August, 2012

I can hardly believe it’s been almost four months since we announced the foundation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Boy, have we been busy: Redis, JQuery Mobile, OData, HTTP 2.0, Doctrine, Symfony, Apache Solr, Windows Azure tools for Mac and Linux, Eclipse, Apache Cordova, MongoDB, CouchDB, EntityFramework, ASP.net MVC 4, Web API, Web Pages, WebRTC, Wordpress… the list goes on, and the road ahead of us is nothing short of amazing. We are heading towards one of the most important years in Microsoft history and everyone in MS Open Tech is excited and busy advancing our journey into openness.

We have come to a point where we really could use some help, and I believe we have quite a few great opportunities to join our team. We are currently looking for developers, program managers, technical diplomats and evangelists: what those profiles have in common is a strong interest and experience in open technologies (Open Standards and Open Source), interoperability and community engagement. We strongly believe in code doing the talking for us: we are pragmatic, agile, focused on real-life scenarios and deeply engaged in open conversations with the community at large.

We are having tons of fun pursuing our passion for solving customer and developer issues by creating innovative solutions and technical bridges between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, and we want more of the same. Please visit the Microsoft careers website to learn more about the open positions and by all means do get in touch: we would love to talk to you.

As noted on the Openness@Microsoft blog this morning by Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager for the Open Source Technical Center:

Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V. This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing.

This release, which includes 8,500 lines of code released under the BSD license, is the result of collaboration between Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. My colleague Peter Galli had a blog post this spring about the announcement of this goal, and it’s great to see this work come to fruition so quickly! For further background, check out the interview with Joe CaraDonna, Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, in which he described how this project would “round out the FreeBSD virtualization story and make the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”

FreeBSD is the latest in a growing list of open-source operating systems and open-source cloud projects that work with Hyper-V, including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, Cs2C, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. This wide range of options makes it easier for customers to take advantage of server virtualization, enabling a variety of cloud computing and hybrid computing scenarios.

For more information about today’s announcement, see the blog post on Openness@Microsoft as well as the documentation and downloads available from the freebsdonhyper-v project on Github. The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).

Congratulations to all involved in reaching this important milestone! We’re looking forward to more good news from the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team going forward.

Doug Mahugh
Senior Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.