Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Industry Conferences

Silverlight 4 Beta Hits the Street

Peter Galli — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:59:00 GMT

The beta for Silverlight 4 was released today, Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's Developer Division, told attendees at the annual Professional Developers Conference here in Los Angeles.

The final verison of the product will be shipped in the first half of 2010, he said, noting that the release of the beta means that developers can begin testing the capabilities of Silverlight 4 to plan for the great applications and rich, compelling user experiences to come, both on and off the Web.

Some 90% of the most commonly requested features were incorporated into Silverlight 4, which is currently installed on 40% of all internet devices and more than 50% of US broadband PCs, Guthrie said.

A number of customers, including Snapflow, Seesmic and H&R Block, as well as numerous Microsoft properties such as Xbox, Bing and MSN, are all already using Silverlight to create compelling user experiences.

The Silverlight 4 beta extends beyond the browser, and brings new out-of-browser capabilities, enabling new experiences that reach deeper into the desktop without additional code or runtimes required.

Webcam and microphone with local recording capability opens new possibilities for innovative interactive media experiences, while native multicast support enables efficient enterprise-wide training and internal communications behind the firewall.

Full support for Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010 gives enterprise developers a tried and trusted development environment and languages that scales for mission-critical enterprise scenarios, while integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint bring the benefits of Silverlight interactivity to a broad enterprise install base, Guthrie said.

Enhanced printing, networking, databinding, reporting and charting capabilities satisfy common business needs, while Silverlight has a growing library of over 60 customizable controls to create rich, interactive applications to rapidly build attractive, functional business applications.

Microsoft also has extended support for Google's Chrome browser with Silverlight 4.

Microsoft is also working with the open source community to ensure that Silverlight content is available to them. Earlier this year, Moonlight 1.0 was released. Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

Team Microsoft Sings "Them Incubator Blues" at ApacheCon

Peter Galli — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:33:00 GMT

As you probably know, Microsoft was both a sponsor and active participant at ApacheCon 2009 in Oakland, California last week.

But what you might not know is that we also showed our lighter, more fun side, when we participated in the Lightning Talks, which were held on Thursday evening, November 5, during a reception with plenty of popcorn, beer and wine.

As my colleague Jas Sandhu noted in his blog about this - and where you can also find the song's lyrics - the talks are a lively, spontaneous ApacheCon tradition with speakers getting about 5 minutes to poke at each other, the projects, technology, community etc ... and have a bit of fun!

The singing and dancing Microsoft team was led by Kent Brown, the Product Manager for Windows Communication Foundation, who was not only the singer, songwriter and guitar player, but also the author of 'Them Incubator Blues,' which is very tongue-in-cheek and loosely based on his experience participating in the Stonehenge Project and working with the community.

He was joined by me, Microsoft's open source community manager; Tanya Young, our chief cat herder at the conference; and Jas Sandhu, a Senior Technical Evangelist. It was great fun and we hope you enjoy it!

Video courtesy of Mladen Turk from Red Hat.

The Business of Open Source

Sandy Gupta — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:25:00 GMT

I am blogging from ApacheCon here in Oakland, where the Apache Software Foundation its celebrating its 10^th anniversary. Congratulations to the Apache community and cheers to the next ten!

Our focus at Microsoft is to make Windows Server a platform choice for both closed source and open source solutions. Many of our customers who run open source on our server platforms pick open source built in the "Apache Way". And so, participation in the Apache communities is important for us and we continue to support the Apache community through our ongoing platinum sponsorship of both the ASF and ApacheCon.

Microsoft also has a sizeable contingent on the ground here at ApacheCon that is delivering technical talks, presenting at BarCamp Apache, giving Lightening talks, participating in MeetUps and, more importantly, learning more about the projects in the Apache community so we can identify opportunities for greater participation.

Yesterday, I participated on a business panel titled: "The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion," which was moderated by Sally Khudairi and included Hewlett-Packard's Scott Lamons, Progress Software's Debbie Moynihan, and RedMonk's Michael Coté. The panel was incredibly engaging - in fact, one of the best panels I have ever participated in.

It was very dynamic, there was great audience interaction, and a range of interesting topics were covered. There was consensus on how customers are taking a pragmatic approach and using a mix of closed and open source software based on the value it has for their business and not based on a religious choice.

We also talked about how there is a lot of open source happening on Windows Server, and there is an opportunity to improve on best practices/understanding of open source development on Windows Server and sandbox infrastructure for all Apache projects. We also had a vibrant discussion regarding release cycles: how can open communities make it more attractive to corporations to offer project manager time so as to help move the project along, keep to deadlines, etc. I hope to be able to participate in more panels like this as there is so much to discuss!

As you know, Microsoft is already participating in many ASF projects like HBase, Stonehenge, QPid, and POI, and we are giving demos around these projects at our booth here as well as on the Eclipse plug-ins for Azure and Silverlight announced at the recent Eclipse Summit.

Enabling our customers to run open source solutions on Windows Server is important for us. It is great to see many business groups in Microsoft are now participating in Open Source projects in areas where they see there is a common value for our customers.

Congratulations once again to the entire Apache Community for a great decade, and here's looking forward to the next one!

Microsoft and ApacheCon 2009

Peter Galli — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:35:00 GMT

This week marks the 10^th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation, which is being celebrated at the annual ApacheCon U.S. event. Microsoft is proud to be a platinum sponsor of both the ASF and ApacheCon 2009.

The Apache community is an important one for Microsoft and, as ASF President Justin Erenkrantz noted recently, Microsoft is now contributing to at least four Apache projects: HBase, Stonehenge, QPid, and POI.

"This really continues the significant sea change from within the organization - Microsoft now isn't afraid of having their employees contribute to Apache projects on Microsoft's time. Committers from Microsoft sign the same legal agreements that we require from all of our contributors. Microsoft's involvement in these specific communities range from having their employees being core contributors driving the project, to having folks contributing patches or ideas on our mailing lists, to even commissioning a third-party to contribute to our project as a work-for-hire. In other words, Microsoft is now actively participating within Apache projects in a broad range of way," Erenkrantz said.

A number of Microsoft folks representing the Interoperability, App Plat, DPE, Open Source Technology Center and Platform Strategy teams will be on-site and participating in a number of events.

We will also have a booth and be demoing:

In addition, Sandy Gupta, the Director of Platform Strategy, will participate in a Business Panel today, titled: "The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion," while Kent Brown and David Ingham will be giving a technical session on Project Stonehenge and Qpid.

Garrett Serack from the Open Source Technology Center gave two BarCamp sessions earlier this week ("How the heck do I get help from Microsoft?" and "The Road Less Travelled" about the new CoApp he has developed,) while David gave a BarCamp presentation on AMQP and Qpid and Kent did one on Stonehenge.

David also led a MeetUp about Qpid on Windows on Tuesday night; while Kent and the team will give a Lightening Talk on Thursday.

We look forward to meeting those of you attending ApacheCon, and please feel free to stop by the booth.

A Chat With Apache Software Foundation President Justin Erenkrantz

Peter Galli — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:01:00 GMT

This week the Apache Software Foundation celebrates its 10th anniversary at its annual U.S. ApacheCon 2009 event in Oakland. As such, I though it would be interesting to chat with ASF President Justin Erenkrantz about the past 10 years and what's still to come going forward.

Peter Galli: Tell me about ApacheCon, who the audience is, what the goal of the event is.

Justin Erenkrantz: Since The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is so globally distributed, with almost 2,000 Committers around the world working on over 100 different projects, we do all of our work virtually, via public mailing lists.

As such, ApacheCon presents a unique opportunity for our community - users, contributors, and developers - to get together face-to-face. We typically try to run at least two shows a year: we're currently holding our upcoming U.S. show in Oakland, and we held ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam earlier this year.

At ApacheCon, we have a range of trainings, talks, and MeetUps. We have half-day, full-day, and two-day trainings typically led by key developers in the project. This immersive environment allows interested parties to dive down into tremendous detail about Apache projects - popular trainings include Hadoop, Solr, Tomcat, ActiveMQ, Wicket, Lucene and, of course, our well-known HTTP Server.

In addition to the trainings, we have three days of session tracks (usually hour-long talks) covering broad topics such as: Content Technology (content management systems including Sling and Jackrabbit, as well as CouchDB and POI), Web Services (Axis and other SOA tools), OFBiz (our Enterprise Resource Planning solution), Tomcat (our popular Java servlet engine...well it does much more than that these days!), Felix (our implementation of the OSGi framework) and, of course, some talks about the HTTP Server.

One thing that we're really excited about this year is our expansion of free MeetUps in the evening. These are a great opportunity to mingle with the community in a very low-key unstructured environment focused on a single topic. You can think of a MeetUp as an all-night "birds of a feather" (BOF) sessions. In addition, we will be holding BarCamp Apache -- our two day un-conference to talk about whatever folks are interested in, as well as the Hackathon, where participants can collaborate on various code bases alongside Apache Committers. The great thing about the MeetUps, BarCamp, and Hackathon is that they're open to the public, free of charge. All are welcome!

Peter Galli: You always hear a lot about the "Apache Way." Explain this to me.

Justin Erenkrantz: As an all volunteer, non-profit organization, the ASF is regularly praised for its consistent, repeatable, open development model. This model, affectionately dubbed by some as "the Apache Way", is behind the ASF's success in scaling from a single project to 70 primary projects today.

One of our biggest challenges, as the ASF has grown to nearly 2,000 Committers, is how to teach the Apache Way to those interested in bringing new Open Source projects to the Foundation. The way to address this on a formal level is through the Apache Incubator, created to "mentor" new projects and to assist in their learning how to operate as an ASF project. ASF Members who find the candidate technology (called a "podling") worth pursuing, they can then volunteer to be a mentor to the project.

Rather than overseeing its technical development, the mentor's main responsibility to a podling is more social, by helping to pass down the traditions and culture of other projects. Over time, once the podling has demonstrated that it has learned the Apache Way and can govern itself successfully, it can become a full-fledged ASF project and graduate to a top-level project.

Anyone can submit a podling proposal to the Incubator for consideration as a new ASF project. If you have an existing Open Source project and would like to join the ASF, we encourage you to check out the Incubator, and submit your proposals to general@incubator.apache.org.

Peter Galli: Microsoft has been working closely with the Apache Community for some time now. Can you talk to how that works and why our participation is important?

Justin Erenkrantz: As you know, last year Microsoft announced its Platinum Sponsorship of the ASF, which it continued this year. While we are delighted to have Microsoft's financial support as a sponsor of the Foundation, I think the more important aspect of Microsoft's relationship is that they are now contributing to a variety of Apache projects.

Since we announced the sponsorship last year, Microsoft is now contributing to at least four Apache projects: HBase, Stonehenge, QPid, and POI. This really continues the significant sea change from within the organization - Microsoft now isn't afraid of having their employees contribute to Apache projects on Microsoft's time. Committers from Microsoft sign the same legal agreements that we require from all of our contributors.

Microsoft's involvement in these specific communities range from having their employees being core contributors driving the project, to having folks contributing patches or ideas on our mailing lists, to even commissioning a third-party to contribute to our project as a work-for-hire. In other words, Microsoft is now actively participating within Apache projects in a broad range of ways.

In recent conversations with the Port25 team at Microsoft, it sounds like there are even more Apache projects that Microsoft is interested in getting involved in. We look forward to Microsoft's continued and increased contribution and participation within Apache.

As a public charity, we rely on donations from the public. Our policy is not to provide direct funding for our projects (we do not pay for contributions to any of our projects), however there are a number of indirect needs to support our projects. The biggest chunk of our budget goes towards maintaining our servers - we maintain SCM systems (currently Subversion-based), mirror distribution system (seeding a large number of volunteer mirrors), build farms, Web sites, and mailing lists.

We have key data centers at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab and SURFnet in the Netherlands. Since we have a growing number of contributors in the Pacific Rim, we're looking to expand our server presence in those regions. Through our Travel Assistance Committee, we also use our funds to help community members (typically college students) who could not otherwise attend our events - this has been a fantastically successful project in helping to encourage further participation. Finally, we also use some of funds to help spread our message - so many folks still think that the ASF is just about the HTTP Server - it's not! It's only 1 of 70 different top-level projects - so we realize we still have to do some education on that front!

Peter Galli: What are some of the most exciting projects that have been developed by the Apache community, or are currently being worked on?

Justin Erenkrantz: There are so many exciting projects that it's hard to choose from! As before, some folks think that the ASF is just about the HTTP Server: we have projects ranging from Atom/RSS parsers/producers (Abdera) to generating high-quality printable graphics via XML (XMLGraphics). Some folks don't often connect the dots and realize that projects like CouchDB, SpamAssassin, and Hadoop are all Apache projects. And, it's important to know that via our Incubator and Labs projects that we're open to shepherding even more projects.

As we celebrate our tenth anniversary, we've established ourselves as an important player in the ecosystem. We were founded on pragmatic principles, but that hasn't meant that we shouldn't have a leadership position: our Apache License version 2 is the flag-bearer for permissive Open-Source licenses and we have been a strong advocate for openness and transparency within the Java standards process. Over the next ten years, it'll be an exciting ride!

We should also point out eWeek's recent story on eleven Apache technologies that have changed computing in the last 10 years.

Peter Galli: What do you hope to see coming from the community over the next years?

Justin Erenkrantz: Our purpose in founding the ASF ten years ago was to bring the "Apache Way" to a broader community than just the initial HTTP Server. Our goal is to continue that process: we realize that developers are best at coding and shouldn't have to worry about the gnarly details - be it setting up servers, distributing files, accepting donations, handling legalese, organizing events, etc. - and just focus on creating terrific code. So, we hope to see more ideas for projects come our way through our Incubator and Labs!

OSCON 2009

Peter Galli — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:29:00 GMT

As Microsoft continues to support and participate in open source communities, the company is again a proud sponsor of the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), which is being held in San Jose from July 20 to July 24.

In addition to having a booth on the show floor, Tony Hey, the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft External Research, will deliver a keynote address on Thursday July 23, titled "Open Tools and Services on Microsoft Platforms," which will examine the far-reaching changes open research tools and services will have to support every stage of the research process.

Erik Meijer, one of Microsoft's Principal Architects, will also give a keynote talk on Friday July 24 and titled "Fundamentalist Functional Programming."

His talk will argue that fundamentalist functional programming - that is, radically eliminating all side effects from programming languages, including strict evaluation - is what it takes to conquer the concurrency and parallelism dragon.

Following his keynote, Erik is also presenting on using the LiveLabs Reactive Framework to democratize the cloud.

Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect in Microsoft's Interoperability group, is also giving a talk on Wednesday July 22 in the Product and Services Track, titled "Interoperability - Build Mission Critical Applications in PHP, Ruby, Java and Eclipse Using Microsoft Software & Services."

During his presentation, Vijay will talk about how Microsoft has delivered multiple technologies that focus on interoperability with non-Microsoft and Open Source technologies. He will also show how developers can, today, use Eclipse tools to build Silverlight applications that run on PCs and Macs, as well as how they can develop using combinations of PHP, Java and Ruby in addition to the standard Microsoft languages.

In addition to all the talking, we also expect to do a lot of "showing," and a number of product groups will be represented in the Microsoft booth, including folk from the Education, External Research, Open Source Technology Center, Interoperability and CodePlex parts of the company, all of whom will be giving technical demos and chatting to attendees..

An analyst/partner roundtable discussion is also on the cards, as is a broader interoperability discussion. You won't want to miss any of it.

Migrating PHP Apps to Windows

Peter Galli — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:32:00 GMT

Microsoft Malaysia is helping sponsor a competition, known as LAMP2WIN, designed to help ensure that PHP applications run well on both Windows and open source platforms.

The competition, themed ‘World of Interoperability,' is being organized by PHP.net.my and involves migrating PHP applications from the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack to the Windows platform.

All 20 applications selected were developed for LAMP, with either partial or no support for the Windows platform.

LAMP2WIN contestants will be assigned one of 20 Open Source applications on a round-robin basis across five different categories - blog, forum, eCommerce, wiki and CMS/portal.

Each of the more than 40 contestants will be given a hosted space that supports PHP, IIS and SQL Server, and they will then be able to upload and operationalize their migrated applications to this space at any time during the competition.

These uploaded and operational entries will be viewed and judged by both the public and the official judges. Contestants are also encouraged to blog about their experience while performing the migration, which will help the judges understand the development processes taken.

PHP.net.my founder Ahmad Amran was recently quoted in MIS Asia saying that "as PHP specialists, we realise and utilise the powerful capabilities of PHP, but the shortcomings of some open-source applications available only on certain platforms set off a light bulb in our heads. Why limit ourselves to only one platform when the ecosystem is derived of so many other platforms?"

"This is why we are calling all Malaysian PHP developers to showcase their skills through LAMP2WIN to demonstrate the relevance of interoperability. The underlying idea of the competition is not about selecting the best application, but to contribute back to the Malaysian software ecosystem by providing choice to the people," Amran said.

LAMP2WIN follows a similar competition earlier this year in Japan, 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.

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.

PHP|Tek in Chicago

hjanssen — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Last week I got the perfect excuse to get out of the Planning and Budget process that we are going through right now, attending PHP|Tek, which was a welcome escape as planning and budgeting in any company is usually enough fun to make a grown man cry!

So last week I went to PHP|Tek in Chicago to speak and meet folk from the PHP community. As always, I greatly enjoy meeting the people who write and use PHP, and I have been to and spoken with enough of the speakers at past events that I know a lot of the core people by first name.

Kind of funny that we now have gotten to the point inside of Microsoft that we are almost old hats at Open Source conferences

There were two days prior to the conference where a group of core PHP developers and community people talked about the state - past, present and future - of PHP. It was super cool to be invited to that one!

Unfortunately I was only able to join one of those two days: amazing that flying from Seattle to Chicago takes the better part of a day!

The discussions there where very wide ranging, from whether there will be a PHP 5.4, what 6.0 will bring, which bugs are current show stoppers, where PDO is going, etc. etc.

For me PHP|Tek remains a very nice ‘community' conference, where the focus is on the community of PHP and not the business/vendors of PHP.

These kinds of conferences are the best way to network, and it would take too long to talk about all the people I spoke to. But Elizabeth Smith and I talked about us writing documentation for php.net (I have been wanting to write the ‘how to build PHP for Windows' part) so hopefully look for more documentation written by Microsoft for php.net soon.

As always I talked to a lot of the usual suspects: Scott MacVicar, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Chris Shiflett, Cal Evans and others.

Oh, and if you are really bored, check out the latest May issue of php architect, which has a bunch of really cool articles about PHP and Windows. Some of them were even co-written by me, which gives you an idea how far php | architect has sunk to have people write articles for them

I just checked out the Website, and the May issue is not posted yet. But everybody who attended PHP|Tek got a copy of that issue in their goodies bag.

I always enjoy giving sessions and the session I did give at PHP|Tek was ‘PHP 5.3 The best PHP on Windows Yet' , and I got some really good feedback. I think I had about 40+ people in my session. People are always surprised to see Microsoft's involvement with PHP and what we have done with the community so far.

It is a talk I have given before. It starts with describing what the organization I belong to (the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center) does and how we work inside of Microsoft. After that I go into some detail about why PHP 5.3 is the best PHP on Windows.

Did you know that, for example, with PHP releases prior to 5.3, the code was build with libraries that were more than 10 years old and for which nobody really had any idea where the source code went? So it was built - linked rather - with object files that were more than 10 years old.

It makes it really hard to fix/improve stuff that you do not have the source code for

Well, pretty much all the issues of the past are now gone. I will make sure I write a blog about what truly went into PHP 5.3 for Windows soon, if the budgeting and planning process doesn't kill me before that point. In the meantime, here is a link to phpfreaks where, a few weeks ago, I posted a bunch of what we have been doing.

One really interesting thing is that there were a lot of Microsoft people at this conference, specifically from the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) side of Microsoft.

These are the people who are very much field and customer focused. From my conversations with them, they enjoyed the conference and were glad to get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the OS crowd. It is amazing how much we all have in common once we talk about technology.

Thanks to the people who put on the conference: of course Marco Tabini, the man behind PHP|Tek, but especially Elizabeth Naramore, who is the unsung hero that is the real driver behind keeping PHP|Tek running smoothly!

The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit

Peter Galli — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

A lot has been written by the press and blogosphere since the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit was held earlier this month, particularly about the panel that included Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Sun Microsystems' Ian Murdock, and Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.

The panel was entitled "Why Can't We All Just Get Along," which struck me as not only divisive, but also a little outdated given the level of collaboration that already takes place between proprietary and open source software vendors alike.

For example, Microsoft and Sun already have a long-standing working collaborative relationship; Microsoft also has a technical collaboration agreement with Novell, an agreement with Red Hat to test and validate our respective server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors, and a number of arrangements in place with other open source companies.

The panel discussed this in greater depth, looking at how collaboration, cooperation and competition exist: not just between proprietary and open software vendors, but also between Linux and open source ones.

This prompted panel moderator Zemlin to suggest that the three make an even greater effort come together and collaborate where it makes sense.

Interestingly, the Summit also spurred renewed discussion about whether there need to be more critics in the Linux community, with one blogger taking Zemlin to task for what he described as the "tall claims" he made at the Summit.

Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also used the panel to remind the Linux and open source communities of his offer for them to reach out to him and others within Microsoft and share their frustrations, problems and issues, so that they could be better educators and advocates on this front across the company.

Ramji also, again, stressed that Microsoft's customers want interoperability with open source software, including for PHP on Windows, but that making this happen sometimes took time.

Sun's Murdock seconded this, talking about internal inertia and how Sun also had had to deal with hearing from customers and developers that they wanted interoperability with technologies other than their own.

At Microsoft, there are cross-group, company-wide open source discussions and initiatives underway, with each group given the autonomy to decide for itself how this plays out with regard to their product set and business model.

While Port 25's mission is to be the voice of the open source community at Microsoft, it is far from the only voice on this topic. There have been blogs across the company on open and interoperability initiatives, from groups including security, Live and the Mac Business Unit, to name just a few.

It is also important to remember that Ramji and other executives like Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server & Tools business, have often said that open source is a journey that Microsoft is on and that much more needs to still be done. Many groups across the company are already responding to that call.

OSBC 2009 and Microsoft

Peter Galli — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:57:00 GMT

Microsoft is once again a Platinum Level sponsor of the annual Open Source Business Conference, which is being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

As part of this sponsorship, Robert Youngjohns, the president for Microsoft North America, will also be delivering a keynote address to attendees on Wednesday, March 25 from 09h00 to 09h30.

As the leader for Microsoft's sales, services and marketing efforts in the United States and Canada, Robert is passionate about connecting with customers and partners on various topics, including our Open Source initiatives. A Silicon Valley native, Robert brings more than 30 years experience in sales, marketing and strategic business development.

Prior to joining Microsoft, he served as president and chief executive officer of Callidus Software, Inc., a publicly traded company and leading provider of sales management software based in San Jose, CA. Before that, Robert spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems, where he was last executive vice president of Global Sales, responsible for Sun's worldwide sales organization. He also spent 18 years in various roles at IBM.

In addition, we will also be holding the third annual Open Source ISV Forum, on Monday March 23. This event is also an opportunity for open source ISVs - both large and small - to discover more about how Microsoft is working with their communities.

As this is a Microsoft BizSpark event, several of the seminars will focus on open source startups, and there will be the opportunity to meet a number of BizSpark Network Partners, including venture capitalists, angel investors and incubators. The event is also part of Microsoft NXT, a program that helps open source ISVs extend their products to the Windows environment. If you'd like to attend, you can register here.

The Saper Law Open Source Symposium

Brian Gorbett — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:12:00 GMT

Hi, this is Brian Gorbett and I am an Architect in Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism group. This week I had the privilege to speak on a panel at the Saper Law Open Source Symposium in Chicago.

At first, one might be tempted to call this a major contradiction and wonder how Microsoft can be credible at an event like this. But, the fact is, if you are reading this on Port 25, then you already have an idea of just how relevant this discussion is.

I was joined on the panel by Harper Reed, the CTO at Skinnycorp/Threadless Inc.; Sumit Nijhawan, the Group Leader of Product Development at Infogix; Scott VanDenPlas, an Engineer at SkinnyCorp/Threadless. The panel was moderated by Phil Gomes, the Senior Vice President with Edelman Digital.

It was a diverse panel of talent and perspectives to be sure. The audience was a great mix of business owners, startups, partners, academic professors, and computer scientists, and one of the most interesting people I met was another panel guest who is a Computer Scientist building software for giant lasers at the National Laboratory... very cool).

The talk started with introductions, and I felt obligated to explain why Microsoft had a seat at this table since, in discussions before we started, it was clear that many attendees were not aware of all the contributions Microsoft makes to the Open Source community.

There were many people genuinely interested in what we are doing in this space and I had many conversations prior to the talk about the many online resources available to them, such as Port25, Microsoft on Open Source, the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, Interoperability, etc... basically everything that Port25 is great at educating about.

The panel discussion was very dynamic and very interactive. In particular, Harper Reed and I always have great conversations. While we are on very different ends of the software spectrum (if you watch the video, Skinnycorp/Threadless is almost 100 percent built on Open Source software - the web stack is 100 percent,) Harper and I agree on the most fundamental topic in technology decisions: solve the business problem with whatever technology works.

During the panel discussion you will hear Harper, Scott (a distinguished engineer at SkinnyCorp/Threadless), and myself say this a few times. You will also hear Harper talk about how they are interoperating with Azure in a project they are working on. Again, using the right technology for the business problem at hand. I admire Harper and his team for the work they do and the tremendous community that they serve.

I am delighted that I got the opportunity to have great conversations with incredibly smart people about a topic many people don't associate Microsoft with. I hope that I will have the opportunity to have more of these discussions, and learn as much as I did at this event, from other people at different venues.

If you want to listen to the full panel discussion, the video is posted on my blog (there is a bit of audio interference at the beginning but, don't worry, it doesn't last).

What's Microsoft up to with PHP?

Peter Galli — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:18:00 GMT

Over the past year, Microsoft has stepped up its participation in initiatives supporting Free and Open Source Software projects like Apache, Samba, and PHP. The company has also been working more closely with the PHP community, sponsoring PHP events and contributing code in the form of a patch to the ADODB PHP package, which is licensed under the LGPL, to make it work better with Microsoft SQL server.

Manuel Lemos, the developer of the PHPClasses.org Web site, takes a look at all of this in an extensive recent blog post titled “What is Microsoft up to with PHP,” and which includes an interview with Tom Hanrahan, the director of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center.

It makes for interesting reading!

A New Appreciation for Open Source in India - and Our Role in it.

anandeep — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:55:00 GMT

As I stated in my last blog, I am attending the premier Indian Open Source conference, FOSS.IN, in Bangalore. This conference had some very technical talks (which I will also blog about) but, like any other Open source conference, it was the people who were the most interesting.

There seems to be a large PHP contingent here. I met some folks from Piazza, a company that does PHP applications. Of course they asked the million dollar question - "Microsoft has an Open Source group?" But, very quickly, they soon started talking about how they could work with Microsoft technologies. They hadn't realized that we had a relationship with Zend, and that Microsoft would treat PHP as a first class language.

Once they heard about this, they excitedly started thinking of .NET applications that their customers were asking for, and how they could build them. These developers were not based in Bangalore, but in a small town in Kerala. They followed the true Open Source model of living and developing from where they wanted, and did not have to work in a large overgrown city with corporate offices. This is a BIG thing in India - and I am seeing this for the first time.

The other PHP linkage I made was with Damian Hickey, CEO of Zacware.com. Zacware is making an e-commerce server called Freeway, which is PHP based. His was more the traditional Open Source business, and his firm had already reached out to Microsoft's representative in Queensland, Australia to see how they could make this application run on Microsoft platforms.

We had a long discussion about community and how Microsoft could approach Open Source. Again, the theme of opening a two-way conversation came up. Damian's development team is in India and I was able to talk to his PHP dev lead, who was also excited to work on .NET.

I had asked one of the organizers why I hadn't heard of a well known contributor to the Linux kernel who hailed from India. I was promptly told that Balbir Singh and Ankita Garg were the two names to know. I ran into Balbir - who works for the IBM Linux Technology Center - and we had some good discussions on kernels and people we knew in common. Turns out he knows Tom Hanrahan, my current boss. (Tom, I mentioned you in my blog. I hope you are noticing for my review next year!)

I then chatted with Amit Shah from Qumranet (now Red Hat). He gave a talk in the conference on how he parleyed an interview question from Qumranet into a career in hypervisors. Again, he was keen to work with Microsoft, especially when he heard about our virtualization Interop efforts with Xen and Novell.

I also met a passionate young student, Abhishek, who very politely asked me all the tough questions about Microsoft. These involved questions on patents, open sourcing Windows, and OOXML. I answered them, presenting my own point of view. The reaction? He said he had been waiting to talk to someone from Microsoft who was so open about this stuff, even if he didn't agree with me on everything.

What did I learn about Microsofts role in Open Source in India? Our role here is to be the two way conduit, but we also need to engage the community with the same kind of passion for our own (Microsoft's) stuff that they have for Open Source. Anything less will appear fake.

More to come.

Anandeep

FOSS in India

anandeep — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:47:00 GMT

I am writing this during lunch at FOSS.IN, the most prominent Open Source conference for developers and FOSS advocates in India. FOSS.IN is in Bangalore, which is where I graduated high school. That was a long time ago - and Bangalore has been transformed from the "garden city" to the software capital of India. Lots more skyscrapers and cars on the road. And lots of software companies (including Microsoft) have development or R&D centers here.

It so happens that the venue for FOSS.IN is in the Indian Institute of Science (I.I.Sc) auditorium. I.I.Sc was right in the middle of the path I trudged from home to school, walking 12 miles uphill both ways (or so it seemed). I have seen the Indian cricket team there, when they were visiting the old auditorium. The new auditorium on the same site is nothing like the old one, it's actually pretty nice. I don't think they would allow me to perform the amateur play that I was forced into by my high school drama teacher at the venue any more!

The conference is all volunteer organized and does not have the polished feel of a larger conference in the US. I think this actually works in the favor of the conference organizers because people seem to interact more with one other than tends to happen at other conferences I have been to stateside.

But I have actually been disappointed that I have not seen more Open Source contributors from India gain prominence. That is kind of sad, since we have one of the (if not the) largest pool of software engineers in the world. So, I am keen to talk to the people involved and see what is happening around Open Source development in India.

There are a large number of people attending - my estimate is between 300 and 400 - with just three vendors: Sun, Noikia and VMWare(?).

So far I have attended the keynote by Harald Welte on how Embedded Linux was not taking the right path and why. I also attended a session that went through an "interview question" that was given to KVM contributor Amit Shah to solve by Qumranet prior to bringing him on board. It was to facilitate the migration of guests from an Intel based architecture host to an AMD based architecture host. The talk was fascinating.

I am starting to mingle and will have a number of stories from interacting with the people at the conference. So, more to come later.

Anandeep

Berkman Lunch: Open Source at Microsoft - Opportunity or Threat?

Bryan Kirschner — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:47:00 GMT

I was recently at Harvard for two events. The first, which I'll talk about in this blog, was part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard lunch series.

Mario Madden and I were invited to speak at a session called "Microsoft and Open Source: Opportunity or Threat?" You can watch the whole thing online at the link - and David Weinberger liveblogged as well.

The focus of the whole thing was, to quote Karim Lakhani, our host, a "vigorous discussion." So we had about 15 minutes to give an up-front presentation about our thoughts on the "opportunity or threat" issue.

The rest of the time was open discussion. So I do recommend checking out the webcast-it's tough to do the discussion justice second hand. I will call out a couple things that won't show up in the recording.

First, Harvard really is an important source of expertise on open source. There's a whole bunch of research that's certainly been valuable to me (on developer and corporate motivations, for example). There are also people like Margo Seltzer (the former CTO of Sleepycat) who I got to meet at the second event, which I'll talk about in my next blog.

Second, the whole OSS Lab at Microsoft community has emphasized the importance of dialogue for as long as we've been around. This event drove that home once again. Some folks followed up verbally or in mail to semi-apologize for it being a bit of a challenging environment for us.

But I didn't think it was challenging: if a question is difficult to answer because someone is working hard at making it difficult for me to answer, I'm not too keen on that. But if a question is difficult to answer because the answer is something we haven't thought about (and maybe should) or it's just a tough problem...if the questioner is willing to help me be smarter about figuring out a good answer, well, bring it on, as they say.

David Weinberger actually raised a point like this when we talked about Microsoft-released projects and contributions(from his blog):

Q: [David] Are 500 contributions a lot? Compared to the number of patents? Products?
A: [Bryan] We'll measure success when every product group considers open source.
Q: [Karim] IBM says they have 1,000 developers working on Linux, etc. Do you have any number you can point to that's similar?
A: No.

I added we don't have a KLOC or person hours target...should we?

Third, just for the record, here, I said think open source and Microsoft represents a mutual opportunity (...check out the podcast for all the reasons why.) But that brings me to the one thing that most sticks in my mind. A CS professor who attended told us she waited until the recording was finished because she didn't want to be rude-but that to her, we were talking about our open source strategy as if it was something new and innovative.

But from her perspective, she said she's been doing software development a long time, and this sounds just like what Microsoft did in the late 1980's, when being open to developers is what made early Microsoft products interesting to her as a developer. So (to paraphrase): not to be rude, but why do you think this is cool?

This was funny because (as I replied) I absolutely agree with her. Our open source strategy took a lot of learning about how open source has changed the landscape, and what it has brought that's new and different, but the fundamental principle remains the same: openness to third-party developers is a powerful and enduring principle.

And it is part of Microsoft's DNA, as we sometimes say ("...the engineering relationship is getting back to the way it used to be in 1994-1997, which is a great relief to us," [Jeremy] Allison, said recently about Samba and Microsoft).

At one time, Microsoft was perceived to be a leader in openness through free SDKs and extensive APIs, active developer communities, published object models (wow, now you can call the Excel object model from the Powershell scripting language...) , and more.

For a number of (in my opinion) remediable reasons, from the time open source started to capture the popular imagination till today, Microsoft has not been perceived as a leader. But I don't see any reason why we can't reach the point where the best things Microsoft has brought to users and developers and the best things open source has brought to users and developers will be decidedly better together. I think there are some arguable examples already (XNA is high on my list: traditional coding contests plus easy paths to write and sell games, plus a growing open source community).

The other event at Harvard was a business focused Open Source CEO Summit...which I'll talk about in my next blog.