Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Codeplex, Linux

Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft

billhilf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:47:00 GMT

It's been a while since I made an appearance on Port25. I felt it was important to provide some thoughts to the Port25 community on Sam Ramji's impending departure from Microsoft.

After many years helping to carry the open source software banner for the company, Sam is leaving Microsoft at the end of this month. You may have also heard that he has accepted the position of interim President of the CodePlex Foundation as well as a leadership position at a startup in California. (I'll let Sam and his new company share more details there.)

Sam joined my team three years ago to drive open source technical strategy. I have eagerly supported him as he passionately articulated a vision that Microsoft could coexist - and even thrive - in a heterogeneous IT world.

The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft's open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab' on campus - now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source - development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities - and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.

And, because we recognize the importance of having that strong internal advocate for open source, we are actively seeking someone to fill Sam's shoes at Microsoft.

We will not waver in our commitment to open source.

To my friend Sam: Best of luck to you and your family as you move on to your next great adventure, and THANK YOU for all of your efforts and passion.

The CodePlex Foundation Debuts

Peter Galli — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Many of you will, by now, have heard about the formation of the CodePlex Foundation. In order to give you an in-depth look into the thinking behind Microsoft sponsoring the Foundation, I talked to Bill Staples, the General Manager for the Web Platform and Tools Team at Microsoft, a member of the interim CodePlex Foundation board and whose engineering team builds the Microsoft Web platforms.

"Before we dig into the details of the CodePlex Foundation, it is important to note that the Foundation is completely independent from Microsoft. The Foundation's mission to help the exchange of code and understanding between software companies and open source communities is really interesting to Microsoft. To help the Foundation fund its first year of operations, Microsoft is donating U.S. $1 million," Staples told me.

One thing that Staples was very clear about during our conversation was that the CodePlex Foundation will be complementary to the software ecosystem and is not designed to compete with any of the existing open source foundations. He hopes that the CodePlex Foundation will bring commercial and open source software development communities even closer.

"We need the community's involvement to make the CodePlex Foundation a success. We don't have all of the answers today. With today's soft launch, we hope to get critical input that will ensure the Foundation is a respected, neutral party that can enhance collaboration between participating companies, industry partners and open source communities. Over the coming weeks and months, we will be reaching out to many folks to get their feedback and to ask them to get involved with the Foundation," he said.

As such, an interim board has been established, with participation by both community and Microsoft individuals, and the plan is to work together with the open source community and other software companies over the next 100 days to really shape and define the foundation, he said. The intention going forward is to find the best candidates for the full-time board, with the expectation that the Foundation will be run by a combination of representatives from software companies and open source communities.

The interim board will also be creating a project governing process by which projects can be nominated and approved as part of the Foundation.

Microsoft's support of the Foundation is really the next logical step in our work with and engagement of open source software communities, and does not signal a shift in Microsoft's open source strategy, Staples said.

Over the past few years we have become increasingly supportive of open source, including sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation, contributing to the PHP Community, participating in Apache projects - including the Hadoop project and the Qpid project - and participation in various community events such as OSBC, OSCON, EclipseCon, PyCon, and the Moodle Conference.

"Our hope is that new opportunities will emerge for Windows and .NET developers to more actively participate in open source development through the CodePlex Foundation," Staples said.

You can read more about the new CodePlex Foundation at http://www.codeplex.org/.

Better Windows Development Environments - One project at a Time

Mark Stone — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Discussions of the PC market usually break down into "desktop" vs. "server", as if these are the only platform categories. However, the developer's dev box -- call it a "workstation" to distinguish it from desktop -- is really a separate platform. Remember, when Linus Torvalds created Linux it wasn't because he needed a better
desktop operating system, or a better server operating system. What he wanted was something that could run the gcc compiler. He wanted a developer workstation he could use at home.

Of course the developer workstation market influences other markets. Developers who develop on a platform are more likely to develop for a platform. So winning developer mind share is often about giving them what they want in the way of development environment. And in this regard, open source developers are something of a
different breed.

Microsoft has a great set of developer tools; I've certainly known developers who swear by Visual Studio. But there's something of a disconnect between graphical tools favored by Windows developers and then command line tools favored by traditional open source developers; I've also known developers whose first order of business
with a new Windows workstation is to GNU-ify it.

Ironically, the Internet has a convergence effect, drawing these two camps together. Put developers online, and they can collaborate. Put developers online, and they can not only develop, but they can build, deploy, and test. The workstation has become not so much a computer as an environment. The developer's toolkit includes version control, build management, automated testing, and the need to do all these things as a team rather than an individual. Developer environments have evolved rapidly to adapt to these changes.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) seems to understand this evolution as well as anyone, and a number of ASF projects focus specifically on tools for the developer environment (Ant, Buildr, Continuum, Gump, and Maven come to mind as a few examples).

What's interesting is to see the .NET developers following suit, and wanting these same sorts of tools for their development environment. What's surprising is that this .NET effort is very grass roots driven.

"Panday" is a Filipino word meaning "blacksmith", and can also be a reference to the graphic novel super hero of the same name (the graphic novel is also originates from the Philippines). This provides an appropriate metaphor for the name of the NPanday project on Codeplex.

The NPanday project is one of several affiliated with Microsoft's Open Source Lab in the Philippines, and is part of the effort to bring to .NET some of the capabilities found in other open source development environments. The aim of NPanday is integrate Apache Maven into the .NET development environment.This would enable .NET
developers to take advantage of Maven-compatible development infrastructure.

Projects like NPanday are important because they offer developers more choice of tools in a Windows development environment. The more familiar those tools are to open source developers, the more open source development will be done on and for Windows. NPanday is also an important project for interoperability, making it easier to integrate .NET development with other development done using Maven.

Joining Microsoft's Open Source Effort

Mark Stone — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:15:00 GMT

"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.