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

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.

Introduction to the Linux Integration Components

hjanssen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:02:00 GMT

Well, here is blog number two. The initial shock has worn off a bit I hope.

The feedback I have received so far has been pretty positive. This really all started in October of 2008 in a meeting with Mike Neil (GM of Hyper-V) and Tom and myself from the Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) at Microsoft.

In that meeting I proposed to Open Source the Linux Integration Components and contribute them to the Linux Kernel. And, secondly, to have the OSTC continue contributing to these IC's after they made it to the Linux Kernel. Well after some discussion, we all agreed that this was the right thing to do.

And so the whole process started inside of Microsoft. Hey, what can I say, we like to push the envelope a bit here at the OSTC, and we have a reputation to uphold!

Before I go on, I again wanted to thank the Kernel community (specifically Greg Kroah-Hartman) in helping us with explaining and guiding us through community process. It gave us a very nice jumpstart to get all of this going, and provided the groundwork for a good working relationship with the community.

I have also seen a few patches already submitted by community members, which is excellent! (Moritz Muehlenhoff gets major kudos for the first community contributed patch ) I will start submitting patches myself next week once the initial submission has stabilized a bit.

It is my plan to use the kernel as my primary development area, and of course I will continue to provide Greg with my patches. My first step is to clean up the code to make sure it fulfills all Kernel coding standards and requirements.

So, here is blog number two: what are the Linux Integration Components?

1. Overview of Linux VM with ICs

Linux Integration Components(IC) take advantages of the VMBUS and synthetic devices provided in Hyper-V to enhance the performance and usability of Linux guests running on Windows servers.

Figure: Conceptual Architecture overview of Linux guest & Hyper-V. Linux IC modules are painted in yellow color.

Glossary:

VSP: Virtualization Service Provider.

VSC: Virtualization Service Client.

VMBus: Data channel between VSP and VSC.

2. Linux IC modules -- VMBus and VSCs

Communication with parent partition is done through Linux VMBus
VSCs are the Linux drivers for synthetic devices (SCSI, IDE, and Ethernet) provided by Hyper-V.
They translate between Linux I/O requests and Hyper-V VSC commands
Devices are registered with Linux Driver Model (LDM)
Every VSC module contains two portions:
o Driver Interface Mapper (DIM): Released as open source

This portion of the VSC component interacts with the Linux kernel like a regular Linux device driver.

o VSC Core: Released as Open Source

The core portion of the VSC module is implemented based on the protocol of the corresponding VSP at Hyper-V host. The VSC core interacts with VSP via the VMBus interface.

3. Descriptions for each Linux IC module

3.1 VMBus driver (hv_vmbus.c)

The VMBus driver is a Linux kernel module. It provides both a lightweight bus driver and library functionality. As a bus driver, it registers with Linux Driver Model framework (LDM) to provide simple bus and device integration and device tree integration (sysfs). As a library, it implements the VMBus channel protocol and provide an abstraction of channel to its clients (Disk and Network VSCs).

3.2 StorVSC driver (hv_storvsc.c)

The Storage VSC interacts with the Windows Storage VSP. The "wire" protocol defined by the storage VSP determines how a VSC interacts with it. The Linux Storage VSC (LSVSC) basically abstracts the Linux I/O stack from needing to understand the Storage VSP's protocol. At the upper-edge of the LSVSC, it talks to the Linux SCSI subsystem. The Linux SCSI subsystem sees the LSVSC as a SCSI low-level driver (LLD) in Linux parlance. It passes SCSI requests (scsi_cmnd) to LSVSC which in turn converts them into the "wire" format understood by the Windows Storage VSP (VSTOR_PACKET). The bottom-edge of the LSVSC talks to Linux VMBus (LVMBUS) which in turn talks to the Windows VMBus to route the packets to the Storage VSP.

3.3 BlkVSC driver (hv_blkvsc.c)

BlkVSC (BlockVSC) supports "fast boot" and fast access to IDE disks. To enable enlightened IDE support for enhancing the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows, a separate BlockVSC component is used as a Linux block device driver. Like StorVSC, the BlockVSC component is comprised of an upper edge wrapper that interfaces with the Linux block layer and a lower-edge through the infrastructure modules. The infrastructure modules with Hyper-V through the Linux VMBus.

3.4 NetVSC driver (hv_netvsc.c)

The network VSC send and receive network traffic between a Linux guest and Hyper-V host which has direct connection to physical network. The mechanism that this is used to accomplish is the Remote NDIS (RNDIS) protocol. Thus the communication that flows between the VSP and the VSC primarily happens over the RNDIS protocol which then is packaged and forwarded as payload over to the other side over NetVSP / VMBus protocol.

4. Linux IC's, Location in the Kernel tree

Hopefully you now have a better idea what they are. But where in the kernel tree can you find them?

Well, you can find sources in linux-next tree in /drivers/staging/hv directory.

And the git repository you can find them in right now is:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sfr/linux-next.git

Or give this command (assuming your system is set up correctly) to download this repository to your machine:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sfr/linux-next.git <your local name>

Since the IC's are part of the kernel now, we follow the normal community process of getting this all migrated into Linus mainline kernel.

Getting Ready for OSCON 2009

Peter Galli — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:13:00 GMT

I'm back at the San Jose at the McEnery Convention Center after attending the Community Leadership Summit this weekend, where we are setting up the Microsoft booth in preparation for the formal opening of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) tomorrow.

In addition to our booth presence, where a number of product groups will be represented, 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, including the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components and the Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, both of which are licensed under the GPL v2

The booth will offer a lounge area, where attendees can play any of a number of Xbox games, including Guitar Hero and Halo 3.

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

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."

We are also hosting a rountable panel that will look at Microsoft and PHP, and include IDC analyst Al Hilwa, Garret Serack from the OSTC, Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch and John Keagy of GoGrid.

So, feel free tostop by the booth, We look forward to talking to you!

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle Debuts

Peter Galli — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:15:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience.

What's even better is that this new, integrated experience is accessible via a single sign-on, which lets teachers and students access the resources and services they need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn.

Moodle is a free open source course management system that teachers use to create online learning websites for their classes, and has some 30 million users in 207 countries.

The plug-in and its feature set was designed as a result of extensive feedback from teachers and institutional IT leaders, and licensed in a way that is consistent with the practices of the open source community - freely under the GPL v2.

The news of the release of the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under GPL v2 follows hot on the heels of Microsoft's release yesterday of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPL v2.

This means that teachers and institutions can download the plug-in under a widely used open source license agreement and under the same terms that Moodle itself is licensed.

This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards, as well as to collaboration so as to help customers, partners, educators and students across the world be successful in a heterogeneous technology world.

With the Live Services Plug-in, educators can email class notes and lecture slides to everyone in the class as well as send alerts regarding homework assignments or quizzes - all from within the same environment.

Students can also utilize Bing for search, check their calendar, send an email or just an instant message - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. They can do it all right within Moodle. They can also check unread emails using advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to check email quickly for example between class periods or just before lectures start.

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle will be part of a growing collection of solutions available from the Microsoft Education Labs.

For more on this news, you can read the blog from L. Michael Golden, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Education Products Group, as well as what Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas has to say about the plug-in.

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.

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.

history.forward()

Sam Ramji — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:00 GMT

I’m writing this from Portland, Oregon where one of the world’s largest Open Source conferences is taking place: OSCON. This year’s event is focused on a theme of “ten years of open source,” referring to 1998 as the year that Eric S. Raymond, Danese Cooper, et al coined the term. The Day 1 keynote theme was the past, Day 2’s theme was the present, and Day 3 (today) is focused on the future.

In my keynote address this morning I’m announcing three areas of contribution:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

We have tested over 100 community PHP applications and found them to run on IIS with no changes required. Hank Janssen and Garrett Serack of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have been championing this work from the beginning, and I thank them for it.

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use.

I am grateful to Andy Oliver, the creator and maintainer of Apache POI, for contacting me back in June with a hope that Microsoft could supply the necessary rights for POI. These include: rights for Office Binary document formats; Open XML; and the right to intentionally subset, have partial implementations, or defects in implementation of these specification. Andy offered his thoughts here.

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

Jim Jagielski, Chairman of the ASF, had this to say about the sponsorship:

"We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top level projects in use and development within the ASF," said ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski. "The ASF Sponsorship program is an excellent way for companies and organizations to show their commitment and enthusiasm towards the ASF and The Apache Way, and helps to ensure that highly innovative, freely-available and community-based/consensus-developed software can continue to flourish and thrive within one of the most successful and respected communities in Open Source. Microsoft's sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft 'gets it' regarding the ASF."

It’s critical to understand two things about our sponsorship of the ASF: what it is, and what it is not.

It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.

I offer my personal thanks in the learning process that has led to today’s announcements to Allison Randall, Jeremy Allison, Andrew Tridgell, Mike Schroepfer, Andi Gutmans, Wez Furlong, Andy Oliver, Jim Jagielski, Brian Behlendorf, Cliff Schmidt, Sally Khudairi, Gianugo Rabellino, and Justin Erenkrantz.

Cheers,

Sam

The OSP and You

Richard Wilder — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:15:00 GMT

I am the Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at Microsoft, having joined the company about 9 months ago. My role is to work with a variety of constituencies inside the company and outside to help shape the approach we take to intellectual property. I am new to the company and cannot take credit for it, but am very pleased that in recent years, Microsoft has made progress in participating with open source communities. A part of that has been the implementation of the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which was launched in 2006. We think it is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement specifications. We constantly listen to feedback from community representatives and respond to that feedback – through Q&A’s on the OSP page and directly to the community. Andy Oliver made some positive comments in this regard as recently as yesterday. When asked for clarification of the OSP with respect to the activities of Apache POI, we responded. The concerns were about implementations of specifications covered by the OSP that may be less than fully compliant – in particular due to implementation bugs. Such a situation is not explicitly covered by the OSP since it is meant to apply to a wide range of technologies and development models and it is simply not possible to address all specific situations in which it would apply. We addressed this situation in the following manner – and I apologize if the explanation is a bit technical, but I will try to avoid too much legal jargon.

The OSP says that it covers "any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification" which addresses the heart of the conformance issue that was raised." To the extent it conforms" means that we do not require an implementation to be perfect; this can be because of implementation bugs or an intentional choice because the requirements of the particular implementation do not actually require full conformance. Under the OSP, implementations can be less than fully compliant. For example, a given implementation that takes a spreadsheet document, extracts information from it, and stores that information in a relational database might not comply with every required part of the spreadsheet document format but such an implementation would still be covered by the OSP. By way of comparison, other promises in the industry may require complete conformance for the promise to apply, and those normally require full compliance as a condition (see IBM's Interoperability Specifications Pledge). Some others make no statement about the subject at all, leaving it an open question as to whether full compliance is required. At Microsoft, we felt that unless we indicated that the OSP is more flexible, some might conservatively assume that complete compliance is required, so we included the “extent it conforms” language in the OSP. We chose to state explicitly that partially conformant implementations are covered, to the extent they are conformant in their individual implementation aspects.

As a result of this clarification, developers can have peace of mind that the specifications covered by the OSP, are, in fact, openly available without ambiguity. This is the kind of conversation and cooperation that marks our intentions with the open source community, and I look forward to continuing this dialogue into the future.

-Richard

Participating Actively

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:39:00 GMT

Now that we’ve had our first “participate” event in conjunction with OSCON here in Portland, I wanted to share a few thoughts. This was a great experience and a great event—or, really, two consecutive events, the morning case study discussion and the afternoon panel.

First I’ll talk about the case study and then build on comments from some folks who’ve “beaten me to the blog.” In the morning Karim Lakhani from Harvard led the group through a case study about a fast-growing company (Threadless t-shirts) built on community contribution and distributed innovation. This was basically like being in a Harvard Business School class with a bunch of super achievers, complete with questions and counter questions (John Wilbanks from Science Commons blogs about it here). Stepping back and taking a look at a whole bunch of concepts and practices that underlie open source in the software domain in another context (t-shirt design), IMO, really opened the floodgates on discussion—a discussion Karim (with regret) had to close as the buzz in the room kept right on going well over time and into lunch…

In the afternoon I was part of a panel discussion and Q and A that started back in the software domain specifically. The one thing I would definitely do differently is to couple the morning case study and the later panel discussion more tightly. Not everyone who could be part of one was part of the other this year, and the real “ah ha’s” for me came from being a part of both. Here’s what I took away overall.

I introduced the morning session by noting that we’re at the ten-year mark since the folks who founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) rallied around the term “open source.” At last year’s OSCON, Bill Hilf announced we had launched http://Microsoft.com/opensource , our first public, official, company-wide statement of policy and strategy on OSS. So (I said): “If you look at that span of time from 1998 to 2007, no one can accuse us of being precipitous, and no one can flatter us for being first adopters.”
But there’s a benefit to being slow: other people don’t stand still stuff. That includes folks like Karim and another professor on our panel, Siobhan O’Mahony, doing research. I can’t emphasize enough the contributions their work and that of many others of their peers made to our first step in informing and building acceptance of that step into participation in 2007. We read it all.

And this is where I’ll offer a different perspective than Zack—in his blog he said he felt the afternoon session (on which I really appreciated his participation and contributions) he felt a bit like “it was outside looking in” on open source and “academic.” With regard to the first point, one of my goals for next year is definitely to figure out how we integrate the “inside look out” (at another domain) like we did in the morning. With regard to the latter, here’s the interesting thing to me: “academic” can be pejorative when it means “divorced from any substantive decision-making”—that is, you’re just studying for the sake of studying. And I can where Zack is coming from: MySQL is one of the oldest OSS-based businesses. Zack was quite clear he knows how they manage their dev process and a bunch of other things. Unlike the folks at Threadless and perhaps many younger OSS-based companies, Zack and MySQL’s leadership team don’t even have to wonder about what to do if they are offered a big contract or billion-dollar buy out from a big established vendor…they’ve been there, done that. I respect that.

But if like Zack (and Matt Asay, who couldn’t be at partcipate08…Matt, I’ve read your blogs for years, you’re a thoughtful guy, I would bet money you couldn’t help but love the morning session…save a date for 09!) you are encouraging Microsoft to make more code (or whole products) open source: on the Microsoft side “academic” insights are highly relevant and actionable. Siobhan almost literally wrote the book on how established companies work with foundations and communities. Karim’s understanding of distributed innovation spans from the early days of OSS’ popularity through Wikipedia and beyond (we learned on Monday that there is a vibrant online user innovation community around custom granola recipes…).

Their research and practitioners like Allison (and others) abstracting out how what-worked-in-her-experience might apply to another technology or audience are directly relevant to diverse Microsoft teams figuring out how to “go open” in ways that are sustainable because they engage a community and make business sense—there are some great examples (here and here and here). But if there’s one qualification for being the first person in the history of the universe with the title of “Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft” (…thanks Bill and Sam…) it is this: the humility to understand it would be foolish to try to figure out how to expand this list company-wide on our own, without learning from everyone who has gone before.

So here is the real a-ha for me: John Wilbanks’ job is a lot harder than mine. He is approaching the Science Commons domain with a far less robust body of knowledge and shared understanding across communities than we have in OSS. Some of that may be ten years of “open source” versus a shorter timeframe for applying these concepts to science—but what I tried to articulate at the end of the panel was this: I believe “open source” has achieved a fascinating and valuable thing. It has achieved a balance as an construct which is not just a reductive, narrow focus on source code licensing (which is a component) nor a vague, fuzzy, wishy-washy platitude or marketing slogan (which is a risk and something I know the OSI worries about). It has enough cohesion, flexibility, and surface tension to be something you can study scientifically and discuss with a shared understanding of how it relates to software or t-shirts or science, and have an intuitive “know-good-practices-when-you-see-them” dimension.

I think the OSI and other leaders in open source contributed to this by striving to maintain fidelity to a core set of values while being flexible rather than doctrinaire. And here at OSCON this strikes me: last year at OSCON 2007 Bill Hilf also announced we were submitting two Microsoft Shared Source licenses to the OSI for approval. This was a milestone I see as not just instrumentally useful to provide clarity to users of these licenses; I see it as fitting as a matter of respect and recognition. And this year we took another step forward with participate08 here at Tim O’Reilly and Allison Randal’s OSCON 2008. I see this as fitting not just instrumentally as a matter of convenience (--lots of the right people happen to be here--) but as a matter of respect and recognition. I hope to be back for participate09.

I am going to close this blog entry on that thought but for one picture that really is worth a thousand words. Once we get the notes and the whiteboard photos assembled I’ll share more about the discussion, but this image will stick with me a theme for why so many folks did come to think hard and contribute as a part of participate08—and why I am grateful they did:

(photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)

Participate08

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:09:00 GMT

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in participate08. participate08 is a one-day summit held in coordination with the O'Reilly Open Source Conference(OSCON). It is designed to facilitate dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities and help explore opportunities for greater participation in the design, development, and deployment of software in the modern IT environment.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (...that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

Sometimes we have to focus on what I’ll call day-to-day issues: like what if a Microsoft team releases an application under an open source license (the Ms-PL) without making the source code available? (The answer is: the team, whose disconnect with our policy was 100% accidental and unintended—stepped up to strongly affirm their commitment to OSS best practices and voluntarily released it with source code, to their great credit.) These are important. Most of the time (as in this case) things turn out positively. But participate08 is focused on the big picture, or macro level issues—the future of distributed innovation in software and beyond; being a part of that sort of discussion with folks like our panelists is just mind-blowingly cool.

In the morning, we’ll be holding a small group, facilitated “executive session”—in the afternoon, the panel will star in an open session where we hope to have a great dialogue among the panel—and with the audience. If you will be at OSCON I hope you’ll join us in E145 at 1:30 PM!

Microsoft & Sourceforge

jcannon — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Over the past four years, we’ve been working with Sourceforge on a number of unique programs to help connect developers with the code and communities that interest them. In 2004, we started the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolkit project on Sourceforge, licensed under the Common Public License. WiX is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. In 2005, we started the open source ODF Converter project. Then, in 2007, we launched the ‘World of Choice’ destination to provide helpful connections to free community and software offerings available from Microsoft.

Developers have told us these interactions are important and that it’s important that we continue collaborating with open source communities. We understand that the language of that collaboration is code. As a result, I’m excited to share that this year, Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards (CCA), joining O’Reilly and the Linux Foundation in supporting the recognition of world-class open source developers and projects.

For the uninitiated, the CCAs are an annual appreciation of open source projects that allow any OSS project to be nominated and voted on by the Sourceforge community. This joint collaboration will result in two important additions to this year’s Community Choice Awards:

1. The CCAs are now open to open source projects that are hosted on Codeplex. This means that projects hosted on Codeplex, and licensed under the MS Public or Reciprocal License, are eligible for nomination, voting and recognition.

2. As a part of our sponsorship, we’ve also worked with Sourceforge to create a new category for ‘Best Project for Educators’: Whether you're working in grade school education, high school, or college, teaching is difficult. Open source can help! This award goes to the project that makes it easier to educate and share knowledge together.

This is an important program for Microsoft – we believe strongly in supporting developer choice and collaboration. Open source is all about choice and collaboration. I can’t think of a better venue to support and cheer the fantastic work that these individuals and communities do every day. Education is another important theme from Microsoft. Worldwide, access to knowledge is a serious social and economic issue. Technology can be a key to closing this gap. We want to recognize development work being done in this area.

So here’s how to get involved: If you’re a project contributor, maintainer, or user – visit http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08/ - Select ‘Nominate’ and get started recognizing your favorite OSS Projects. You can ‘Search’ for projects too – Sourceforge has developed a clever widget that returns results across forges. In the case below, I searched for ‘XNA’ and received multiple Codeplex results.

This summer, winners will be recognized at OSCON in Portland, OR. If you will be in town, you’re welcome to attend.

This is an exciting time to be a developer. Let the recognition begin.

OPEN/SHARED SOURCE AT Microsoft

MichaelF — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:25:00 GMT

It has been a while since I posted a blog, and I really have no other excuse than that I have been very busy. I have had a whole bunch of blog ideas percolating in the back of my mind, and I will be writing them down soon.

When we started port25 and the OSSL it was met with great skepticism. But there have been a lot of changes going on around us here at Microsoft. And one of those I wanted to bring to your attention.

A few years ago the mere thought of Open Source at Microsoft was ridiculed both inside and outside of the company. But I am starting to see small and sometimes not so small changes. This blog describes a very positive change.

As you might all know, I went to the 2006 OSCON conference in Portland. And there I met another Microsoft employee, Sara Ford. She works in the Visual Studio and Power Toys area. She has been a very active blogger in the past (unlike myself, working on it though!) And you can find her page here.

We got to talking at the conference and I have worked with her a little since then and found her to be a very energetic person greatly interested in OSS. But why is this interesting??? Well she attended a session at OSCON given by James Howison. (See his OSCON session info here ) And his presentation was on open source communities.

She was so impressed by it that she is currently working on Open Sourcing the Power Toys. I had the pleasure to sit in the training she gave the team, you can see more of the training she gave (unfortunately I was there as well and probably messed up the whole video by opening my mouth. So ignore me!) here.

In any case, who would ever thought Microsoft would open sourcing anything. But it is happening, and in future blogs I will give you all more insight on my first 4 or so months here and the changes I am seeing both internal and external.

Till then!

Hank.

Thoughts from OSCON: Development Practices

MichaelF — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:30:00 GMT

I recently attended OSCON 2006, and had a lot of fun being there. Microsoft’s presence in the Open Source World is still a novelty (to say the least), so I always got a reaction out of people at the conference when they saw my badge!

We had a large presence there, because we do believe that open source as a development model is here to stay. Bill Hilf was at the conference and Port 25 has some of the interactions he had with open source luminaries Tim O’Reilly and Matt Asay. While Bill was having these interesting conversations, we at the OSSL (Open Source Software Lab) were busy attending the talks at the sessions and collecting “swag” on the exhibition floor! I do have swag from HP, Google, Intel, Dell, AMD, Oracle, ActiveState, Solid and MindTouch but interestingly IBM was missing. Anyone out there have an IBM t-shirt to exchange for our Port 25 t-shirt? (see accompanying pictures)

The buzz in the air, appeared to me to be about open source both as and in business. The talks I gravitated towards (naturally) were about open source development practices. These ranged from taking closed source products and turning them loose as open source projects to driving pure open source development to using experts in a particular domain as contributors for a project not thought suitable for open source.

There was a common thread running through all these talks – the critical nature of development practices. No, there wasn’t anything earth shattering – these were development practices that are accepted as “goodness”. But the forces surrounding open source development made the use of these practices almost a necessity for projects to get of the ground. This is not to say that closed source companies do not follow these practices, but due to co-location, centralized management and other circumstances that go along with commercial development, some of the practices may not be rigidly enforced and the lack of these practices may not impact the product as much. Open source development does not have that luxury (I refer only to successful open source development projects, not the long tail of open source projects that are fossilized on SourceForge and other repositories).

The practices fall into the following categories

Easy “build”

Consider this, you browse to an open source project which is new to you and download it (could be from repositories such as Sourceforge or Codeplex). It doesn’t install and takes a lot of wrassling to run. More often than not, this first impression decides your level of participation. If you can’t find something cool, try it and run it – there are other fish in the open source sea!

The initial install is not the only thing that has to run right, as an open source developer working on a module, adding/modifying some source code, building the source code and running it are part of the iterative process that lets developers be productive. A system which doesn’t make the dependencies transparent and which doesn’t have a build system to include all the necessary files (and NOT include the unnecessary ones) will probably not get good developer input.

The easy build thing has been known for a while. At Microsoft, product groups have the concept of daily builds – if you as the developer “break” the build, you don’t go home till you fix it. In order for this to work, each developer should be able to build the system on his desk easily.

Quick iterative program development in the large without hassle is the name of the game. The very nature of open source development which needs to attract developers to gain momentum leads to a focus on easy builds.

There’s doc (or a blog or a newsgroup) for everything

Most open source developers don’t work in the same building. I am talking about open source developers in the community, not those employed full time by commercial open source companies. (Though most commercial open source developers have to interact with community developers on their virtual team). This means you can’t walk to the next office and ask the developer about how the API call really works!

It follows that at any time of day or night, answers to questions like “how does the API call really work?” should be available through internet accessible means. This could be doc, a newsgroup, a wiki , a blog or any other easily accessible repository.

Documentation by developers, you ask, isn’t that a mythical being?

That’s exactly the point – open source developers do write docs, they just don’t recognize that they are doing so. In order for an open source project to truly take off, education of new developers is a must - both when they are viewing code and when they are looking at documents explaining interfaces, how things work and the meaning of life! Ok, maybe the last thing is not strictly necessary, but it does make reading documentation much more fun. Who wouldn’t want to work on Ruby after reading “why’s (poignant) guide to ruby”?!!!

Every lifecycle stage and artifact is important

The way you work your way up the “committer” chain in open source projects is to prove yourself useful. The path to building credibility is to write documents, find bugs, review codes and make yourself useful in a pretty stiff meritocracy. Even when a developer achieves the golden “commit” privilege they continue to participate in those activities.

Not having departments with people exclusively devoted to test, doc or reviews makes the development of a “caste system” difficult! Development managers cannot put pressure on test managers to shortcut tests – because the development managers and test managers could be the same person!

This is a little bit more subtle than the “more eyes make all bugs shallow” argument – that is only true if those eyes don’t think of looking at bugs as work that is to be done by other eyes!

This is even truer of documents and education – it isn’t some tech writer with expertise only in writing who writes the important documentation, but the luminaries of the community. When the “Gurus” (which in Sanskrit means teacher) do what they are meant to do – then nirvana is attained (I loosely paraphrase from the Bhagavad Gita!).

Sprints not marathons

Consider having developers in the US, UK, India and Australia – when is the best time for a meeting? When it’s morning in the US, its night in India – and who knows what time it is in Australia? Software companies whose code is all developed by their own employees can have coordination meetings on a schedule decided by someone – not so in open source. This means that coordination can’t be complex and long drawn out.

So open source makes use of XP principles, work on a small feature that doesn’t take more than a month (ok, so it isn’t the extreme XP where the feature shouldn’t take more than two weeks!). Based on community pressures, priorities can be decided. Longer term projects are either done by a single person or by a co-located team (by commercial open source companies for example).

That means planning horizons are small, and mistakes can be rectified without huge loss of time. Releases happen when there is a critical set of features ready. The community is able to get their hands on new features early and give early feedback, which further cuts down the time for stable development.

Of course this means that customers are running hard just to stay in one place, if they accept all the releases! But at least they have the choice…!

Visibility into EVERYTHING

Open source is not just about the source being visible. More people do look at server side code, but even on servers the number of code readers is small compared to the number of contributors.

Visibility in open source is about everything – how many and what bugs are there, time to resolve bugs, prioritization of bugs, who is contributing what, what comments were made about whose code, whose code was included and whose wasn’t etc. etc. etc.

This not only acts as a great feedback mechanism to users, it provides for real and open debate about priorities and execution. As long as the project is handled on a rational basis, people can predict the state of the project. They can anticipate when a feature they want or a bug they have will be fixed. It also allows users to submit code to fix bugs for their own problems and see it transparently go through the system.

My full time job at a previous position was mediating features for a group of customers (numbering in the 10s). This required the full energy of a team, which was not a development team, to gather this information in a closed source environment and then disseminate this information. Of course there were mistakes in information gathering and communication, since the customers only got a view of the project through an intermediary. Building trust with the customers took the better part of the year and resulted in a development process that was not as efficient as it could have been.

So flame wars notwithstanding, visibility into everything is an advantage for open source projects.

Community, Community, Community

In order for developers to be productive they have to communicate with whom they want, when they want and get back what they want. This means there is a burden on the open source product’s leaders to make sure that this responsiveness is part of their community. The artifacts used are answering 250 e-mails a day, having IM on all the time and putting systems in place that make this possible. One open source company I know of uses categorization software just so that the appropriate person can look at an e-mail and has fast mail systems that allow sub-second previews of the e-mails!

What this gains the company is encapsulated in a quote from an OSCON presenter – “When we had a closed source product people worked 9 to 5, but with open source there is so much interaction with the community that our developers are strongly motivated to work on finding solutions and building features and they are much more productive!”

Actually come to think of it, there isn’t a thing here that I have said that wouldn’t work where I work! In fact these processes are already at work at Microsoft. I am not only talking only about the work that we are doing at Codeplex, releasing source for products such as Power Toys for Visual Studio Collection available on Codeplex or the WiX tool available at Sourceforge (You can get more info about these projects from the interviews on Port 25 with Sarah Ford and Rob Mensching) but also about the code sharing internally within Microsoft. Since Microsoft does both platform and application development, application developers often need and have access to the bug databases and source code of platform level components. There is a lot a give and take between teams of users within Microsoft. This visibility has also been expanded to users such as academic, government and enterprise users under license agreements with Microsoft.

Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

MichaelF — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:33:00 GMT

Matt Asay, formerly of Novell, now VP of Business Development at Alfresco and co-founder of OSCON took some time out of his busy conference schedule to sit down with Bill for an interview. Matt, author of the AC/OS Blog (Matt Asay on OS) is a vocal supporter of Open Source Software and has some interesting insights on where commercial Open Source Software is headed.

In this interview Matt and Bill discuss Open Source business models, monetization opportunties for open business apps, and thoughts on the first days of OSCON.

Here is a link to a recent blog post by Matt that further explains some of the concepts he mentions around Open Source business models.

Big Thanks to Matt for taking the time to join us on Port 25!

Video: Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

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Tim O'Reilly sits down with Bill Hilf at OSCON2006

MichaelF — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 03:09:00 GMT

While we were at OSCON this week we were fortunate enough to get some time to sit down with Tim O'Reilly. I dare say Tim, author of the O'Reilly Radar, needs no introduction but just in case: Tim is an Open Source Software advocate as well as the Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. He is also one half of the duo that founded OSCON along with Matt Asay. While this is his first time on Port 25, Tim also joined Bill Gates at Mix 06 for a conversation and Q&A session.

In this interview Bill and Tim discuss the redefinition of "Open Source", Web 2.0, and some other topics that arose in the first two days of the conference.

Stay tuned: Monday we will post another interview from the conference between Bill and Matt Asay wherein they discuss mixed environments and commercial OSS trends. If you haven't already, sign up for our RSS feed and we'll notify you when this interview is published.

Video: Tim O'Reilly sits down at OSCON 2006

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Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

MichaelF — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:01:00 GMT

On day two of OSCON we snuck into the vendor fair during setup time and spent some time with Mindtouch, a Microsoft partner looking at new ways to leverage Wiki's to enhance data sharing and collaboration. Interestingly, at the same time that we met them, Mindtouch was making some announcements (CNET, NYT) regarding their company and their Open Source solution: OpenGarden, built on Mindtouch Dream.

Jamie Cannon makes his first appearance on camera to conduct the interview with Aaron Fulkerson (Co-founder, COO) and Steve Bjorg (Co-founder, President and CTO) from the floor of OSCON wherein they discuss Mindtouch, wiki's and the start-up's recent announcements.

Video: Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

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