Follow Us on Twitter
by Mark Stone on March 30, 2009 04:15pm
We should never forget that a key motivator for open source developers is fun. For student developers -- where open source really starts -- this is especially true.
We’ve been looking at several potential student projects in Croatia, and for the past several months have been lending some support to the PlugBlog project.
In many ways this is a classic open source story. Croatia is not a large country (population 4.5 million), nor does it have as highly developed a technology sector as, say, Scandanavian countries of comparable size. Combine that with a distinctive language of Slavic origin, and you have an environment in which there is very little motivation for commercial software providers to offer Croatian localization. Thousands of languages and dialects world-wide struggle with this same problem: they simply lack the critical mass and market opportunity to warrant commercial software localization.
Into this breach steps open source. Several local blogging sites in Croatia do, of course, post blogs in Croatian. But bloggers would like to have the client tools to compose in Croatian as well. Given the popularity of Windows Live Messenger as an instant messaging client, there was a natural opportunity for open source development to create a localization pack enabling Live Writer composition in Croatian. This is precisely what PlugBlog aims to do.
One of the interesting twists on life in the era of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is how enabling SOA is of open source. Plugins for Live Writer can easily be open source independent of the source code status of Live Writer itself, because these plugins need only make web services calls to the Live Writer API. Indeed, a quick search of Codeplex shows more than 60 open source projects dealing with Live Writer. This is the kind of thriving little sub-community that SOA makes possible.
The developers working PlugBlog are students, and they are doing this work as a student project. As such, it has a clearly defined project plan and specific milestones for the project. The work they are doing will provide a valuable localized tool to Croatian bloggers, but it will also serve as an example of how other languages could integrate localization with Live Writer. This is all great, but you can’t stop developers from doing something just because its fun.
So I was surprised to see a check-in on this project that creates a connector for passing data from Skype to Live Writer. This wasn’t on the project plan. Talking to project coordinator Boris, he mentioned this was an extra they threw in in their spare time. Given the huge popularity of Skype in Eastern Europe this shouldn’t have been surprising, and indeed if anyone had mentioned it during project planning it almost certainly would have been part of the original design.
But this too is part of the beauty of open source: user-driven innovation fills the gaps overlooked originally. I look forward to more Skype integration and more pleasant surprises from the Croatian team.
by Mark Stone on March 25, 2009 10:00am
On Monday Microsoft and SD Forum held the 3rd annual Open Source ISV Forum. In a day of interesting talks, I was particularly struck by Larry Augustin's talk. As an emphasizing example of the growth of open source projects partnered with a commercial endeavor, Larry mentioned DotNetNuke.
DotNetNuke is, of course, freely available for download and licensed under an open source license. But there is also a professional edition and a range of complimentary commercial services for those who want service, support, or customizations. The business model is classic open source: the free download seeds the market with potential customers, and as some of those run up against the limits of what they are willing to do on their own, they make inquiries about the professional edition. Thus open source creates an inbound channel of qualified sales leads, without the overhead and expense of a sales force working in the field.
This is a great business model, but it's important to think about the actual decision-makers in this adoption process. What's distinctive about DotNetNuke is that it's one of the few mature, open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) that is not written in PHP. It is, as the name implies, ASP.NET based. And this reminds me of a prdocut management position I was in some years ago when (a) the only mature CMS choices were PHP-based, and (b) PHP on Windows was not yet a viable alternative.
The company in question was in a typical position: they were not a technology company, but needed a strong web presence for their business and to connect to the online community of their customers. They had a home-grown CMS solution that wasn't scaling, wasn't secure, and wasn't stable. My product management team put together a good comparison chart of various CMS choices, many of them open source. I sat down with the web development manager to review the choices.
"Some of these are good systems," he said, "but I have a team of .NET developers, and these are all PHP-based. I don't have head count to go out and hire a PHP dev for this project."
Note the decision-making process at work here:
The person with the first vote in the process is not a CIO or any other traditional "IT Decision Maker". It's one dev, talking to his manager. If your software gets vetoed at that level, or -- worse -- never even gets a try-out, then your product isn't in the decision-making process.
A lot has changed in recent years. PHP is now much better supported on Windows, and .NET projects like DotNetNuke are available and much more mature. This is as it should be. For open source to spread to its full potential, it has to be available in the technology adoption decision-making process. And that availability starts with being available to the hidden technology decision-maker: that lone developer who will look at software written in a framework they understand for a platform they work with.
by Vijay Rajagopalan on March 18, 2009 01:15pm
In October 2008, when Microsoft announced the general availability of Silverlight 2.0, and, as part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to interoperability, Microsoft and Soyatec unveiled the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (Eclipse4SL).
Today, Microsoft and Soyatec are expanding our interoperability collaboration by releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the eclipse4SL project that includes support for the Macintosh platform. Mac and Windows developers can now collaborate on Silverlight projects using the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDEs. We have also added several new features to the project that should please all developers like C# code generation and improved XAML auto-completion (check out our Interoperability Team blog for more details and a demo)
As an open source initiative sponsored by Microsoft (funding and architectural guidance) and led by Soyatec (development), the eclipse4SL project is released under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge.net and was submitted by Soyatec it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. Since its inception the project has received lots of feedback and made significant progress. eclipse4SL has been among the “Top Rated” projects on www.eclipseplugincentral.com for weeks:
(Screenshot taken on 03/16/2009)
For more information, visit the Eclipse for Silverlight web site, or join the discussion at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/.
Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect in the Interoperability Strategy Team at Microsoft.
by Mark Stone on March 18, 2009 10:10am
Several years ago I was helping a musician friend of mine set up a web site to use as a promotional site for his live performances. I opted for a simple, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) that wouldn’t require any special knowledge for him to post new information, and would be – famous last words – easy for me to set up and maintain.
Not having done professional web development for some time, I quickly found myself on the phone to one of my PHP guru friends. After editing three configuration files (two for the web server, one for PHP itself), and adjusting to make sure we had the right version of PHP running with the right version of MySQL, we finally got everything working, and the CMS properly installed and configured.
This small example has several instructive lessons:
So there’s something very liberating about seeing Microsoft offer better tools and facilitate better community collaboration so that web developers can spend more time on creative work and less on component complexity.
I’m referring specifically to the Microsoft Web Platform: Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (WebPI) and Windows Web Application Gallery, announced today at MIX ’09.
WebPI provides a single online destination and a single process for downloading and installing Microsoft’s freely available web products. By itself this may seem like no more than much-needed common sense, a good effort by Microsoft to help web developers get all the components they need working together more easily and more effectively.
What makes this development really interesting is the Web Application Gallery, an opportunity for web developers to participate and collaborate in a knowledge marketplace of shared components. In other words any web developer who follows certain basic guidelines can add their product to the Gallery, and be part of this ecosystem/community of shared web development activity. This is an opportunity not just to market your work, but share ideas and innovations with other web developers, and indeed let them build on your work.
Does that sound reminiscent of an open source community? It should. While there is no requirement that Gallery code be open source, the spirit behind this effort is very much one of collaboration. The Gallery is based on the idea that web developers collectively can advance their work more than each can individually.
Nor is this a playground strictly for Microsoft technologies. There are two supported web development frameworks in the Gallery: .NET and PHP. Opening up the world of PHP applications for Windows is an exciting prospect. There is at least the possibility that something like Word Press on Windows Server will be a point and click install. We aren’t there yet. WebPI installs SQL Server by default, and MySQL is still a manual install. Many web developers won’t – or shouldn’t – care about the difference, but to some it will matter.
But this is definitely a step along the right path, one step closer to making PHP an operating system-agnostic language. Because a PHP developer should care only about building great apps.
by Mark Stone on March 16, 2009 02:05pm
I’m going to tell a story that starts in Indiana, but really it’s about Brazil.
Once upon a time “scientific computing” was nearly synonymous with “Fortran”. Today, though, just about any high level language can be used to write High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These days that language choice also includes C#.
At Indiana University, the Open Systems Lab has pioneered work to implement Message Passing Interface (MPI) support for .Net, so that MPI applications can be written in C#. The project is MPI.Net, and you can find it on Codeplex. It is open source, about three years old, has reached a 1.0 release, and is compatible with two other important open source projects, OpenMPI and Mono. The principle developers behind the project are Andrew Lumsdaine at Indiana University and his former student, Douglas Gregor, who is now on the faculty of Rensselear Polytechnic Institute.
This is the kind of open source work that’s really exciting to see because of the way it expands choices for the developer and the end user. A C# developer should not be closed off from writing HPC applications if that’s what they want to do. And a research scientist should not have to think about whether their lab is running Linux or Windows Server. Both of these individuals are working enough layers above the operating system that somebody else’s operating system choice should not be a constraint.
So I was very excited to learn that students in Brazil at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul were doing work on MPI, and excited to talk with them about their work. One of their projects is MPI#, also open source and also hosted on Codeplex.
MPI# builds on top of the work of MPI.Net, adding some functionality not yet present in MPI.Net. Specifically, quoting from the project description:
The goals of this project would be to build upon MPI.NET in order to complement it with the features that are missing, mainly regarding collective communication. Either they could benefit from C# native support for such communication, either they could be programmed on top of the provided MPISend/MPIRecv encapsulations. C# and .NET features such as fault tolerance or dynamicity support would be studied, in other to turn the MPI# implementation robust in large, dynamic and heterogeneous platforms.
Two of the students working on MPI# are Ismael Stangherlini and Fernando Afonso. They are graduate students in computer science, working on projects affiliated with the Brazilian Interoperability and Open Source Software Development Nucleous. When I talked to them about their work on MPI# I was curious what their communication with Indiana University had been like. Their response: they had never been in contact with Indiana University; they simply downloaded the code for MPI.Net and started working on their own.
That’s the magic of open source: that they can, in fact, just download the code on their own and start coding against it. They may make an important contribution to MPI.Net. Or their code may be entirely disregarded. Or they may move on to other projects and somebody else may or may not pick up where they left off. At this stage it’s too early to tell. But the fact that all of these scenarios are possible demonstrates why, as a methodology, open source is so nimble and adaptive. A top-down product development process, or a top-down standards development process can only execute on the innovations envisioned by the few at the top, and at the speed of the slowest decision-makers in the process. But a bottom-up open source process enables every innovation that anyone at the grass roots level can see.
by Mark Stone on March 12, 2009 09:15am
"Open source at Microsoft." My friends still find that phrase surprising. Yet for those of us who have worked so long on open source, if we really believe the principles we have espoused, shouldn't this be the expected outcome?
In 1994 I did my first Linux install. It was an early version of Slackware, running the 1.0.8 kernel. The term "open source" was still several years in the future. While I never really accepted the basic premises behind the ideology of the Free Software movement, the methodology we later called "open source" seemed obvious and sensible. Share knowledge, collaborate with others, expect and encourage others to evolve your ideas and share their innovations. In other domains, we call this the Scientific Method. Without the ability to openly share ideas, the process of scientific discovery would come to a grinding halt, and we'd be stuck in something like the medieval era of alchemy.
So I am pleased, but not surprised, at the progress open source has made in the last 15 years. And I'm happy to have had a front row view to a lot of it. That journey has taken me through O'Reilly, as the executive editor for their open source group, to Editor-in-Chief of the brief-lived Journal of Linux Technology, to a long stint at VA Linux Systems (now SourceForge) initially leading the web arm of their open source evangelism efforts and later running their developer relations program. Along the way I worked with Chris DiBona and others to get a couple of important books out on open source (Open Sources, and Open Sources 2.0).
SourceForge's developer relations program introduced me to a lot of technology companies eager to reach out to SourceForge's community of open source developers. About six years ago one of the companies we worked with was Microsoft. I worked with Stephen Walli (then at Microsoft) and others to help get Microsoft's first open source projects up on SourceForge. At the time this was a big deal. Few at Microsoft had much familiarity with open source licensing, and there was unease about opening up intellectual property in this way. And Micrsosoft had no experience with the long term benefits of "paying it forward" with this kind of investment in the open source community.
Today is a different story. Microsoft has its own open source project hosting site, Codeplex. Codeplex is growing steadily, and hosts about as many projects today as SourceForge did in 2002. Microsoft has OSI approved licenses that are used by many projects. And Microsoft has an entire group under Sam Ramji that works, among other things, to improve open source offerings on top of Windows.
Some view this turn of events at Microsoft with suspicion and hostility. I do not. Indeed, it would be hypocritical for any true open source believer to view Microsoft that way. If we genuinely believe that the collaborative practices inherent in open source are an important part of software development methodology, then we have to believe that (a) the world's largest creator of commercial software would benefit from contributing to open source, and (b) the world's largest creator of commercial software would be smart enough to recognize those benefits. So it should seem natural, not surprising, that Microsoft's evolution has turned in this direction.
Six months ago I was curious -- fascinated even -- watching Microsoft's recent open source efforts from the outside. For the last six months I've had the privilege of working first-hand with Sam's team, and getting an inside view of what open source is like at Microsoft. I've also had the distinct privilege of getting to know some of the developers and projects on Codeplex. Mine has been an unusual journey from SourceForge to Codeplex, but one I'm happy to have made. And I look forward to sharing some of my experiences with these open source projects here on Port25.
by Peter Galli on March 11, 2009 09:01am
Microsoft and the Creative Commons have released an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily insert scientific hyperlinks or ontologies as semantic annotations to their documents and research papers.
Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, has been championing the creation and use of ontologies - essentially a classification system to organize concepts, not unlike the high-tech Dewey Decimal System.
For its part, Microsoft has developed an add-in that enables the consumption of these ontologies in Word 2007 - and is making the source code available to enable new functionality in Word 2007 - allowing for semantic search capabilities of the documents.
Microsoft is also making the source code available for the Creative Commons Add-in for Word 2007, free of charge, to open source communities on CodePlex through the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License.
Making the source code for the copyright licensing tool available to open source communities provides developers with the opportunity to tailor it for specific industries using domain-specific language.
For example, a developer could choose to modify the tool with language relevant for an author creating a work in the field of genetic research, enabling an author to easily add a copyright license relevant specifically to that subject matter.
The add-in, which was developed in collaboration with the University of California San Diego and Science Commons, serves as a solution accelerator for those working in the ontology field, says Microsoft Program Manager Pablo Fernicola.
"Looking at the developer stack from higher to lower levels of abstraction, the add-in will be useful in three key areas: the development of new ontologies, investigation of new author interaction paradigms, and integration into publishing and semantic workflows," he says.
For those developing new ontologies, the add-in provides a very easy way to test those ontologies with their target audience.
"In many scientific disciplines, Microsoft Word is a very popular tool for authoring papers and articles, and as such authors are already familiar with its usage and features. The add-in is able to seamlessly build on this familiarity to expose new functionality, while additional ontologies can be downloaded through a REST interface," he said.
You can read more about all this on Pablo's blog.
Tom Rubin, the chief counsel for IP Strategy at Microsoft, also notes that the partnership between Microsoft and the Creative Commons enables creators and users of intellectual property to share and build on ideas while also recognizing and respecting the legitimacy and value of IP.
"We're encouraged that our work together - across the fields of science, technology and law - will present new opportunities for research," he said.
By making the source code for the semantically-enabled add-in available under an open source license, Microsoft is allowing users to improve the add-in or even to port it to other publishing systems.
As such people will, for example, have the opportunity to expand on scientific hyperlinks in research papers. So, when researchers run structured queries in the Web, it will be easier for them to find peer-related documents, and to mark up papers as science evolves.
To John Wilbanks, the vice president for Science at Creative Commons and Executive Director of Science Commons, the Web is broken for scientific researchers: full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles but no way for them to find what they need.
"The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing," he said.
This is also just another deliverable in the long history of close collaboration between Microsoft and the Creative Commons, including the June 2006 joint release of a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications, and the July 2008 Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 as part of its Scholarly Communication lifecycle of tools.
by Peter Galli on March 10, 2009 04:30pm
I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday with a group of LAMP engineers who have some experience with Windows Server and IIS, and who are based in Japan.
The three - Kimio Tanaka, the president of Museum IN Cloud; Junpei Hosoda, the president of Yokohama System Development; and Hajime Taira, with Hewlett-Packard Japan - won a competition organized by impress IT and designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".
A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.
The three winners were chosen based on the number of ported applications on IIS, with the prize being a trip to Redmond. A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.
The first-place winner Kimio Tanaka managed to port 71 applications onto a single IIS server. His technical documents can be found here.
Kentaro Yoshikawa, the Platform Strategy CSI Lead for Microsoft Japan, put the competition together and brought the winners to Redmond, where we arranged for them to meet with folk from the Windows Azure, Windows Server and IIS development teams. They also spent time with Sam Ramji, the Senior Director for Platform Strategy, as well as with Tom Hanrahan and Hank Janssen of the Open Source Technology Center.
Kentaro told me that the three were really impressed by the depth of the discussions they had during the day, which was useful to them as they have, until now, mostly lived outside of the traditional Microsoft ecosystem.
They also appreciated the depth of technical thought, strategy and commitment to open source communities that exists within not only the Platform Strategy group, but across Microsoft.
by Peter Galli on March 09, 2009 05:45pm
I would like to introduce Mark Stone, who will be a regular contributor to Port 25 going forward. Mark has a long association with open source.
He did his first Linux install in 1994 and, in the fifteen years since, has served as O'Reilly's executive editor for open source, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Linux Technology, publisher for the web arm of SourceForge's open source evangelism efforts, and later Director of Developer Relations for SourceForge.
During that time he helped Microsoft launch its first two open source projects on SourceForge.net. He has also co-edited two of the foundational books on open source: Open Sources and Open Sources 2.0.
At SourceForge, and as an independent consultant, he has worked with technology companies large and small to help them formulate their community engagement strategy around open source.
He has most recently been working at Microsoft to help identify and support community projects that advance open source on the Windows platform.
Please join me in welcoming him to the Port 25 family and look for his first blog post later this week.
Peter
by Peter Galli on March 09, 2009 04:35pm
In case you missed it, the Apache Software Foundation announced last week that the Qpid project has graduated from the Apache Incubator as a Top-Level Project, which essentially means that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
Apache Qpid is an Open Source messaging implementation built on the Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification, and is the first open standard for enterprise messaging.
Qpid provides transaction management, queuing, clustering, federation, security, management, and support across multiple operating systems and platforms, and currently runs critical systems for many users and large organizations.
Microsoft was invited to join the AMQP working group last October by the six founding members. Sam Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft said at that time in a blog post that the company had "committed to participate in the development of the specification and is keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging."
While message-based transports with security and transactional integrity were a vital infrastructure component throughout financial institutions, the AMQP specification and related implementations "may also provide greater interoperability for a number of other vertical scenarios, including insurance and healthcare. AMQP specifies a wire-level protocol (think of a transport like TCP or HTTP) and FIX, FpML, SOAP, and other messages can be sent of AMQP in LAN and WAN environments," Ramji said.
He also stressed that Microsoft's work in AMQP would be consistent with the commitment to openness outlined in July. As the AMQP Working Group required a limited royalty-free patent licensing commitment from its members Microsoft, as a participant, agreed to grant royalty-free patent licenses on specified terms to implementers of the specification.
"Since joining AMQP.org last year, we have seen how valuable the AMQP specification is to the participating customers. It is great to see the Apache Qpid project maturing as the community strives to address the customer need for choice and improved enterprise-class messaging interoperability," Ramji said last week.