September, 2006

by MichaelF on September 11, 2006 03:16pm

Be careful what you write on your blog about having such a great time at OSCON, because the Port 25 team will find it!  I mentioned that I had wanted to do a second video regarding everything I had learned at OSCON.  I was (almost) embarrassed how my first video interview fell into the category of “common misconceptions about running OSS projects.”  Knowing me, I had to correct this at once.

James Howison, a doctoral student on Kevin Crowston's NSF-funded research team at the Syracuse University Information School and a regular presenter at O’Reilly events, gave this incredible tutorial about OSS communities.  I couldn’t wait to get back to campus to show my team what I had learned and how we were going to apply it to our power toys.  So, we all decided to film the presentation in order to capture the discussions of a team at Microsoft going open and have something to share with other teams that are interested.  I think this is extremely cool stuff, and I hope you agree and want to see more like it.

As a follow-up we hope to get James in for a pod cast interview in the near future to provide some feedback and insight on this topic.  Stay tuned.

Links:

Presentation Outline

Presentation Slides

by MichaelF on September 19, 2006 03:57pm

Update:  We thought we would try our videos on YouTube...would love to hear feedback on this implementation.
Sam interviews Wayne Citrin to discuss work his company, JNBridge, has done to provide interoperability between .NET and Java.

Wayne Citrin is the CTO at JNBridge. He is the architect of JNBridgePro, and has been engrossed in Java and .NET interop issues since .NET's beta days.  Previously, Wayne was a leading researcher in programming languages and compilers, and was on the Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a researcher at IBM's research lab in Zürich, Switzerland, and has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Computer Science.

The JNBridge blog can be found here.

Attachment: jnbridge.mp3

by MichaelF on September 06, 2006 12:19am

http://www.devreadiness.org

·         Guidance

·         Technical Whitepapers

·         Tools

·         Demos

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference/appcompat/default.aspx

·         Thirty minute compatibility check

·         Extended feature details

·         Integration guidance

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference

·        Application compatibility

·        Communications

·         Interoperability and Migration

·         Mobile PC

·         Presentation

·         Security

·         System Services

Recently Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner suggested we provide:  "Something like a checklist of the most common OS integration points that have changed from Windows XP would be extremely useful…"

Turns out there are some useful resources already available, see above, for those interested in developing Open Source applications for Windows Vista or ensuring that their current applications are compatible. 

I took a few minutes to speak with Michael Shaw, Technical Evangelist, to get some additional details on the resources available at the sites listed above.  The following is a short synopsis of our conversation.

What is http://www.devreadiness.org?

MShaw:  The site is an aggregation of tools, whitepapers, presentations and videos intended to help developers understand how to make their existing Windows XP applications compatible with Windows Vista.

Are there other sites aside from devreadiness that developers can turn to?

MShaw:  Yes, but many of the resources available on those sites are either linked from devreadiness or the tools/resources are also located on our site.  Consider this a one-stop shop for Vista application compatibility resources.

Is there anything in particular that those interested should take a look at?

MShaw:  Yes. I would first take a look at the Application Compatibility Cookbook that is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/reference/appcompat/default.aspx. This is the first document developers should look at concerning application compatibility. We have identified and addressed the major areas affecting applications when changing from Windows XP to Windows Vista. I’d like to point out the section on Computer Defaults as this is one big area that developers should take a close look to ensure compatibility for users.

Thanks to Michael Shaw for taking the time to talk with us and to Scott Laster who manages these sites.  If you have specific questions about devreadiness or the Application Compatibility Cookbook, let us know.

-Michael

by MichaelF on September 20, 2006 03:23pm

I’ve seen a lot of speculation on the rationale (some call it strategy) for why I invited the Mozilla developers up to Redmond.  I thought I’d lay out my thinking so you can decide for yourself.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the press coverage of the invitation.  The articles I read varied from hopeful to suspicious – as it typically is for the work I do (collaboration between open source and Microsoft continues to surprise people).  Most misread my opening joke as paranoia rather than humor, which struck me as funny.  On the other hand, bloggers seemed to mostly get it right and see that my invitation was authentic and represents a real shift to do the right thing for open source projects.  And they got my joke ;)

Most importantly, Mike Schroepfer and Mike Beltzner got it, and accepted.  I am grateful to both of them for being open to real collaboration.  Mike & Mike – thank you.

As to the why of it

Part of my personal mission is advocacy for open source applications on Windows.  I posted a long time ago that dividing the world into open source and closed source doesn't make much sense.  Software is software. 

Software companies (or ISVs, as they are known inside Microsoft) that run on Windows have a broad set of resources available to them - from technology enablement to special licensing programs to business development and sales assistance.  Currently these programs are built to deal with software companies.

Open source projects - with some exceptions - are not run by companies, but by people (maintainers and committers), often without a legal entity and usually not interested in building a business.  Microsoft partner programs simply have never been set up to handle this kind of organization.  This is not surprising when you consider that as a commercial, for-profit company, Microsoft is already well designed to work with similar entities that have a shared goal of driving revenue.

All developers should be able to build applications that are able to run on Windows, regardless of licensing models.  Different styles of development call for different kinds of support.  As Port 25 readers are aware, Microsoft is working with JBoss and SugarCRM to help them deliver versions of their products on Windows, and these won't be the last commercial open source companies we work with.  We’re also working with XenSource to enable excellent virtualization of Linux on Windows – again, independent of the licensing model, I want to see technology work well.

In a way, I'm trying something new by inviting the Mozilla folks (both Firefox and Thunderbird) to Redmond.  I’ve gotten a number of emails from inside Microsoft – teams who want to meet up directly with Firefox developers to show them cool features and brainstorm together.   I expect not only to help Mozilla, but to learn how we need to change to support this style of development team.

Mike Beltzner pointed out that we have an opportunity to provide better support to open source projects in general – a jump start on Vista that includes docs, sample code, testing tools, integration points and what is changing.  In response, we pulled together the first cut at a site to bring this info together.  This will evolve over time as we learn what’s needed by the community.

From here, the lab will be expanding our work in this area – both by creating new resources for open source developers, and by growing my team to support more direct work with Open Source Software projects.

It’s going to be long ride and I’m here to see it through.

Cheers,

Sam

by MichaelF on September 14, 2006 01:45pm

In addition to technical tips, blogs and video interviews, the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft conducts a number of technical analysis and research projects throughout the year to help inform and solve key interoperability challenges between Microsoft and open source technologies.  This paper is part two of three.  The first paper in this series discussing DHCP can be found here.

Abstract:

This paper is an evaluation and teardown of the GNU GPL-licensed FreeRADIUS software (http://www.freeradius.org/).  This document includes a detailed analysis of the features that are supported by the server as well as an analysis of the configuration, management and overall usability of the system.

Much of the analysis was done on a RedHat Enterprise Linux version 4 (RHEL4) system using the vendor-supplied FreeRADIUS package, which at the time of writing is version 1.0.1.  The latest package from the project website is version 1.1.0, which was also analyzed for additional features.

Download the Networking Roles Analysis-Free RADIUS paper (.PDF, 396k)

Attachment: http://port25.technet.com/videos/research/networkingrolesanalysisfreeradius.pdf

by MichaelF on September 15, 2006 05:24pm

I wanted to share with all of you the letter one of Our Penguins wrote. Unfortunately he will be leaving us in another week.

Dan (or, as he's known in other circles:  Hypovex), You will be missed!!! 

** DISCLAIMER:  No Penguins Were Harmed In The Making Of This Blog **

(See Dan: We took you up on your dare.)

-Hank

----------------------------------------

As of 9/22/06, the open-source lab will be the second coolest place to work in the dot-com industry. That’s right; yours truly is hitting the road.

Mid-winter of 2006 I had been out of work for about 3 months. It was also the lean-season in many companies, so jobs were few and far between. I have been a Linux sysadmin for about 6 years now and always in a full-time capacity. The idea of contracting had never occurred to me, and the thought of working at Microsoft was right up there with pursuing my childhood dream to be the first man to set foot on the Sun. I was a bit dubious about the prospect of a “Linux job” at Microsoft.

If you’ve spent as much time as I have in the past ignoring Microsoft, there really aren’t many building blocks available to you for constructing a mental image of what to expect. I imagined a scenario that might be some kind of punishment for the divine comedy’s 8th deadly sin: Corporate Geek; Parroted “Office Space” clichés, cubicles plastered with Dilbert comics, people who name their laptops, and have replaced their dating “black book” with an Outlook Calendar. Sounds like fun, right?  (and by “fun”, I mean in the same sense that diving into a wood-chipper might be).

Despite my initial reluctance, I was intrigued by the thought of an “Open Source Software lab” at Microsoft and immediately agreed to begin the interview process. I was given all kinds of advance warning about the dreaded “Microsoft Interview”. To prepare myself, I went out and bought a book on that very subject. I spent 2 days studying puzzle questions, filling my head full of logic bombs, and then the day came…

My first contact with was a phone screen with the group of penguins as it existed at the time and Kishi (as lead) who began to unleash a assault of logical conundrums like, “how would you create an ext3 file system in Linux?”, “What are some ports/sockets and associated services?”, “what’s the difference between a file and an inode?”, “what tool would you use to inspect the integrity of a hard drive”, “how would you troubleshoot this/that”, and “what is your favorite Linux distro?”

I was puzzled. I thought, “what the hell is wrong with these guys?!?! Forget all of that Linux-Schminux crap! Ask me how I would create a test matrix for Bill Gates' underwear!!” 

Never happened.

I hadn’t even been hired yet and the penguins had already cost me $5.99 and two days of my life that I will never get back…jerks.

Apparently they liked me enough though to invite me to an in-person interview. I would go into depth on what we discussed, but if you’ve ever been grilled during an interview for a Linux SA type job, just think of the questions you were asked and pretend I’ve typed them all here. After which, they explained to me some of the projects they’d taken on, what they liked about the job, what they’d like to improve, etc and so on. It was more of an informal discussion than an “interview” per se.

The next week I met with Sam Ramji. The technical portion of our discussion was pretty much as follows:

Sam: So, you like working with Linux?
Me: yeah
Sam: Want a job?
Me: sure.
(note: infer sarcasm)

Actually, there’s a little more to it than that. The general criteria are that you have to have the knowledge and experience to do the job(s) and genuinely enjoy what we do. They generally have to like you and you have to truly enjoy working with open-source technology. Not giving mindless answers to questions as noted in the above, fictitious conversation probably helps as well.

And that was pretty much that. There was also the entrance ritual of having to pit-fight Bill Hilf, which I thought was bollocks as he’s got about a 2-inch reach and height advantage on me. Fortunately, he sprained his ankle surfing while at some open-source convention in Pago-Pago. I got a bit of a reprieve.

The team itself is comprised of a very friendly cast of characters with some very diverse backgrounds in the industry. Some of us are admins, some of us have dev backgrounds, some straight out of college, etc. There’s no politics within the group, no geek-ego among us, or over-ambitious prima donnas.

In all honesty; being here and working on this team has vanquished every assumption I’ve had about what being here and working on this team would be like.  It’s been a fun, engaging, and communicative team to be a part of. Our project managers really go to bat for us. If we need anything done to accomplish a project or task, it’s usually an email away or short walk and a, “hey, any chance you could…”  Red tape doesn’t exist  here.

Contrary to the belief of many, there is a strong bias toward Linux and the open-source community by us. Our managers, leads, and the teams we work with depend on that bias. We are not here to preach to the choir. We build and demonstrate Linux and open-source solutions to push Microsoft to improve its own product line. In that regard our work has had some very tangible results, which I think is really cool.

Personally, my time on the team has provided me the opportunity to learn a few new things and really expand my knowledge of a few key  pieces of software. Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate more without breaking my NDA. I’ll just leave off with saying that I’m moving on with a sharper skill set than I came in with. I’m glad to have been a part of it.

In the next life,

-Daniel Simonton

by MichaelF on September 01, 2006 07:19pm

(Special thanks to Dan Simonton & Kyle Adams for the testing and writing of this tech tip)
Have you ever stood in front of a server you are building, feeding it install cds, and thought to yourself “it just doesn’t get any better than this…?”
Me neither.

But look at the bright side: That growing collection of CDRS that are now spilling over the top of the spindle will make an excellent conversation piece when you have guests in your facility. It also makes for an interesting makeshift “jenga” type game. Ok, maybe not. The point is, there are alternatives.

After a growing frustration with having to burn new install discs every time one got a scratch in the wrong place, misplaced, or needing them while they were currently in use, some of the other penguins and I said, “STOP THE INSANITY!!”, and then endeavored to build ourselves a PXE boot server for our lab so we could install our machines on the fly. We anticipate this being a major time saver in the future.

If you live in an IT cave or for some other reason are unfamiliar with PXE boot systems, the acronym itself stands for “Preboot Execution Environment”. It is a boot option that is built into the firmware of the bios on most modern network interface cards. Essentially it is a coupling of dhcp(bootp) and tftp. Basically, a dhcp request is sent out from the client machine, it receives an ip address and a file with instructions to complete the transaction. From here, the install process is initiated. That’s the short version. If you want the long version, look here: http://www.pix.net/software/pxeboot/archive/pxespec.pdf

We set ours up on a machine with a dhcp server, tftp server, and an apache web server. It is possible to setup the PXE system, adding it to the configuration of an existing, authoritative dhcp server, but for the sake of simplicity, we kept ours on a separate machine running RHEL4 AS. If an authoritative DHCP server already exists on the network, it is important that the following option be applied to it’s configuration under the subnet specification:

          ignore bootp;

This ensures it will not attempt to answer requests by the PXE client. Otherwise, any PXE installation you attempt may not make it very far.

On the PXE dhcp server, you will want to setup with the following options

          not authoritative;
            allow bootp;

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        range dynamic-bootp 192.168.0.200 192.168.0.254;
        max-lease-time 3600;
        default-lease-time 3600;
        option routers 192.168.1.1;
        option subnetmask 255.255.255.0;
        filename "pxelinux.0";
}

We kept the lease time at 1 hour. Once the install is complete (which should only take a third of that time), it won’t need it anymore, so we figured this was sufficient. It is important to note the “not authoritative” option at the top, as this will prevent unintended machines from leasing non-routable ip addresses from the machine.

We then mounted the FC5 iso images on a loopback and copied all of the files over to a directory we created called FC5, under /tftpboot.

          mkdir /tmp/FC5
          mount –o loop FC-5-i386-disc1.iso /tmp/FC5
            cp –r /tmp/FC5/* /tftpboot/FC5

We repeated this process for disc 2-5.

In our /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, we’ve added the following directory options.

          <Directory /tftpboot/FC5>
  Options Indexes
  AllowOverride None
</Directory>
  Alias /linux /tftpboot/FC5

As the directory specification “FC5” might suggest, we’re using this to install Fedora Core 5 from the PXE server. This specification within the httpd.conf gives Anaconda access to the necessary files to install FC5 via http.

It’s worthy of mention that you can choose to do this for as many operating systems as you wish to install.  We primarily run RHEL4 and Fedora Core 5 systems for the sake of uniformity, so we’ll use RHEL4 in this example. Next we copied  initrd.img and vmlinuz files from both /tftpboot/FC5/isolinux and /tftpboot/RHEL4/isolinux into the upper /tftpboot directory and renamed them according to distribution (rhel4-initrd.img and rhel4-vmlinuz for example).
Next we have to setup the tftp server. If the file does not exist under /etc/xinetd.d, it will need to be created (but most likely, it’s already there). It should have the following options specified:

          service tftp
{
                        socket_type             = dgram
                        protocol                = udp
                        wait                    = yes
                        user                    = root
                        server                  = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
                        server_args             = -s /tftpboot
                        disable                 = no
                        per_source              = 11
                        cps                     = 100 2
                        flags                   = IPv4
}

Next, create the directory /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg and make it world-readable. Inside this directory, we need to create eight zero-byte files which represent 192.168.0.254 (use the “touch” command).

touch C
touch C0
touch C0A
touch C0A8
touch C0A80
touch C0A800
touch C0A800F
touch C0A800FE

and lastly, a 9th file for the MAC address, with 01 pre-pended to the beginning

            touch 01-AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF

The AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF portion of course, replaced with the actual mac address of the interface you will be using.  If you do not have this information, it can be obtained via:

          $ ifconfig

            eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr
00:C0:A8:8D:D0:D0
inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:157.55.215.255  Mask:255.255.248.0

Next we create a file called “default” with the following added to it:

          prompt 1
default linux-fc5 ks=http://10.197.173.80/FC5/ks.cfg
timeout 100
label linux-fc5
kernel vmlinuz-fc5
append initrd=initrd-fc5.img ramdisk_size=9216 noapic acpi=off
label linux-rhel4
kernel vmlinuz-rhel4
append initrd=initrd-rhel4.img ramdisk_size=9216 noacpi acpi=off

The options are pretty much the same as you would see in a grub configuration. You can add kickstart file options here if you wish, as noted above. With this configuration, once we reach the PXE linux boot prompt, we can specify either the linux-fc5 or linux-rhel4 to begin the install. If you wish to use a kickstart file, simply specify the location next to the kernel option. As you can see, in our example, it is being taken from an http connection on a different machine. One final step, copy /usr/syslinux/pxelinux.0 into your /tftpboot directory and you should be ready to go.

The final step in the process would be to actually perform an install. On the machine intended for this, go into your bios and place PXE/Network boot in the order before harddrive (if there is an OS present on the machine already). Alternatively, if there is a key-press option (such as f12) on post, you could do that as well. You should see the dhcp client address request progress on screen. Once the address has been obtained, you will see the files specified under /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg directory load and will get a “boot:” prompt. At this point, specify the label of the kernel you wish to boot (these were defined in your /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file).  The install process should now begin.

That’s all there is to it.

by MichaelF on September 25, 2006 06:56pm

I collect old computers.  I always have, not sure why exactly but it does often help me remember where we have been and to contrast it to today and where we are going.  In my office I have the following machines: 

(on the desk)

·         HP AMD64 desktop with dual monitors (primary workstation) running Windows Vista and Office 2007
·         Mac Intel running OSX but often running Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux in Parallels virtualization software

(on the shelf)

·         Commodore PET
·         Sinclair ZX81
·         Radio Shack TRS-80
·         TI 99/41
·         Atari 400
·         Osborne I
·         Commodore 64

It’s the same at my home, where there is a mix of Microsoft Windows, various Linux, Unix and BSDs, and Apple operating systems running about.  At one point, I had some Irix and NeXTSTEP systems in the middle of this bedlam, but the electricity bill was getting a little silly at that point.  This is both intentional (at a minimum) and part of a grand master plan (at the maximum).   As much as possible, I try to force my computing experiences to include a broad range of technologies.  The incongruities that exist when bringing various technologies together are, in my mind, where we learn a tremendous amount.  We take a similar approach here in our lab.

There is another, more subtle, benefit of having all these different technologies together.  There really is no better way to see the differences, advantages/disadvantages, and the level of progress between technologies than using them side by side.  This goes for desktops, servers, and embedded devices.

When I first programmed, I was writing code that quickly consumed memory (what little of it there was) so I had to be very cognizant of memory allocation and deallocation, and practice judicious control of memory consumption and data manipulation.  Good practice, in general, but it was fun this last weekend to run that same old code on a modern machine that has 1GB of memory.  If this was the type of system available to me back then, I doubt I would have learned as much about efficient sorting algorithms as I did.  The tools available today would have made this easier as well.

As an industry, we strive to build innovations that capitalize on hardware advancements.  We are in the era of big network pipes, large and shared memory architectures, multi core chips.  How we ‘light up’ those hardware and infrastructure advancements is the magic of software, which is why I think work such as Software Transactional Memory and LINQ are fascinating – making complicated technologies easier for developers, essentially democratizing programming.

As a counterpoint, think about one of the key features of the Sinclair ZX81 (released in 1981): The ZX81 could be operated in two modes, SLOW and FAST. The FAST mode only refreshed the display when the system had finished computing, causing a severe screen flicker (think frozen screen).   It was a useful mode when you had to do a lot of calculation without the need to see what's going on all the time on the screen.  The SLOW mode (which computed at just that speed) behaved like all other computers did, refreshing the screen all the time.  Imagine that concept today – if you need to run that Excel calculation or load a complicated Web site, you could go FAST but not use the display.  At the time, this was innovation – get work done faster, but at a price.

This is why I keep these old boxes and machines around – to keep perspective on where we have been and where we might be able to go.   Create an incongruous environment and see what you can see.

-Bill

P.S. - I am still looking for an Altair 8800 to complete the collection, so if you know of a good deal, send me mail.

P.S.S. – another benefit of having old computer stuff lying around, is you can modify your home furniture.  Here’s a picture of a media cabinet in my home where I cut holes into the back panel and attached two cpu fans to a six volt battery, connected through a car light switch (where the red/black wires drop down from at the top).  This is so I can switch on fan power to the cabinet to cool down my Xbox 360 system behind this panel – which is necessary after long hours in Ghost Recon or Call of Duty2 play.  And yes, I opted for cpu fans with flashing blue leds, it is a game cabinet after all.

by MichaelF on September 27, 2006 08:13pm

To continue the series of interesting people we met at OSCON Anandeep spends some time with Andreas Knab Computer Systems Engineer at the Center for Instructional Technology at James Madison University.  Andreas works on an Open Sourced .NET project at the University called:  Madison Digital Image Database.  The project is an online slide management and teaching tool.  Think of it as an online substitute for the 35mm projector from Art History class.  In the podcast Andreas and Anandeep discuss the project, the development environment and Andreas' experience working on an Open Source project.

Links:

http://mdid.org (project wiki)
http://mdid.org/demo (demo site, requires registration)

[Edit]  We just got the following note from Andreas:

"...we actually just received an IMLS grant(http://www.imls.gov/news/2006/092606_list.shtm#VA) to add an API to MDID to facilitate interoperability with other image management and presentation systems, so the project will stay in active development for the foreseeable future."

Congratulations!

Attachment: http://port25.technet.com/videos/podcasts/jamesmadison.mp3

by MichaelF on September 20, 2006 06:54pm

Sam interviews Rod Smith Author of the O'Reilly Book:  Linux in a Windows World, a required read for OSSL staff.  In this interview Sam and Rod discuss the impetus for writing the book and what readers can expect as well as Rod's background and challenges faced in penning this useful resource.

Along with the interview, O'Reilly Publications has given us permission to repost an excerpt from the book that provides useful information on configuring a Samba Server.

Big Thanks to O'Reilly for allowing us to make this portion of the book publicly available through Port 25!

Click the cover for the excerpt: (Download PDF)

(cover link: http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-86-46-PDFs/2766.excerpt_5F00_linux_5F00_in_5F00_a_5F00_windows_5F00_world.pdf)

Title: Linux in a Windows World
First Edition: February 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00758-2
Pages: 494
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxwinworld/index.html

Copyright © 2006 O'Reilly Media, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Used with permission.

Attachment: http://port25.technet.com/videos/podcasts/rodsmith.mp3

by MichaelF on September 29, 2006 07:01pm

Sam and Hank spend some time with Iain McDonald and Andrew Mason.  In this interview they discuss Windows Server Core a command line controlled installation of Windows Server intended to simplify management and minimize the server installation for the four key server roles: AD, DHCP, DNS and File Server as well as others..  They discuss the architecture, why it was developed, comparisons with Linux and even show us the interface.  They also spend some time drawing on windows while hanging out in a stairwell...

by MichaelF on September 14, 2006 03:15pm

We've received numerous inquiries regarding the Windows Vista Beta program so I wanted to make sure anyone subscribed to our RSS feed who also happens to be interested sees this before the program fills up.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx

In order to download the bits (3.0GB's for the 32-bit version to be exact) you will need a Windows Live account.

-michael

by MichaelF on September 05, 2006 06:01pm

On a recent visit to Thailand I had the opportunity to meet a variety of customers, open source community members, government officials and new Microsoft people.  A great part of my job is the opportunity to understand the state of the software industry in different countries around the world – both in developed and emerging countries.  It’s fascinating to see the patterns of similarities and often surprising to learn about the myriad of country-specific characteristics that influence the evolution and growth of a software industry.  My visit to Thailand was remarkable in both of these areas.  I visited at a time where the government was under some unstable conditions – although the environment is amazingly under control and calm. The state of the Thai software industry is relatively segmented, with some areas quite advanced and some under significant early development.

The role of Microsoft in a country like Thailand is somewhat different than in many large developed countries.  In countries like Thailand, Microsoft participates heavily in the growth and health of the software industry.  Certainly we do this in large countries as well, but it’s much more direct and hands on in countries like Thailand.  Naysayer’s will claim this is so we can just ‘sell more’ to new audiences.  Of course we care about software sales (we’re a commercial software business!) but in these environments we prioritize the condition of the software ecosystem as it’s the basis for any near or future business.  For example, the Microsoft general manager for a country like Thailand (Andrew in the photo below – far right) will spend a good portion of their time working on country-wide initiatives for improved software education, or in cross-vendor forums focusing on improved software security, or in helping the government plan for software infrastructures for future natural disasters (tsunamis, for instance).  What I find interesting, is that many people, particularly in the U.S., don’t often see this side of Microsoft and it is a very important part of our role as a business, community and industry leader to help the entire software ecosystem grow and prosper.

Related to this, one of my trip highlights was a dinner in Bangkok with some of the leading science and technology thinkers in the Thai government around the future of IT in Thailand*.  Below is a photo of (left to right): Dr. Chadamas Tuwasetakul, Assistant to Director, National Electronic and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC); Dr. Pairash Thajchayapong, Senior Advisor to National Science and Technology Development Agency; me; Dr Thaweesak Koanantakool, Director, NECTEC; Andrew McBean, General Manager, Microsoft Thailand.

We had a great discussion about software for children in K-12 classrooms, the benefits and challenges to delivering country-wide computing infrastructure for environments that have numerous IT challenges (such as very few technical support staff).  We also talked about commercial and free software, Microsoft’s position on OSS, standards, interoperability and our future product line – particularly Windows Vista and Office 2007.  It was a great and opinionated discussion and I learned much from Dr. Tuwasetakul, Dr. Thajchayapong, and Dr. Koanantakool, their insight was highly valuable.

The software industry is going through tremendous growth in Thailand.  I feel there is much to be learned from watching these next frontier software ecosystems, to see how they develop their industries in this new era of software economies, how they learn from other economies, countries and trends and most importantly how they create a software legacy that is both prosperous and uniquely Thai.

O’Reilly blogger Allison had an interesting term, technodiversity that I think is a great way of thinking about ecosystem evolution.  I believe strongly that intellectual invention, innovation, and both pragmatic and expressible interoperability are keys to achieving this type of technodiversity.  In an upcoming blog entry I hope to dive more into this area of pragmatic and expressible interoperability to describe why this often fuzzy term ‘interoperability’ is crucial to growing ecosystems.  Warning – expect unusual correlations to trains, newts and other seemingly random but (to be illustrated) relevant examples to the subject.

bill

* To be fair, earlier in the day I spent time with James Clark, long time OSS/XML developer and now part of SIPA (Software Industry Promotion Agency) and the leading OSS promoter in Thailand, and I would include James as one the leading thinkers on software in Thailand as well.

by jcannon on September 14, 2006 02:09pm

Over the past weekend, we discovered that some of the comments being posted to our blogs were being caught by the Community Server spam filter. Usually, this wouldn't be a bad thing - especially if you were around when we launched Port 25. However, the algorithm for catching spam had been unknowingly set to the strictest interpretation due to a recent server upgrade...so many benign comments had been caught over the past couple weeks.

This has been corrected & all comments have been set to publish. If you've had this happen to you - we apologize. Comment away! If you ever feel like something on the site isn't working the way it's supposed to - please let us know.

To make up for our oversight, the video below should provide a good laugh for anyone who works in IT - regardless of what operating system or development models you subscribe to :)

Thank you Long Zheng (I Started Something) for blogging about 4. 

-Jamie

by MichaelF on September 12, 2006 07:25pm

It has been a while since I posted a blog, and I really have no other excuse than that I have been very busy. I have had a whole bunch of blog ideas percolating in the back of my mind, and I will be writing them down soon.

When we started port25 and the OSSL it was met with great skepticism.  But there have been a lot of changes going on around us here at Microsoft. And one of those I wanted to bring to your attention.

A few years ago the mere thought of Open Source at Microsoft was ridiculed both inside and outside of the company. But I am starting to see small and sometimes not so small changes. This blog describes a very positive change.

As you might all know, I went to the 2006 OSCON conference in Portland. And there I met another Microsoft employee, Sara Ford. She works in the Visual Studio and Power Toys area.  She has been a very active blogger in the past (unlike myself, working on it though!) And you can find her page here.

We got to talking at the conference and I have worked with her a little since then and found her to be a very energetic person greatly interested in OSS. But why is this interesting???   Well she attended a session at OSCON given by James Howison. (See his OSCON session info here ) And his presentation was on open source communities.

She was so impressed by it that she is currently working on Open Sourcing the Power Toys. I had the pleasure to sit in the training she gave the team, you can see more of the training she gave (unfortunately I was there as well and probably messed up the whole video by opening my mouth. So ignore me!) here.

In any case, who would ever thought Microsoft would open sourcing anything. But it is happening, and in future blogs I will give you all more insight on my first 4 or so months here and the changes I am seeing both internal and external.

Till then!

Hank.