Here's some big news

billhilf — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:30:00 GMT

Today we announced a very important partnership with Novell that represents a milestone for our industry. The partnership has technical, business and legal significance for Microsoft, Novell, our customers and the open source community. I want to break it down into reasonably sized chunks of information to help explain what it is and how we arrived here.

There is often a big ‘elephant in the room’ when discussing Microsoft and Open Source, and that issue is related to intellectual property. Our business at Microsoft is built on intellectual property, as are many businesses: Apple, Sony, BMW, Amazon, Nike, and the list goes on. What does this mean? It’s relatively simple – each day thousands of people come to work at Microsoft to build new technologies that (ideally) make it easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable to use a computer. We pay these people to do this and then we sell their work through our products. We then use that money to continue to pay these people to keep innovating and building new things that meet the above goal and the cycle goes on and on. Like the other companies I listed above, we protect the intellectual property from these innovations through patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets (the four parts of intellectual property). Use an iPod? The menu structure driven by that little wheel is protected by patents that Apple owns. Wear Nike shoes? The layering of those soles and their contents are protected by patents and the Nike ‘swoosh is a protected trademark of Nike. Used Red Hat’s update service? That is also protected by a patent application. Even that soda you got at McDonald’s was likely delivered through this interesting invention. This is the world of intellectual property and apart from opinions on the governance of this system, this is how it works today.

Microsoft’s intellectual property is almost entirely in software innovations (no surprise) so it was very important for us to have a model where our intellectual property continues to be valued and respected by all constituencies, including the commercial open source world. Again, our business (as many are) is rooted in intellectual property so this is a non-trivial issue. Our agreement with Novell provides a way for Microsoft and Novell to keep square on one another’s patents and it provides a way for us to pass on the benefits to customers who want to know these complex issues have been sorted out. At the same time, we’ve got to do all this in a way that works for those open source developers who contribute code for the love of technology, not for the paycheck. Microsoft is stepping up and saying we won’t assert patents against individual, non-compensated developers for the code they write. What does all this mean? It means that we have a way to work through (or bridge) the open source and Microsoft issues around intellectual property by defining a line between commercial and non-commercial use of our intellectual property. Additionally Novell’s customers can feel confident that they are clear and compliant (at minimum with Microsoft) of the open source products they buy and deploy from Novell.

Figuring out this model unlocked a variety of new areas that we can collaborate on together, such as the work we’ll be doing around Virtualization, Office file formats and management technologies. Here are some of the highlights:

Patent coverage

The concern over potential patent infringements makes some people nervous about the deployment of open source technologies.
From the start, a design principle of the agreement was to be compatible with the GPL.
To do this, Novell and Microsoft are providing covenants to each other’s customers, therefore releasing each company from the other’s patent portfolio. This may sounds odd vs. a traditional patent cross-license agreement but it is one of the things that makes this deal so unique.
What it really means is that customers deploying technologies from Novell and Microsoft no longer have to fear about possible lawsuits or potential patent infringement from either company.

Development: Virtualization

Microsoft and Novell will collaborate in enhancing and developing the functionality required to efficiently virtualize Windows on Linux and Linux on Windows.
Both will now be first class citizens in data centers, addressing the needs of mixed environments. They will both enjoy optimized, supported and tuned device drivers to maximize their potential.

Development: Virtualization Management

As a plus, the companies will work together to implement the necessary standards to manage data centers that run mixed environments (WS-Management).
Novell will develop tools to manage virtualized Windows machines, and Microsoft will develop tools to manage virtualized Linux systems.

Office Open XML

Novell engineers have been working for the last year together with Microsoft engineers through the ECMA TC45 working group in producing a complete specification that would allow for interoperability across office suites.
Novell will develop the code necessary to bring support for Office Open XML into OpenOffice, and will contribute that support back to the OpenOffice.org organization. Novell will also distribute the Office Open XML plug-in in their own edition of OpenOffice. In addition, Novell will participate in the Open XML Translator open source project.

Mono, OpenOffice and Samba

Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice as well as .NET and Windows Server.-All of these technologies will be improved upon during the 5 years of the agreement and there are some limits on the coverage that would be provided for future technologies added to these offerings.
The collaboration framework we have put in place allows us to work on complex subjects such as this where intellectual property and innovation are important parts of the conversation.

We’re also building a joint research facility where Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions, and will work with customers and the community to build and support these technologies (read: cool big new lab with all sorts of gear and tinkering going on).

I’ve been in the open source world for over twelve years and I have worked with thousands of customers worldwide who use commercial and open source software. I have been part of the large deal team working on this partnership for a long time now. In my opinion, this is the most important bridge ever developed between Microsoft and open source and *significantly* helps customers and hobbyist developers have the peace of mind that they need and have asked for. As Steve Ballmer said today, “They said it couldn’t be done” but we did and I’m personally very proud to have been part of this bridge building.

It’s been a long and exciting day so now a few of us from Microsoft and Novell are going to go get some sleep

Zend & Microsoft Technical Partnership: Enhancing PHP on Windows

billhilf — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:30:00 GMT

Today I had the opportunity to attend and present at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose. I was here to announce a technical collaboration between Zend and Microsoft that will improve the performance of PHP on Windows Server (and down the road Longhorn Server). You can read the specific details of the collaboration here.

As part of my presentation, we performed a demo showing a before and after scenario. We first showed PHP running on Windows Server before the enhancements- then again after. On the latter, I’m pleased to say that we consistently achieved 100% performance gains and on some applications a 150% improvement. All treats, no tricks…that’s right 100-150%.

So what are we doing exactly?

Core PHP and IIS Collaboration. Zend and Microsoft are working to develop PHP performance improvements to increase the performance of PHP on Windows. Microsoft will work with engineers from Zend and the PHP community to identify and implement improvements for PHP on IIS6 (part of Windows Server 2003) and IIS7 (Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ 32 bit and 64 bit editions). These improvements will be submitted under the PHP license to the PHP community. Additionally, Microsoft will develop and release an IIS add-on component (FastCGI) that will serve as the interface between PHP and the IIS webserver. This FastCGI component will be made freely available from Microsoft for users of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server ‘Longhorn.’
Continuous Testing & Engineering. Zend will establish a Windows testing lab and conduct regular tests and performance improvements to maintain high performance of PHP on Windows as Zend, PHP and Microsoft technologies evolve. This lab will be comprised of a cluster of Windows Server boxes (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and a testing framework which will be used to run tests prior to major releases of PHP. The results of these tests will be used by the engineers to identify and fix bugs.
Community Participation. Zend and Microsoft will continue to actively participate in the community to answer questions and, in general, help out.

PHP, being the third most popular development language today, is an important addition to the options available to developers who want to leverage the Windows Server platform, and the overall Microsoft ecosystem. According to Zend’s internal statistics, the majority of PHP developers already use Windows as their application development platform – over 70%. Improving their experience with running PHP applications on Windows for production is a natural next step.

In the end, we believe the real winners in this technical collaboration are PHP developers who now have viable options when thinking about platform of choice for their PHP applications. Of course, that means our mutual customers benefit from PHP applications as well as the choice of technologies that best suit their needs. To make sure this not only happens today, but going forward, both Microsoft and Zend will be active participants in the PHP community to ensure open communications and a continually improving experience for PHP developers in Microsoft environments.

As I have said before, interoperability does not happen by accident. This announcement is the result of a lot of hard work by people from both Microsoft and Zend. I personally want to thank Andi Gutmans, CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. Andi and I have been in discussions for a long while now and I’m very happy to see the great results from a conversation started long ago. We have been working with Zend over the past 6 months to put all of the pieces in place. From the technical work on FastCGI to helping Zend create an engineering lab to improve PHP as it develops over time. This is the first step in an ongoing relationship.

And for those of you in North America, Happy Halloween!

-Bill

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Bill Hilf, Partnerships

Here's some big news

Zend & Microsoft Technical Partnership: Enhancing PHP on Windows