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by Sam Ramji on July 23, 2009 08:38pm
Microsoft on Monday contributed the Linux Integration Component drivers to the Linux community for the reasons stated in our release. Microsoft chose the GPLv2 license for the mutual benefit of our customers, partners, the community, and Microsoft.
Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers.
The primary reason we made this determination in this case is because GPLv2 is the preferred license required by the Linux community for their broad acceptance and engagement. For us to participate in the Linux Driver Project, GPLv2 was the best option that allowed us to enjoy the tremendous offer of community support. The community's response even within a few hours of posting the code was welcoming and we appreciate it greatly.
We arrived at the decision to release the drivers to the community under the GPLv2 through this process. Both Greg K-H and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation have reiterated that this is the same process that other companies follow when deciding how to release new device drivers to the Linux community.
We are looking forward to the positive collaboration and acceptance that has marked the vast majority of our interactions with customers and community members regarding this important project.
Cheers,
Sam
Updated 7/25/2009 @ 11:54 AM Pacific: Dave Roberts of Vyatta posted a blog entry rebutting recent cloims that we were accused of a licensing violation with some detail on the technical issues.
by Peter Galli on November 02, 2009 03:01pm
This week the Apache Software Foundation celebrates its 10th anniversary at its annual U.S. ApacheCon 2009 event in Oakland. As such, I though it would be interesting to chat with ASF President Justin Erenkrantz about the past 10 years and what's still to come going forward.
Peter Galli: Tell me about ApacheCon, who the audience is, what the goal of the event is.
Justin Erenkrantz: Since The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is so globally distributed, with almost 2,000 Committers around the world working on over 100 different projects, we do all of our work virtually, via public mailing lists.
As such, ApacheCon presents a unique opportunity for our community - users, contributors, and developers - to get together face-to-face. We typically try to run at least two shows a year: we're currently holding our upcoming U.S. show in Oakland, and we held ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam earlier this year.
At ApacheCon, we have a range of trainings, talks, and MeetUps. We have half-day, full-day, and two-day trainings typically led by key developers in the project. This immersive environment allows interested parties to dive down into tremendous detail about Apache projects - popular trainings include Hadoop, Solr, Tomcat, ActiveMQ, Wicket, Lucene and, of course, our well-known HTTP Server.
In addition to the trainings, we have three days of session tracks (usually hour-long talks) covering broad topics such as: Content Technology (content management systems including Sling and Jackrabbit, as well as CouchDB and POI), Web Services (Axis and other SOA tools), OFBiz (our Enterprise Resource Planning solution), Tomcat (our popular Java servlet engine...well it does much more than that these days!), Felix (our implementation of the OSGi framework) and, of course, some talks about the HTTP Server.
One thing that we're really excited about this year is our expansion of free MeetUps in the evening. These are a great opportunity to mingle with the community in a very low-key unstructured environment focused on a single topic. You can think of a MeetUp as an all-night "birds of a feather" (BOF) sessions. In addition, we will be holding BarCamp Apache -- our two day un-conference to talk about whatever folks are interested in, as well as the Hackathon, where participants can collaborate on various code bases alongside Apache Committers. The great thing about the MeetUps, BarCamp, and Hackathon is that they're open to the public, free of charge. All are welcome!
Peter Galli: You always hear a lot about the "Apache Way." Explain this to me.
Justin Erenkrantz: As an all volunteer, non-profit organization, the ASF is regularly praised for its consistent, repeatable, open development model. This model, affectionately dubbed by some as "the Apache Way", is behind the ASF's success in scaling from a single project to 70 primary projects today.
One of our biggest challenges, as the ASF has grown to nearly 2,000 Committers, is how to teach the Apache Way to those interested in bringing new Open Source projects to the Foundation. The way to address this on a formal level is through the Apache Incubator, created to "mentor" new projects and to assist in their learning how to operate as an ASF project. ASF Members who find the candidate technology (called a "podling") worth pursuing, they can then volunteer to be a mentor to the project.
Rather than overseeing its technical development, the mentor's main responsibility to a podling is more social, by helping to pass down the traditions and culture of other projects. Over time, once the podling has demonstrated that it has learned the Apache Way and can govern itself successfully, it can become a full-fledged ASF project and graduate to a top-level project.
Anyone can submit a podling proposal to the Incubator for consideration as a new ASF project. If you have an existing Open Source project and would like to join the ASF, we encourage you to check out the Incubator, and submit your proposals to general@incubator.apache.org.
Peter Galli: Microsoft has been working closely with the Apache Community for some time now. Can you talk to how that works and why our participation is important?
Justin Erenkrantz: As you know, last year Microsoft announced its Platinum Sponsorship of the ASF, which it continued this year. While we are delighted to have Microsoft's financial support as a sponsor of the Foundation, I think the more important aspect of Microsoft's relationship is that they are now contributing to a variety of Apache projects.
Since we announced the sponsorship last year, Microsoft is now contributing to at least four Apache projects: HBase, Stonehenge, QPid, and POI. This really continues the significant sea change from within the organization - Microsoft now isn't afraid of having their employees contribute to Apache projects on Microsoft's time. Committers from Microsoft sign the same legal agreements that we require from all of our contributors.
Microsoft's involvement in these specific communities range from having their employees being core contributors driving the project, to having folks contributing patches or ideas on our mailing lists, to even commissioning a third-party to contribute to our project as a work-for-hire. In other words, Microsoft is now actively participating within Apache projects in a broad range of ways.
In recent conversations with the Port25 team at Microsoft, it sounds like there are even more Apache projects that Microsoft is interested in getting involved in. We look forward to Microsoft's continued and increased contribution and participation within Apache.
As a public charity, we rely on donations from the public. Our policy is not to provide direct funding for our projects (we do not pay for contributions to any of our projects), however there are a number of indirect needs to support our projects. The biggest chunk of our budget goes towards maintaining our servers - we maintain SCM systems (currently Subversion-based), mirror distribution system (seeding a large number of volunteer mirrors), build farms, Web sites, and mailing lists.
We have key data centers at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab and SURFnet in the Netherlands. Since we have a growing number of contributors in the Pacific Rim, we're looking to expand our server presence in those regions. Through our Travel Assistance Committee, we also use our funds to help community members (typically college students) who could not otherwise attend our events - this has been a fantastically successful project in helping to encourage further participation. Finally, we also use some of funds to help spread our message - so many folks still think that the ASF is just about the HTTP Server - it's not! It's only 1 of 70 different top-level projects - so we realize we still have to do some education on that front!
Peter Galli: What are some of the most exciting projects that have been developed by the Apache community, or are currently being worked on?
Justin Erenkrantz: There are so many exciting projects that it's hard to choose from! As before, some folks think that the ASF is just about the HTTP Server: we have projects ranging from Atom/RSS parsers/producers (Abdera) to generating high-quality printable graphics via XML (XMLGraphics). Some folks don't often connect the dots and realize that projects like CouchDB, SpamAssassin, and Hadoop are all Apache projects. And, it's important to know that via our Incubator and Labs projects that we're open to shepherding even more projects.
As we celebrate our tenth anniversary, we've established ourselves as an important player in the ecosystem. We were founded on pragmatic principles, but that hasn't meant that we shouldn't have a leadership position: our Apache License version 2 is the flag-bearer for permissive Open-Source licenses and we have been a strong advocate for openness and transparency within the Java standards process. Over the next ten years, it'll be an exciting ride!
We should also point out eWeek's recent story on eleven Apache technologies that have changed computing in the last 10 years.
Peter Galli: What do you hope to see coming from the community over the next years?
Justin Erenkrantz: Our purpose in founding the ASF ten years ago was to bring the "Apache Way" to a broader community than just the initial HTTP Server. Our goal is to continue that process: we realize that developers are best at coding and shouldn't have to worry about the gnarly details - be it setting up servers, distributing files, accepting donations, handling legalese, organizing events, etc. - and just focus on creating terrific code. So, we hope to see more ideas for projects come our way through our Incubator and Labs!
by Peter Galli on July 21, 2009 06:15am
Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience. What's even better is that this new, integrated experience is accessible via a single sign-on, which lets teachers and students access the resources and services they need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn. Moodle is a free open source course management system that teachers use to create online learning websites for their classes, and has some 30 million users in 207 countries. The plug-in and its feature set was designed as a result of extensive feedback from teachers and institutional IT leaders, and licensed in a way that is consistent with the practices of the open source community - freely under the GPL v2. The news of the release of the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under GPL v2 follows hot on the heels of Microsoft's release yesterday of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPL v2. This means that teachers and institutions can download the plug-in under a widely used open source license agreement and under the same terms that Moodle itself is licensed. This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards, as well as to collaboration so as to help customers, partners, educators and students across the world be successful in a heterogeneous technology world. With the Live Services Plug-in, educators can email class notes and lecture slides to everyone in the class as well as send alerts regarding homework assignments or quizzes - all from within the same environment. Students can also utilize Bing for search, check their calendar, send an email or just an instant message - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. They can do it all right within Moodle. They can also check unread emails using advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to check email quickly for example between class periods or just before lectures start. The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle will be part of a growing collection of solutions available from the Microsoft Education Labs. For more on this news, you can read the blog from L. Michael Golden, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Education Products Group, as well as what Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas has to say about the plug-in.
Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience.
What's even better is that this new, integrated experience is accessible via a single sign-on, which lets teachers and students access the resources and services they need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn.
Moodle is a free open source course management system that teachers use to create online learning websites for their classes, and has some 30 million users in 207 countries.
The plug-in and its feature set was designed as a result of extensive feedback from teachers and institutional IT leaders, and licensed in a way that is consistent with the practices of the open source community - freely under the GPL v2.
The news of the release of the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under GPL v2 follows hot on the heels of Microsoft's release yesterday of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPL v2.
This means that teachers and institutions can download the plug-in under a widely used open source license agreement and under the same terms that Moodle itself is licensed.
This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards, as well as to collaboration so as to help customers, partners, educators and students across the world be successful in a heterogeneous technology world.
With the Live Services Plug-in, educators can email class notes and lecture slides to everyone in the class as well as send alerts regarding homework assignments or quizzes - all from within the same environment.
Students can also utilize Bing for search, check their calendar, send an email or just an instant message - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. They can do it all right within Moodle. They can also check unread emails using advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to check email quickly for example between class periods or just before lectures start.
The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle will be part of a growing collection of solutions available from the Microsoft Education Labs.
by Peter Galli on September 22, 2009 09:00am
Today, Zend Technologies announced the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, which is a new open source initiative that allows developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.
This new project is designed to encourage widespread participation and contributions from the open source community, resulting in the availability of Simple Cloud API adapters for virtually all major cloud providers.
Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid are all co-founding contributors to this community project, which aims to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms and whose initial goal is to provide a set of programming interfaces for PHP developers to facilitate the development of applications that have basic cloud storage needs.
The first deliverables will include interfaces for file storage, document database, and simple queue services from platforms like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Rackspace Cloud Files, allowing developers to deploy software applications to access services in these environments without making time consuming and expensive changes to their source code.
As Andi Gutmans, the CEO at Zend Technologies, notes in the press release announcing the project, "cloud computing offers irresistible value to enterprises of all sizes, but the lack of portability across cloud application services for even the most basic operations has been an impediment to broader adoption of cloud services."
An initial Simple Cloud API proposal and reference implementation is already available now for community review and participation, while a technology preview of the PHP client libraries for Windows Azure can be found here.
Microsoft is also contributing Simple Cloud API adapters, along with the official PHP client libraries for Windows Azure storage, to future versions of Zend Framework. These adapters will allow applications to take advantage of many Windows Azure features through the Simple Cloud API interface, while Microsoft's client libraries will put Windows Azure innovations, such as transaction and partial upload support, at the fingertips of cloud application developers.
"The Simple Cloud API is an example of Microsoft's continued investment in the openness and interoperability of its platform. We're excited to see how this project will foster adoption of cloud computing platforms by PHP developers and hope that many of these developers are encouraged to use Windows Azure," Doug Hauger, the General Manager for Windows Azure, notes in the press release.
Microsoft's involvement started a few months ago, through our work with Real Dolmen on a Windows Azure SDK for PHP developers. This SDK has been submitted to the Zend Framework, and it now forms the basis of Microsoft's contribution to the Simple Cloud API project.
As Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect at Microsoft, notes in his blog, the Zend Adapter for Windows Azure will leverage Microsoft's contribution. PHP developers will now be able to program against Windows Azure - in a way that is consistent with other cloud platforms - by tapping into the main features of Window Azure Storage.
Those PHP developers who need to use specific Windows Azure features not included in the scope of the Simple Cloup API (like transaction), will be able to combine the Zend Cloud Adapter with the dedicated Windows Azure SDK for PHP.
"This will allow developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers. Simple API for Cloud also gives PHP developers more choices, and this is a great opportunity for them to think about using Windows Azure," he says.
by Peter Galli on October 28, 2010 12:00pm
The Microsoft Interoperability Technical Strategy team today used the Professional Developers Conference 2010 (PDC 10) on campus in Redmond to announce a new set of tools based on Eclipse and updated client libraries for Windows Azure.
This means that customers can now choose to upload the Java environment of their choice and run it on Windows Azure, which is an an Open Platform that provides language choice such as C#, PHP or Java.
The Interop team announced:
In addition, Vijay Rajagopalan, the Principal Architect for Microsoft's Interoperability Strategy team, is also demoing a preview of the Windows Azure tools for Eclipse/Java, during his session: "Open in the cloud: Windows Azure and Java" today from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can watch the session here.
He has also recorded an on-demand session, titled "Developing PHP Applications on the Windows Azure Platform," in which he demos the latest version of the Windows Azure and PHP tools and SDK.
"I'm excited about all that we announced today and look forward to updating you on lots of exciting things moving forward. Stay tuned as we will follow up shortly with more technical articles and tutorials detailing scenarios using Windows Azure with PHP and Java. As always, do give us your feedback here," Rajagopalan said in his Interoperability blog.
by MichaelF on February 02, 2007 06:36pm
Following up on our post yesterday here is an interview Sam did with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist: Steve Marx.
Steve discusses the three components of ASP.NET AJAX and shows us a demo of the software formerly known as ATLAS running on top of PHP on Linux to demonstrate some of the front and backend extraction capabilities.
If you are interested in looking a bit more deeply at ASP.NET AJAX, as well as the PHP support Steve released to Codeplex, here are some links he provided:
ASP.NET AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net/ Direct link to download the Microsoft AJAX Library: http://ajax.asp.net/downloads/library/default.aspx?tabid=47 PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library: http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax Steve's Blog: http://smarx.com/
We've been participating in creating a roadmap for adoption of cloud computing throughout the federal government, with the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) , an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the United States first federal physical science research laboratory. NIST is also known for publishing the often-quoted Definition of Cloud Computing, used by many organizations and vendors in the cloud space.
Microsoft is participating in the NIST initiative to jumpstart the adoption of cloud computing standards called Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing, (SAJACC).The goal is to formulate a roadmap for adoption of high-quality cloud computing standards. One way they do this is by providing working examples to show how key cloud computing use cases can be supported by interfaces implemented by various cloud services available today. Microsoft worked with NIST and our partner, Soyatec, to demonstrate how Windows Azure can support some of the key use cases defined by SAJACC using our publicly documented and openly available cloud APIs.
NIST works with industry, government agencies and academia. They use an open and ongoing process of collecting and generating cloud system specifications. The hope is to have these resources serve to both accelerate the development of standards and reduce technical uncertainty during the interim adoption period before many cloud computing standards are formalized.
By using the Windows Azure Service Management REST APIs we are able to manage services and run simple operations including simple CRUD operations, solve simple authentication and authorizations using certificates. Our Service management components are built with RESTful principles and support multiple languages and runtimes including Java, PHP and .NET as well as IDEs including Eclipse and Visual Studio.
It also provides rich interfaces and functionality that provide scalable access to public, private and hosted clouds. All of the SDKs are available as open source too. With the Windows Azure Storage Service REST APIs we can use 3 sets of APIs that provide storage management support for Tables, Blobs and Queues with the same RESTful principles using the same set of languages. These APIs as well are available as open source.
We also have an example that we have created called SAJACC use case drivers to demonstrate this code in action. In this demonstration written in Java we show the basic functionality demonstrated for the NIST Sample. We created the following scenarios and corresponding code …
1. Copying Data Objects into a Cloud, the user is able to copy items on their local machine (client) and copy to the Windows Azure Storage without any change in the file; the assumptions are to have credential with a pair of account name and key. The scenario involves generating a container with a random name in each test execution to avoid possible name conflicts. The container uses the Windows Azure API. With the credential previously created the user prepares the Windows Azure Storage execution context. Then a blob container is created, with optional custom network connection timeout and retry policy, you are able to easily recover from network failure. Then we will create a block blob and transfer a local file to it. We will then compute a MD5 hash for the local file, get one for the blob and compare it to show there are equivalent and no data was lost
2. Copying Data Objects Out of a Cloud, repeats what we do from the first use case, Copying Data Objects into a Cloud. Additionally we will include another scenario, where set public access to the blob container and get its public URL; we will then as an un-identified (public) user retrieve the blob using an http GET request and save it to the local file system. We will then generate a MD5 hash for this file and compare it to the originals we used previously
3. Erasing Data Objects in a Cloud erases a data object on behalf of a user. With the credentials and data you created in the previous examples we will use the public URL of the blob and delete it by using its blob name. We will verify by using an http GET request to confirm that it has been erased.
4. VM Control: Allocating VM Instance, the user is able to create a VM image to compute on that is secure and performs well. The scenario involves creating a Java Keystore and Truststore from a user certificate to support SSL transport (described below). We will also create Windows Azure management execution context to issue commands from and create a hosted service using it. We will then prepare a Windows Azure service package and copy it to the blob we created in the first use case. We will then deploy in the hosted service using its name and service configuration information including the URL of the blob and the number of instances. We can then change the instance count to as many roles we want to execute using what we deploy and verify the change by getting status information from it.
5. VM Control: Managing Virtual Machine Instance State, the user is able to stop, terminate, reboot, and start the state of a virtual instance. We will first prepare an app to run as the Web Role in Windows Azure. The program will add a Windows Azure Drive to keep some files persistent when the VM is killed or rebooted. We will have two web pages, one where a random file is created inside the mounted drive, and another to list all the files on the drive. Then we will build and package the program and deploy the Web Role create as a hosted service on Window Azure using the portal. We will then create another program to manage the VM instance state similar to what we had done before in the previous use case, VM Control: Allocating VM Instance. We will use http GET requests to visit the first web page to create a random file on the Windows Azure Drive and the second web page to lists the files to show that they are not empty. We will then use the management execution context to stop the VM and disassociate the IP address and confirm this by visiting the second web page which will not be available. We will then use the same management execution context to restart the VM and confirm that the files in the drive are persistent between the restarts of the VM.
6. Copying Data Objects between Cloud-Providers, the user is able to copy data objects from one Windows Azure Storage account to another. This example involves creating a program to run as a worker role where a storage execution context is created. We will use the container as per the first use case, Copying Data Objects into a Cloud. We will download the blob to a local file system. We will then then create a second storage execution context and transfer the downloaded file to this new storage execution context. Then as per the first use case we will create a new program and deploy it to retrieve the two blobs and compare and verify the contents MD5 hashes are the same.
Java code to test the Service Management API
Test Results
Managing API Certificates
For the Java examples (use cases 4-6), we need to have key credentials. In our download we demonstrate the Service Management API being called with an IIS certificate. We will take you through generating an X509 certificate for the Windows Azure Management API. We show the management console for IIS7 and certificate manager in Windows. Creating the self-signed server certificates and exporting them to the Windows Azure portal and generate a JKS format key store for the Java Azure SDK. We will then upload it to the Azure account and converting the keys for use in the Java Keystore and for calling the Service Management API from Java We then demonstrate the Service Management API using the Java Key tool Certificates. We will use the Java Keystore and export an X.509 certificate to the Windows Azure Management API. Then we upload certificate to an Azure account. We will then construct a new Service Management Rest object with the specific parameters and end by testing the Services Management API from Java
To get more information, the Windows Azure Storage Services REST API Reference and the Windows Azure SDK for PHP Developers are useful resources to have. You may also want to explore more with the following tutorials:
With the above tools and Azure cloud services, you can implement most of the Use Cases listed by NIST for use in SAJACC. We hope you find these demonstrations and resources useful, and please send feedback!
Resources:
Jas Sandhu, Technical Evangelist, @jassand
by hjanssen on February 28, 2007 06:06pm
When I started working at Microsoft in May of 2006 I wanted to chronicle my adventures here. So my first blog was posted on June 7th 2006 Titled What is a guy like me doing in a place like this, I had every intention writing frequently about my experiences. As you can see, I have not been very consistent with that. Something that I will try to improve in the future.
If you would have told me 1 year ago that I would work at Microsoft I would have laughed. I still walk around looking with amazement at my badge, and when I go to other MS buildings I shake my head when I have to swipe my badge on the reader. When I talk to people I continue to refer to them and us (them being Microsoft, Us being the rest of the world )
I am happy to report that I continue to be the department's skeptic , something I will continue to be.
So I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about a bunch of my experiences since a lot has happened in the last 10 months (more about this later)
First of all, contrary what people believe, I do not know of a greater Microsoft plot to take over the world and destroy Linux and OSS. If there is such a thing, we at our level are unaware of it. And since this department in many ways is on the front lines working with OSS and Linux, I would have expected to see some evidence.
There is no helicopter pad (not on campus anyway) where Microsoft stores its black helicopters. There are no dispensers of Microsoft Kool-Aid. (They might have some dispensers in the water coolers though.) And the articles, blogs and posts that I read on what is going on here are most of the time completely off the mark.
Is Microsoft competing with Linux and OSS?? You bet they are. Just like every other company is competing against other companies/people/products that create similar products.
Is Microsoft working to better interface with some of the Linux and OSS products? You bet they are too! We are frequently working on those things as well.
I am not being censored or restricted in any way. I actually have access to a very wide array of things. More so than I thought I would when I started.
The department has a unique position inside of Microsoft. We get to talk to and work with a very wide swath of Microsoft product lines. Just to highlight a typical week that took place a few weeks ago; in the same week I spoke to the Robotics guys, people from the embedded department, People from IIS, SQL server department, the Powershell developers and the cardspace group. And this is a typical week. I am not sure how may other places in Microsoft have the same breadth.
And more and more groups are becoming aware of what we do and contact us to work with us.
Is Microsoft changing?? Yeah, I think it is. In some places it is going very fast, in other places not so much.
Yet if I look back over the last 10 months, I have seen some great changes happen. To name a few:
But we have been touching a lot of items people never thought a few years ago would be likely. Getting Mozilla people on site for one. Another one that would have been considered impossible is Microsoft writing plugins for Firefox. Here is a cool one for example Photosynth, and you can listen to my podcast in which I interview Ian Gilman one of the Photosynth developers. Here is a link to the blog metioned in the podcast: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs/
Just think about that for a second, Microsoft writing Firefox plugins!!!
I will leave you all with a few more observations:
There seems to be a perception that we are not moving fast enough. But I believe we have been able to move at a pretty good speed! And, there are quite a few more things that we are working on that will show up in the future.
Looking back over the past 10 months I have come to the realization that I am really enjoying the job. There certainly are frustrating times, if you are on the front lines like we seem to be you are likely to get smacked every once and a while. If you are not, than you are not doing your job . But we are seeing noticeable change on all fronts. And it is a blast to be able to work with so many groups inside and outside of Microsoft.
So I will close with the following, I am not drinking the Kool-Aid, quite the opposite; I continue to question everything that is going on inside of Microsoft. And I will continue to be a voice for Open Source inside of Microsoft.
Great news for all Node.js developers wanting to use Windows: today we reached an important milestone - v0.6.0 – which is the first official stable build that includes Windows support.
This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.
Those developers who have been following our progress on GitHub know that there have been Node.js builds with Windows support for a while, but today we reached the all-important v.6.0 milestone.
This accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.
And, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working on iisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS.
Among other significant benefits, Windows native support gave Node.js significant performance improvements as reported by Ryan on the Node.js.org blog.
Node.js developers on Windows will also be able to rely on NPM to install the modules they need for their application. Isaac Schlueter from the Joyent team is currently working on porting NPM on Windows, and an early experimental version is already available on GitHub. The good news is that soon we’ll have a stable build integrated in the Node.js installer for Windows.
So stay tuned for more news on this front.
Claudio Caldato
Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team
Hello web and mobile developers!
As you probably noticed, jQuery Mobile version 1.0 was announced this week. We are pleased to use this exciting occasion to reinforce our commitment to supporting popular open source mobile frameworks.
Of the most recent activities, I want to highlight the work done to supporting PhoneGap by adding support for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), and now we are moving up the stack to improve support of jQuery Mobile on Windows Phone 7.5.
As you probably know, jQuery Mobile framework is a Javascript HTML5-based user interface system for mobile device platforms, built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.
While today’s version 1 and the recent RC releases contain many features, we wanted to take a minute and highlight the collaboration we started with the jQuery Mobile team. In the last few weeks we have focused our attention on supporting Kin Blas and others in the community to improving the performance on Windows Phone 7.5.
In particular, as the RC3 blog published earlier this week outlines, Windows Phone performance has improved quite dramatically as shown by the two showcase apps:
The jQuery team has additional performance optimization tips for Windows Phone in the change log that saves additional perf time in certain scenarios.
We are pretty encouraged with this progress, and will continue working with community to bring higher levels of performance and support for jQuery features to Windows Phone... stay tuned, and congratulations again to the jQuery Mobile Team!
Abu Obeida Bakhach
Interoperability Strategy Program Manager
by Peter Galli on July 15, 2010 05:59pm
Version 1.0 of the Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF), which is licensed under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License, has shipped.
MBF is a language-neutral bioinformatics toolkit built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework, initially aimed at the area of Genomics research.
Currently, it implements a range of parsers for common bioinformatics file formats; a range of algorithms for manipulating DNA, RNA, and protein sequences; and a set of connectors to biological web services such as NCBI BLAST.
The MBF executables, source code, demo applications, and documentation are freely downloadable. The source code and development of MBF is managed on this CodePlex site, but all downloads are hosted on the Microsoft Research site here.
I recently returned from Paris, where I attended both the annual Open Source Think Tank and Open World Forum events. It was really great getting to chat with some of the folks representing the myriad of businesses that have sprung up around Open Source solutions, and having some in-depth discussions about broad industry trends.
The Open Source Think Tank is pretty much a unique event in that it gives attendees the opportunity to examine open source and cloud evolution through detailed analysis and discussions of specific industry related case studies, as well as panels, presentations and networking opportunities with a collaborative group of folks from across the industry.
For its part Open World Forum brings together hundreds of decision-makers, developers and users from across the world to discuss Open technological, business and societal initiatives to help shape the digital future
I was happy to be able to participate in a number of panel discussions at both events. At the Think Tank, I got to brainstorm on the topic of “Open Source Ethos as an Agent of Change," which essentially looked at how closed source companies use the open source ethos to energize their companies and change how they relate to their customers, partners and employees. I was joined by Erynn Petersen of AOL and Gil Yehuda of Yahoo, and a lively conversation ensued.
From a Microsoft perspective I pointed out how we recognize the value of openness in working with a diverse array of OSS communities to help developers, customers and partners succeed in today's heterogeneous IT environments.
I noted that we now have a better appreciation for how the open source development model can be useful for our own software development as well as the potential for Microsoft technologies to be great platforms for open source applications. I also briefly talked about our increased investments in standards, interoperability and integration with Open Source Software.
The second Think Tank discussion revolved around Open Source, Open Systems and Open Standards and what that means today. Larry Augustin from SugarCRM and Yahoo's Gil Yehuda also participated, and a lively discussion ensued, a lot of which was way off topic :-)
(This blog was originally posted on our Interoperability blog)
As a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation, it’s always great to see the growth and adoption of Apache community projects. The Apache Hadoop project is a prime example. Last year I blogged about how Microsoft was engaging with this vibrant community, Microsoft, Hadoop and Big Data. Today, I’m pleased to relay the news about increased interoperability capabilities for Apache Hadoop on the Windows Server and Windows Azure platforms and an expanded Microsoft partnership with Hortonworks.
Microsoft Technical Fellow David Campbell announced today new previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server, the company’s Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server.
Here’s what Dave had to say in the official news about how this partnership is simplifying big data in the enterprise.
“Big Data should provide answers for business, not complexity for IT. Providing Hadoop compatibility on Windows Server and Azure dramatically lowers the barriers to setup and deployment and enables customers to pull insights from any data, any size, on-premises or in the cloud.”
Dave also outlined how the Hortonworks partnership will give customers access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop with the newly released solutions.
And here’s what Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden said about this expanded Microsoft collaboration.
“Hortonworks is the only provider of Apache Hadoop that ensures a 100% open source platform. Our expanded partnership with Microsoft empowers customers to build and deploy on platforms that are fully compatible with Apache Hadoop.”
An interesting part of my open source community role at MS Open Tech is meeting with customers and trying to better understand their needs for interoperable solutions. Enhancing our products with new Interop capabilities helps reduce the cost and complexity of running mixed IT environments. Today’s news helps simplify deployment of Hadoop-based solutions and allows customers to use Microsoft business intelligence tools to extract insights from big data.
By Gianugo RabellinoSenior Director Open Source CommunitiesMicrosoft Open Technologies, Inc.
As I write this, I’m exploring the public preview of VM Depot, a new service from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.
The preview launch of VM Depot today is an introduction of things to come: you can already easily deploy different Linux-based virtual machines that include custom and curated installations and configurations. (We have the latest, full-fledged distributions of Debian, Alt Linux and Mageia for your hacking pleasure.) You can comment on them. You can rate them. And, what’s more, you can remix them to your liking and possibly share the results with other members of the community. Or why don’t you go ahead and just create a new one from scratch with your favorite software? For ultimate speed, you can quickly deploy images already customized for specific business scenarios. All this is just a few clicks away, completely free of charge and just waiting for your input to make it better. To learn more, see Getting Started with VM Depot.
VM Depot is another illustration of how the Azure platform is effectively open. As complex as it may seem, VM Depot was relatively easy to build as it relies exclusively on published Azure APIs. As we explore the meaning of openness and interoperability of cloud platforms, I can now say that Windows Azure is at the forefront of the debate and provides compelling proof that documented APIs can do wonders to enable building amazing new applications that leverage the cloud.
Some days you can’t help smiling. I had a big smile on my face back in June when Microsoft announced it was making preconfigured Linux images available in Windows Azure gallery and today I have another reason to be happy as I see how Microsoft Open Technologies is helping open source communities work even more collaboratively with the Windows Azure platform.
VM Depot wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a number of partners who have contributed images and packages for this preview launch, including Alt Linux, Basho, Bitnami and Hupstream. Here what they have to say about VM Depot:
"Ease of deployment is one of the key discussions we have with all of the companies leveraging Riak for their highly-available, scalable data storage needs. The VM Depot indicates that Microsoft Open Technologies is dedicated to supporting the needs of today's enterprise with the Windows Azure Platform" - Tyler Hannan, Director of Technical Marketing, Basho Technologies, Inc.
“The launch of Azure Virtual Images and now the VM Depot demonstrate that Microsoft is serious about building out its cloud computing platform. We are thrilled to be a part of this new marketplace, which simplifies deployment of the top open source applications to the enterprise-ready Azure platform, taking Windows Azure to a whole new level.” – Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock, developers of Bitnami
“The demand for cloud computing is there, and Hupstream had the skills to adapt a distribution to the specifics of cloud computing, and provide support as needed. We also wanted to make Debian and Mageia more accessible, and cloud platforms are the simplest way to get started. This was also an opportunity to establish a conversation between actors that traditionally shun each other. Notably, we had excellent collaboration with Microsoft engineers and other community members, while working on a common goal: expanding the reach of developers with Linux.” – Romain d'Alverny, Managing Partner & Engineer at hupstream
I have been doing a fair amount of traveling for MS Open Tech lately where I’ve met a number of great people from the open source community. After a wonderful holiday break, we’re off to an exciting and busy New Year. I know I will use every free moment this month to peek at the VM Depot dashboard and see our latest creation take its first baby steps. Expect more in the upcoming weeks and please help us make VM Depot the best place for open source communities to work together and build shared images for the cloud. See you there.
Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio.
The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.
The theme looks just gorgeous, doesn’t it?
The CSS and Javascript theme adapts to the current theme used in Windows Phone and applies the right styling to the jQuery Mobile controls.This allows mobile HTML5 web sites and hybrid applications to naturally integrate into the Windows Phone Metro style experience. This offers developers the choice of rapidly integrating the theme into their existing application but also to contribute to this open source project through GitHub.
You can see an extensive demo of the theme on this page and you can learn more on this site where we are publishing new articles, references and source code sample for developing with Apache Cordova and the Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile.
This is another milestone in our continuous engagement with the community. Our team has been working closely with the Windows Phone division to support the mobile HTML5 and JavaScript open source communities over the last year to bring popular open source projects to Windows Phone:
We believe it is important for developers to have choices when targeting Windows Phone, and we also want them to be able to deliver a good experience to the users of their applications, especially when making the choice of using Web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) to target multiple mobile platforms by picking solutions such as Apache Cordova.
To do so, developers already enjoy a selection of Apache Cordova Plugins that give their application a Windows Phone touch such as Social Share, Bing Map launcher and Live Tile. Now developers can use the new open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile to give their mobile apps and websites the Metro style look and feel, and offer the final users an experience similar to the one they get with native applications.
As usual we are very interested in hearing from developers and gathering feedback about the experience of developing HTML5-based applications and websites on Windows Phone. Let us know what other features, tools and frameworks you’d like to see.
Abu Obeida Bakhach Program Manager Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation