solution. Take it away, Aaron.
Since we last talked MindTouch has managed to propel itself into the pole position of our space. Specifically, MindTouch's Deki Wiki is the most popular commercially supported wiki there is. Our rate of adoption outpaces our most well-known competitor by a factor of 30x.Our software is currently being downloaded and installed more than 700 times a day and growing.
Why? How? Well, first of all, we've listened intently to our community of users and it has grown to an active and vibrant group of a couple thousand who have translated our application into 7 languages, filed bug reports, written code patches, and developed application extensions. They've also been very active in steering the product road map. Next, we've developed a compelling platform. The only platform in this space in fact. What I mean by "platform" is two fold. Deki Wiki has the most complete API. Deki Wiki's API has 99 REST-based methods and make it very easy to integrate the wiki or to build new applications, learn more here: http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/API_Reference. Point two, Deki Wiki has a web-service extension model that makes it the most extensible in this space. Finally, what's really set us apart from any other applications in this space is that MindTouch's Deki Wiki facilitates, even for non-technical users, the ability to create and share of application and content mashups. This will become clear in the demo video.
I should mention Deki Wiki is developed in C# on .NET and it is compatible with Mono. Extending it is language agnostic and it's platform independent thanks to the good folks working on Mono at Novell. Watch the demo video, I'm certain you'll be impressed with the power, usefulness, and uniqueness of what MindTouch is building. Then go download and install. It's free, open source, and thanks to the VMware certified image it can be installed in just over 5 minutes.
Thanks for having us Jamie and Port 25.
by Bryan Kirschner on December 04, 2007 08:10pm
There’s been a flurry of articles and blogs about Microsoft’s open source strategy lately, spurred in part by an interview with Bill Hilf (Zachary Rodriques Connolly …and a comment from davidmeyer on my previous post).
Collectively they make me think of a bunch of things to blog about—today I’m going to start with something that struck me about davidmeyer’s comment (--out of unabashed favoritism for Port25 ).
The nub of the matter is that by many measures, Microsoft and open source are both growing. But what is the nature of the relationship..is there a relationship? Are they growing: coincidentally, ships passing in the night in the same general direction? Complementarily, in a mutually reinforcing way? Or despite one another? My impression from reading davidmeyer’s comment (as well as others by other people I respect ) is that statements in the press loom a lot larger in the minds of other folks than in mine as indicators or causes—or both—of the nature of that relationship. What I mean is that once you believe open source and Microsoft are established parts of the IT landscape, talk really becomes the “tail wagging the dog.”
Let me use a little thought experiment to share where I’m coming from: consider the relationship between Microsoft and Oracle. Both companies are, I think, universally regarded as established parts of the IT landscape. As such, both companies devote a lot of effort to direct, head-to-head competition--we can take some type of sustained competitive activity, now and in the future, for granted.
At the same time, both companies devote substantial effort to complementary efforts (Here’s all kinds of stuff at the Oracle .NET developer center – community discussion, technical resources, marketing collateral…and this is one of three including Office and Windows sites). So there’s clearly more than one dimension to the relationship.
So if somebody asked me “what about the complementary relationship between Microsoft and Oracle?” --what would I think about as indicators? I’d look at the technology—like application availability, compatibility, interoperability, and performance.
I’d consider the people and the ecosystem—developers and ISVs.
And I’d want to understand the efforts underway to work together and find joint opportunities, tune and optimize, and innovate.
Probably one of the last things I’d consider as an indicator is what’s happening in the press. And the concept that (for example) whether Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer had anything nice to say about one another to journalists wouldn’t be something I’d spend much time thinking about at all. This is not to discount the impact of “talk”, and not to discount the reality that what folks read in the media can help make them more excited and confident—or suspicious and discouraged. And Oracle and Microsoft—two discreet companies--are not a directly applicable comparison to considering Microsoft and open source in general. But Port25 principle #3--No comment goes unread & every idea (common sense required) is openly discussed— really jumped out at me as I was reading the items linked above (no, I don’t have the principles memorized--they are printed out and hanging immediately to the left of my monitor…); thus, today’s post.
(And yes, I don’t think it’s even a close call that the indicators I consider important favor an excited and confident view of the relationship between Microsoft and open source—but that’s something I’ll pick up on another blog.)
by Bryan Kirschner on December 14, 2007 10:11am
My participation in technology was transformed by the Commodore 64. That's why I--like others here at Port25 and over at Slashdot--still love it after 25 years. Natales posts: "I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502..." Neither can I. I was 10, and needed to learn assembly to make a game I was writing run faster. I still remember there was a free 4k block of memory up at register C000 (49152) you could use to stick your assembly code in. "Participation" is a theme you've probably picked up on here at Port25. That's not just because most of us here share some sort of experience that enabled us to participate in technology in new and rewarding ways. It's also because it's an important element in enabling Microsoft and open source to "grow together." I am confident about Microsoft and open source growing together. With that said, it's a fair point to make that the best of open source is not-- yet! --established as a universal part of "Microsoft DNA." But a tradition of growing opportunities to participate in the opportunities offered by technology is. It's easy to forget today that providing free SDK's for developers was at one time a significant departure from common industry practice -- a business model innovation. Business and technical approaches that enabled third parties to develop on top of a "platform" are a part of Microsoft's heritage. The importance of growing the number of people able to participate in that ecosystem as creators or entrepreneurs is widely understood as simply smart business. Following Tim O'Reilly's insight, we think broadly about the "architecture of participation" as "systems that are designed for user contribution." One thing we do is work day by day to learn how open source concepts and approaches offer new or enhanced ways to grow participation. And then we work to understand what's already being done across Microsoft--and what could be done that's new or different. After a talking with folks here (Bill Hilf is an-ex C64 hacker and Sam Ramji got started on a PET) I realized that understanding the people and projects and perspectives of our open source community inside Microsoft isn't possible without more transparency about this idea of "participation." So this blog is an introduction for further blogs--and some new bloggers--on the ways in which we're working on and thinking about growing participation now and in the future, whether by effecting change at Microsoft, sharing information more broadly about opportunities that already exist, or working with leaders in the technical and academic communities on new ideas. (And if the Commodore 64 changed your life too, by all means chime in--or share what other technology made a big difference for you!)
by jcannon on January 21, 2008 02:39pm
Earlier this month, I was reading the Open Solutions Alliance's top predictions for 2008....this was based on polling they conducted within their membership base. It's a good read and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys that kind of fodder (there's no shortage of "predictions," it seems, this time of year.) The full report is here (PDF). One in particular caught my eye: The CEO of Adaptive Planning, William Soward, echoed the 451 Group in his assertion that '...open source is becoming a fundamental element of all software...'
To a great or lesser extent, open source or open source-inspired development approaches and the increasingly related fields of "open" collaboration and innovation are undeniably spreading to many fields of software conception, design and development. One could look at this horizontally, or where open source development is happening at the fundamental stacks within computer science (operating systems, compilers, editors, programming languages)- and we see this all the time: Linux, Java, Haskell, Ruby, Python; or, one could look at vertical development, as in ESB, CRM, Retail or Healthcare applications...and this is happening as well: MuleSource, Iona and LedgerSMB are a few examples. In each case, the classic struggle to advance software usefulness is being addressed by open collaboration, where certain fundamentals are being shared within a larger group to allow for greater concentration on, say, bigger issues. In the same vein of Soward's prediction, there have always been & always will be certain aspects of technology that cut across all software. One obvious example that comes to mind is security. No matter what the software size or complexity, purpose or reason, security has a home among the fundamental considerations made by programmers, on behalf of the end-user. Privacy is another aspect of the software (and data) lifecycle that is increasingly core – but still not quite there...
Open source will have a similar home, I imagine, in the minds of developers. Where does open source have a home in my software's lifecycle? What components will galvanize and excite a community? What components will not? Much like security, the industry will expect these considerations as a part of all software development.
This is something our team has recognized and - recently, something that was recognized by the Engineering Excellence folks. In a nutshell, Engineering Excellence is about ensuring code quality and best practices are part of the fabric of software development. If anything, it represents Microsoft's view of excellence in software engineering practices. And yes, we even have an internal handbook.... I can’t think of a better reflection of open source growing into all software –including at Microsoft--than sharing a glimpse from that handbook. (As you may have noticed, I'm keen on the screenshots.....). Among many considerations, we expect all of our developers to understand core elements, such as Privacy, Security, Code Integrity, etc. We have - as of December 2007, added “Shared Source Code."
This section adds to an established set of practices: “exchanging source code with external parties for development and testing” for sharing source code outside of Microsoft and inside of Microsoft. This is now a core component to our fundamental practices across Microsoft development. This is significant as the considerations for sharing original inventions outside any company is always difficult - including at Microsoft.
If this is any indication, I agree with Mr. Soward's prediction... In 2008, the world will see more organizations evaluate where open sources makes sense as part of their fundamental product development considerations....and it will increasingly appear across horizontal and vertical software development, or "all software."
Here's to an exciting year together.
by jcannon on January 31, 2008 03:05pm
<lighter note> I'm going to guess that some of our audience knows what ComicCon is - I'm familiar as I was huge DC and Marvel fan in the mid-90's...Who was not, I suppose. My favorite hero, to this day, is Batman (he fights the fight without any special powers....) - and the annual San Diego event was an easy way to track that industry, and the entertainment space around it. Suffice to say, I'm excited for the Dark Knight.
What does this have to do with Microsoft? As part of the very cool {Heroes} work being done, we're now featuring comics that, "adapts tech stories from actual IT Professionals and Developers - a web comic that reflects the real lives of IT Hero's such as you." They're very clever. And to beat, the stories are by Chuck Dixon, a man very well known to Batman fans in the 1990s.
Enjoy the dailies, or subscribe to the RSS feed - I chuckled at the Firewall story.
</lighter note>
by Brett Shoemaker on February 01, 2008 08:51pm
As an open source business strategy lead here at Microsoft, I am particularly interested in community reaction following acquisition waves like the one we have seen recently (Sun/MySQL, Nokia/Trolltech, SpringSource/Covalent, etc.). While I am interested in reaction to each announcement individually, I find those that attempt to extrapolate what the event says about the broader OSS landscape especially interesting. This time around, one question that keeps surfacing is whether open source companies have sold out. Put differently, does selling mean selling out? My answer is no.
First, let me quickly point out the obvious. This recent wave of open source acquisitions is nothing new. Over the last 3 years, we have seen a number of open source companies sell to traditional ones (e.g., Zimbra to Yahoo, XenSource to Citrix, Gluecode to IBM). There is also a continuum of “ownership” and participation at the project level as well from company-driven to community-driven projects (e.g., from IBM’s influence over Geronimo to Zend’s PHP involvement to community-driven projects on Sourceforge or CodePlex). And, there is a continuum of opinion on it.
When I hear the question raised of whether open source companies are selling out, my reaction is “Why should OSS companies be held to a different standard than that of traditional ones?” What I mean is that I expect companies, whether open source or not, to do what is in the best interest of their customers and provides the best opportunity for future growth. The question should not be are OSS companies selling out, but rather are OSS companies selling to the right companies and in what ways will it further the company’s purpose.
Furthermore, the approach that an OSS company takes—IPO, acquisition, VC backing, or go-at-it-alone—doesn’t particularly matter. Today, we see more acquisitions and not IPOs because these traditional companies place higher valuations on these OSS companies than the market does. While the market focuses more on revenues, these traditional companies price in other variables (competitive impact, benefits to existing complementary offerings, etc.).
Does this acquisition trend mean that the terms open and closed source will no longer be relevant in the future? Maybe. Maybe not. To me, it’s minutia compared to the overall trend. I expect to continue to see convergence between the traditional and open source business models, and I expect to see Microsoft and other traditionally proprietary companies’ involvement continue to grow, as it is in the best interest of customers, partners, and shareholders. The heterogeneity of the technology landscape will continue to grow and consist of multiple source approaches so as to deliver the most value to customers. So, for me, this wave of acquisitions is nothing more than the next logical step on that path, and I’m excited to be a part of figuring out those next steps.
by Bryan Kirschner on February 05, 2008 07:32pm
“…Our goal here is to evolve and to hopefully provide information that makes it easier for people using OSS and Microsoft software in the real world.” Bill Hilf wrote this in an April 2006 blog entitled “Who Would Have Guessed?” just one week after Port25 launched. Although in hindsight it seems obvious Port25 was a good idea, back then there was a lot of guessing and finger-crossing, because Port25 wasn’t about Bill or Sam participating in a dialogue as individuals—something they did and continue to do all the time. This was about Microsoft as a company opening up for two-way participation in a new domain.
This domain has proven to be even broader than people using open source and Microsoft software—it includes people holding varied dispositions across technical, business and legal perspectives, in both camps. There are people interested in very specific technical issues and some in broader industry trends and themes. Posts with high readership, many trackbacks, lots of comments (or some combination of the above) include, for example, some how-to and systems administration focused (Kishi on systems configuration), some about new bits you can use (Hank on Windows media player for Firefox) and some about big news (John Rosenberg on the approval of two Shared Source licensed by the OSI).
Comments on two recent posts—How Did It Start for You? and New Horizons really crystallized for me the diversity of the Port25 community—inside and outside Microsoft. The Port25 community defies reductive classification as “a Microsoft guy (or gal)” or “an open source gal (or guy)”—or as “a developer” or “an end-user.” Folks wear multiple hats and have diverse experiences and interests. So Port25 is evolving to reflect and support that diversity.
Port25 will continue to be the home of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft. And technical content will continue to make “it easier for people using OSS and Microsoft software in the real world”. But the redesign you’re looking at will make it easier to browse and search a larger and more diverse body of content efficiently: are you looking for downloads, developer-focused content, or in browsing content of general interest to the “community?”
One big reason for making these sorts of changes is the steadily increasing number and scope of people , technologies , activities , and downloads across Microsoft and around the world that are relevant to Microsoft and open source growing together (to use a phrase you’ve heard before on Port25). We want these to be readily discoverable for every member of the Port25 community who might have an interest in them—whether because you find something to be problematic (--constructive feedback is important!), inspirational, or useful. And above all, the biggest reason is something we have all experienced over the life of Port25: the vitality and two-way dialogue of Port25 continues to foster to more awareness, connections, participation and change within Microsoft and in the broader ecosystem.
Referring to one such manifestation of change, Sam titled a blog “If you’re surprised you’re not paying attention.” The evolution of Port25 will make it easier for you to pay attention to what matters to you.
by Community Contributor on February 27, 2008 08:33pm
First, many thanks to Microsoft’s Port 25 Team for the opportunity to post today!
Today SpikeSource announced the availability of five additional PHP-based applications on the Windows Server 2008 platform. Gallery, Mantis, Moodle, PhpBB and WebCalendar are available for free download from www.spikesource.com. We welcome you to take a look and to offer your feedback!
Similar to the previous applications we released on Windows Server (Drupal, Alfresco), SpikeSource delivered these as turnkey “SpikeIgnited” applications, with all components needed to run the application available in a single one-click-install distribution. We have also included a variant of our SpikeNet update service optimized for Windows Server 2008.
“That’s great”, you might say, “SpikeSource has ‘Ignited’ a few more apps, so what’s the big deal?” We believe the big deal is that these applications also run on a stack of other Microsoft products in addition to Windows, namely, IIS/Fast-CGI and SQL Server Express, with which many open source products have historically not interoperated well. Quite a bit of engineering went into assembling this “WISP” stack and building/testing these PHP applications, and this know-how is an important step towards improving the interoperability between the worlds of Microsoft and open source.
Why do this? Because customers want it. Throughout SpikeSource’s history, nearly 50% of our customer’s request Windows versions of our open source applications, and most of them also care about interoperating with IIS, SQLServer, Sharepoint, ActiveDirectory and so forth. Our experience is representative of the industry. Ask any commercial OSS ISV with a server-side application, and they’ll tell you the same thing, with similar numbers.
Also, last December, the Open Solutions Alliance (www.opensolutionsalliance.org) published a report (pdf) summarizing the results of its customer outreach efforts. One of the key findings was that customers want better open source and Microsoft interoperability, and moreover, they felt this was the issue that the industry has collectively done the least to address. While there has been a lot of unfortunate history that has gotten in the way of this, ultimately customers don’t care as much about grudges as they care about everything simply working. Together, SpikeSource and Microsoft’s open source lab are doing something about it.
The release of these five PHP applications is just a first step. By taking five commonly used PHP applications and making them run better on a Windows stack, we took a step towards better interoperability, and we also built some technical expertise that we intend to leverage more broadly and share with the community in the future.
So, stay tuned, and we welcome your input. What other types of open source applications are important to run well on Windows? What specific technical issues do you have that you would like to see us solve? What more can we do? Please send us your feedback!
Dominic Sartorio Sr Director, Product Management, SpikeSource President, Open Solutions Alliance