Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Video

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.

MindTouch, Microsoft, and Social Enterprise Collaboration

Peter Galli — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:33:00 GMT

In this, our second video filmed at an open source company, the spotlight falls on MindTouch, whose Deki Wiki enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, publishing systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications.

The first video talked to developers at BitRock about their product as well as their thoughts on open source versus proprietary software, and can be viewed here.

The MindTouch Deki, which is built on top of the Mono, the open source .Net implementation, is downloaded some 2,000 times a day.

You'll see and hear Damien, a graphics designer, talk about his one-eyed fish and the disappearance of Phil, the filter feeder, and how he is only going to have community fish in his next tank, fish who like one another and work well together.

Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO and one of the company's founders, talks about his passion for getting the product running on Windows, with Windows Server 2008 and a Microsoft installer. For him, it really doesn't matter what technology the solution is implemented on, as long as the company has delivered a great product to the market that is "free, as in freedom, as in free speech."

While there is a groundswell of community adoption around MindTouch's Linux deployments, lots of large companies are also asking for deployments on Windows. In fact, its core market is those people who like both .Net and open source.

Take a look for yourself, and see what they have to say.

What do BitRock Developers Really Think of Microsoft?

Peter Galli — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:52:00 GMT

What do open source companies and their developers actually think of Microsoft and its relationship with them and their communities, and how much do they have in common?

We decided to find out, so we sent a camera crew to two open source companies - BitRock and MindTouch - to see what they had to say.

In this first video, several developers from BitRock - which was founded in 2003, created the BitNami installer, and provides an automated solution for Open Source application deployment - talk about many topics, ranging from smoking, to getting their picture on beer bottles, to Microsoft and open source.

You'll also see Erica Brescia, BitRock's CEO, express surprise that Microsoft would actually want to film open source developers, particularly those who are candid about the sometimes troubled relationship between the software company and the open source community.

Allison Randal on Participation & Motivation

Sam Ramji — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:14:00 GMT

It's taken awhile, but without further delay - we're excited to post Sam's discussion with Allison Randal that took place at this year's OSCON event in Portland, OR. Allison discusses the importance of participation in the open source community and her perspective where Microsoft sits relative to the principle that everyone deserves to participate.

From her biography on the O'Reilly site: Allison Randal is the Program co-Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention and Energy Innovation Conference. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.

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Haskell in the Hallway: Sam Interviews Simon Peyton Jones

Sam Ramji — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:35:00 GMT

While at OSCON this year Sam and I got the chance to spend some time with Simon Peyton Jones, researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University. Earlier in the week Simon had presented a tutorial on Haskell titled: A Taste of Haskell at the O'Reilly event.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to have some time with Simon, we found a (sometimes) quiet hallway to talk about Haskell, functional programming and other topics.

Video: Haskell in the Hallway: Sam Interviews Simon Peyton Jones

Talking Ruby and Dynamic Language Support with John Lam

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:05:00 GMT

As promised in the first post today, here is the second interview regarding today's announcements regarding Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime and Silverlight. In this video Sam sits down with John Lam, who we interviewed during the LANG.NET Symposium in August (before he came to work for Microsoft), to discuss his work with Ruby and the DLR.

Video: John Lam and Sam Ramji discuss RubyCLR, Avalon Ruby Editor and Open Source Fundi

Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Mix 07 kicked off today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. Amongst announcements regarding media and Silverlight Scott Guthrie announced the release of a cross-platform version of the .NET framework within Silverlight Alpha 1.1. Included is a Dynamic Language Runtime that allows developers to use languages such as Python, Java and Ruby to program in Silverlight.

I could drone on about this but we decided to go sit down with two of the individuals who contributed to this effort: Jim Hugunin and John Lam instead. Jim, who we interviewed before, gives us some insight into this announcement including some information about new MS-PL releases to Codeplex tied to this announcement (Hint: IronPython 2.0).

Later today, we will post the second interview with John Lam.

Video: Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Sup

Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

MichaelF — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT

In this interview Sam sits down with a veteran of the gaming industry, Star Trek Deck Plan Expert and Development Manager for the XNA Community Game Platform: Frank Savage. Sam and Frank discuss his background and how he ended up at Microsoft as well as the finer points of XNA. Included are demos of both games that have been developed using XNA as well as how XNA eases much of the work associated with game development allowing users to focus on the game itself.

Video: Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

You can download XNA Express Studio and the XNA Framework here.

An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

anandeep — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:49:00 GMT

Michael Koziarski (a.k.a) Koz is one of the core group of about 12 people who holds the keys to the code repository for the Rails framework (also known as Ruby on Rails). They’re all listed on the Rails core page with name and mug-shot. (I checked, a guy who looks like the Michael I interviewed has his mug shot on the page!).

According to his bio there “Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s a contributor to The Rails Way and maintains a personal blog.” That’s as good a intro as any so we thought we wouldn’t improve on it!

Michael was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit and I was able to spend some really entertaining and educational time with him. I even showed him the lab! I think he may have enjoyed his time here as he wrote about us in a blog entry.

I enjoyed talking to him – and he stayed to talk to us about Rails, the dev process and other stuff despite being very close to missing his flight!

Anandeep

Video: An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

anandeep — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:32:00 GMT

Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology.

Samir and I share more than our interest in Open Source (or Free Software as Samir prefers to call it!). Our fathers trained as Air Force pilots in the Indian Air Force in their teens and knew each other very well. In fact Samir (being the renaissance man that he is) has co-authored one of the most successful books on Indian Air Force history “The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965”. We contribute to an “open source” site on Indian armed forces history – you can read one of my articles (shameless plug!) on air war history here.

Samir is a Free Software proponent and recently he was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit to exchange ideas with a wide audience from both within Microsoft and from all around the globe. I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about his forthcoming book “Decoding Liberation” and to debate with him our views of how software would evolve.

Samir’s site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/ (his co-author, Scott Dexter's site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sdexter) and he writes a blog on Free Software which has the same title as his book.

An introduction to the book is here.
Routledge has also given us permission to post the first chapter of this book which is available now for pre-order.
Video: Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of our Friends at Teamprise

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

Awhile ago we interviewed Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.

To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.

To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.

Video: Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of Teamprise

Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.

Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

MichaelF — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:00:00 GMT

We get quite a few requests to provide more information about Powershell so Hank and I decided to go straight to the person who just finished writing the book on Powershell: Powershell in Action, Bruce Payette. Bruce was one of the founders of the Powershell team here at Microsoft and is an expert on not only Powershell but according to Jeff Snover, on any number of popular and obscure languages.

In this interview Hank and Bruce discuss Powershell and Bruce gives us a demo. While we couldn't show everything here, if there is interest, we can go back and have Bruce show us specific scenarios and examples. Let us know if there is anything you'd like to see...

Check out the link above to see Bruce's book and read a couple of sample chapters.

Video: Powershell in Action! Hank interviews Bruce Payette

A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

MichaelF — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:36:00 GMT

Following up on our post yesterday here is an interview Sam did with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist: Steve Marx.

Steve discusses the three components of ASP.NET AJAX and shows us a demo of the software formerly known as ATLAS running on top of PHP on Linux to demonstrate some of the front and backend extraction capabilities.

Video: A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

If you are interested in looking a bit more deeply at ASP.NET AJAX, as well as the PHP support Steve released to Codeplex, here are some links he provided:

ASP.NET AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net/
Direct link to download the Microsoft AJAX Library: http://ajax.asp.net/downloads/library/default.aspx?tabid=47
PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library: http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax
Steve's Blog: http://smarx.com/

OSSL Roundtable Answers Your Questions (Part 1 of ?)...

MichaelF — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:15:00 GMT

In December, Jamie posted a call for questions in the spirit of Festivus one of our favorite secular non-mainstream holidays (aye, we be talkin like pirates on September 19th too matey). Here is the result, or at least the first part of it.

We didn't get to all of the questions in this first pass, but we will be posting the continuation of this conversation early next week. Let us know what you think, if you enjoyed this we'll be happy to do it more regularly.

-michael

Video: OSSL Roundtable Answers Your Questions (Part 1 of ?)...

Sharepoint Learning Kit: Bryan interviews Mike Hines

Bryan Kirschner — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:00:00 GMT

There have been two journal articles lately that have stuck in my head:

First, Brian Fitzgerald writing broadly about the future of open source (“open source 2.0”) in September’s MIS Quarterly argues for the durability of OSS because it can achieve “a balance between a commercial profit value-for-money proposition while still adhering to acceptable open source community values.” Within this flexibility he describes how “the quintessential proprietary software company, Microsoft, can appear to satisfy the definition of an open source company, while a quintessential open source company, Red Hat, can appear to resemble a proprietary software company.”

That in itself is a lot to chew on, especially if you happen to work in the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.

But then Baldwin, Hienerth, and long-time user innovation champion Eric von Hippel published an article November’s Research Policy including discussion of the relationships between high-capital, mainstream manufacturers” and “low-capital, experimental user-manufacturers” in relation to innovation. They conclude that in “design spaces”—markets or products; they use cell phones and PDA’s as an example—that are “relatively easy to expand” the high-capital manufacturers and user-innovators might “co-exist indefinitely.” As I read it, one of the key concepts is the idea of “toolkits” which split the cost of designing an innovation into a capital component (the toolkit) and the designer’s decision—thereby “reducing the time and effort needed to generate new designs” and increasing individual and possibly community capacity for innovation—“rejuvenat[ing] innovation in a design space that was previously deemed to be exhausted.”

(It’s worth pointing out that as far as I have seen, von Hippel has not historically thought of this as applying to software as opposed to physical goods—a source of no end of consternation for me, because I find it to be quite elegant, even inspiring when applied to software and maybe even further to other types of intellectual property—but that’s another blog.)

I subsequently ran across a great example of real-life business and engineering decisions by the Education Products Group at Microsoft that are a fascinating case study to which to apply these two idea. The Sharepoint Learning Kit (SLK) is (in essence) “a toolkit” for Microsoft’s SharePoint2007 designed for teachers that is being released under a Shared Source license.

We’re very pleased to have Mike Hines, a product manager with this group, stop by on his way to BETT 2007 (the Educational Technology Show) come tell us about the engineering, licensing, and business decisions they made, why —and what’s started happening as a result.

In subsequent interviews we will turn the focus on some of the cool technical work being done in community, commercial , and public-sector projects using SLK such as the project he mentions in Kent.

Video: Bryan interviews Mike Hines; Sharepoint Learning Kit