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

Releasing the Linux Integration Component Drivers...

Sam Ramji — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:38:00 GMT

Microsoft on Monday contributed the Linux Integration Component drivers to the Linux community for the reasons stated in our release. Microsoft chose the GPLv2 license for the mutual benefit of our customers, partners, the community, and Microsoft.

Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers.

The primary reason we made this determination in this case is because GPLv2 is the preferred license required by the Linux community for their broad acceptance and engagement. For us to participate in the Linux Driver Project, GPLv2 was the best option that allowed us to enjoy the tremendous offer of community support. The community's response even within a few hours of posting the code was welcoming and we appreciate it greatly.

We arrived at the decision to release the drivers to the community under the GPLv2 through this process. Both Greg K-H and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation have reiterated that this is the same process that other companies follow when deciding how to release new device drivers to the Linux community.

We are looking forward to the positive collaboration and acceptance that has marked the vast majority of our interactions with customers and community members regarding this important project.

Cheers,

Sam

Updated 7/25/2009 @ 11:54 AM Pacific: Dave Roberts of Vyatta posted a blog entry rebutting recent cloims that we were accused of a licensing violation with some detail on the technical issues.

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

Barton George interviews Sam Ramji

Sam Ramji — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:57:00 GMT

On the day before OSCON officially kicked off I was heading back from the Oregon Convention Center to downtown and ended up standing on the MAX next to someone who caught my attention for two reasons. First, he was the first person to tell me about the Tim O'Reilly/Eben Moglen conversation from earlier in the morning which I had missed. Second he had a cool flash memory microphone that he used to record podcasts on the fly. Turns out it was Baron George (http://www.blogs.sun.com/barton808/), Group Manager, Free and Open Source Software from Sun.

I had a nice chat with Barton (and we helped each other navigate the heavily under construction Portland downtown) and little did I know he also had a conversation with Sam Ramji that day. The podcast has been posted and you can download it here. Enjoy.

From Barton's Blog:

"Topics: Where the Open Source Software Lab fits within Microsoft; How big is Sam's group; When software technologies compete, you win; What reaction does he get when he turns up at FOSS events; Debating Eben Moglen at OSBC -- no one wants patent Armageddon; Is there a Wubuntu in the works?."

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.

We're Writing Firefox Plug-ins? Interview with Ian Gilman and Thoughts on 10 Months at Microsoft

hjanssen — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:06:00 GMT

When I started working at Microsoft in May of 2006 I wanted to chronicle my adventures here. So my first blog was posted on June 7th 2006 Titled What is a guy like me doing in a place like this, I had every intention writing frequently about my experiences. As you can see, I have not been very consistent with that. Something that I will try to improve in the future.

If you would have told me 1 year ago that I would work at Microsoft I would have laughed. I still walk around looking with amazement at my badge, and when I go to other MS buildings I shake my head when I have to swipe my badge on the reader. When I talk to people I continue to refer to them and us (them being Microsoft, Us being the rest of the world )

I am happy to report that I continue to be the department's skeptic , something I will continue to be.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about a bunch of my experiences since a lot has happened in the last 10 months (more about this later)

First of all, contrary what people believe, I do not know of a greater Microsoft plot to take over the world and destroy Linux and OSS. If there is such a thing, we at our level are unaware of it. And since this department in many ways is on the front lines working with OSS and Linux, I would have expected to see some evidence.

There is no helicopter pad (not on campus anyway) where Microsoft stores its black helicopters. There are no dispensers of Microsoft Kool-Aid. (They might have some dispensers in the water coolers though.) And the articles, blogs and posts that I read on what is going on here are most of the time completely off the mark.

Is Microsoft competing with Linux and OSS?? You bet they are. Just like every other company is competing against other companies/people/products that create similar products.

Is Microsoft working to better interface with some of the Linux and OSS products? You bet they are too! We are frequently working on those things as well.

I am not being censored or restricted in any way. I actually have access to a very wide array of things. More so than I thought I would when I started.

The department has a unique position inside of Microsoft. We get to talk to and work with a very wide swath of Microsoft product lines. Just to highlight a typical week that took place a few weeks ago; in the same week I spoke to the Robotics guys, people from the embedded department, People from IIS, SQL server department, the Powershell developers and the cardspace group. And this is a typical week. I am not sure how may other places in Microsoft have the same breadth.

And more and more groups are becoming aware of what we do and contact us to work with us.

Is Microsoft changing?? Yeah, I think it is. In some places it is going very fast, in other places not so much.

Yet if I look back over the last 10 months, I have seen some great changes happen. To name a few:

My Boss Sam Ramji invited the Mozilla foundation guys out to Redmond to help them get their products to work better inside of Vista. I spent the entire time they where here with them. It was met with great skeptism, the Slashdot comments ranged from ‘they are hiring the mozzilla folks’ to other helpful hints such as ‘fly on a different planes’. But I can say that when we send out feelers inside of the company of people would like to talk to them, people at Microsoft where literally lining up to do so. Read my blog for more on it.
Microsoft’s announcement of working with Zend to make PHP work better on windows, The department works with the Zend guys to assist them wherever we can.
We have continued to write and post many technical docs to Port 25, and will of course continue to do so in the future. We are always looking for topics.
Sam interviewed Miguel De Icaza and Steve Wozniak and many other people.
We continually help other parts of Microsoft when they have any questions about OSS, and help them when they want to Open Source things. (Powertoys for example)
The department is working with Novell on implementing the partnership. The interoperability lab that is being talked about with Novell is not smoke and mirrors.
There are many more items. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to read port25.technet.com for some of the other stuff we have been doing.

But we have been touching a lot of items people never thought a few years ago would be likely. Getting Mozilla people on site for one. Another one that would have been considered impossible is Microsoft writing plugins for Firefox. Here is a cool one for example Photosynth, and you can listen to my podcast in which I interview Ian Gilman one of the Photosynth developers. Here is a link to the blog metioned in the podcast: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs/

Just think about that for a second, Microsoft writing Firefox plugins!!!

I will leave you all with a few more observations:

Microsoft does listen to OSS people. And we do work with those people. More and more all the time.
There is still an awful lot of work to be done. Both internally and externally.
When the OSSL was created at Microsoft people thought it to be another Microsoft marketing ploy. Well I can tell you that that is certainly not the case here at OSSL.
The other guys in the group Sam, Anandeep, Kishi, Michael and Jamie are a blast to work with.

There seems to be a perception that we are not moving fast enough. But I believe we have been able to move at a pretty good speed! And, there are quite a few more things that we are working on that will show up in the future.

Looking back over the past 10 months I have come to the realization that I am really enjoying the job. There certainly are frustrating times, if you are on the front lines like we seem to be you are likely to get smacked every once and a while. If you are not, than you are not doing your job . But we are seeing noticeable change on all fronts. And it is a blast to be able to work with so many groups inside and outside of Microsoft.

So I will close with the following, I am not drinking the Kool-Aid, quite the opposite; I continue to question everything that is going on inside of Microsoft. And I will continue to be a voice for Open Source inside of Microsoft.

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