I was taking a look at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention page (OSCON is underway this week), and noticed that Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor (apparently that is the level above Platinum, which is better than Gold.  I suppose that Palladium comes next ;)

That would probably relate to the fact that we announced a new site today that covers our efforts as they pertain to Open Source.  The URL is easy to remember...http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/

I am glad to see our efforts of interfacing with the Open Source community continuing to grow stronger.  For perspective on how far we have come, I point you to the following posting by Eric S. Raymond (open source luminary and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar) in 2004 (http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=208)

FURTHER UPDATE: I had my serious, constructive converstation [sic] with Microsoft last year, when a midlevel exec named Steven Walli took me out to dinner at OSCON 2004 and asked, in so many words, “How can we not be evil?” And I told him — open up your file formats (including Word and multimedia), support open technical standards instead of sabotaging them, license your patents under royalty-free, paperwork-free terms.

Opening up our file formats?

• Office documents are all based on fully documented XML, and are in the process of becoming an ISO standard:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
• http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx
• Our VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file format is open and free for use by anyone under the Open Specification Promise
• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/virtualserver/downloads/vhdspec.mspx
• XPS (XML Paper Specification).  Fully documented, royalty free license, and submitted to ISO for standardization.

Supporting open standards?

• The Zune supports Windows Media (of course), MP3, and AAC
• Our Management products (System Center) are moving to a standards (and XML) based language to promote interoperability
• Service Modeling Language

Supporting:

• multiple browsers and platforms (including OS X and Firefox) with our new .NET based Silverlight Runtime
• dynamic languages (including Ruby and Python) in .NET environments

Working with competitors to increase interoperability?

• SAP
• Novell
• XENSource
• Linspire

Supporting Linux distributions on our Virtualization Platform?

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 7)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 (update 8)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 (update 4)
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.0
• Solaris 10
• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• SuSE Linux 9.3
• SuSE Linux 10.0
• SuSE Linux 10.1
• SuSE Linux 10.2

So... how are we doing?  Are we less evil yet?  :)

Other OSS at Microsoft links:

• Port 25 – Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft
• Codeplex – Microsoft’s open source project hosting site
• Shared Source – Microsoft’s set of programs for sharing source code with customers, partners, governments, researchers, etc.
• John Lam’s Blog – MS Developer, good blogs on IronRuby, Dynamic Language Runtime, Silverlight, etc.
• Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum – offer for OSS ISVs through Microsoft Partner Program