Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Open Source, Tom Hanrahan

Microsoft Releases Device Driver Code to the Linux Community

Peter Galli — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:48:00 GMT

In what many may see as a surprising move, Microsoft today released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under the popular General Public Licence v2.

The code includes three Linux device drivers, and has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

The drivers will be available to both the Linux community and customers, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

In an article posted to Microsoft's PressPass site, Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, notes that this is a significant milestone because it's the first time the company has released code directly to the Linux community. "Additionally significant is that we are releasing the code under the GPLv2 license, which is the Linux community's preferred license," he said.

In the same article, Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, points out that Microsoft communities and open source communities are growing together, which is ultimately of benefit to customers. An example of this is the Linux community, which has built a platform used by many customers. "So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for," he said.

Ramji also alluded to the fact that people are often surprised when they hear how much open source community and development work is happening across Microsoft, which is largely due to the fact that these collaborations focus more on getting the work done and engaging with the various communities on a one-to-one basis and less about promoting them.

One example of how Microsoft participates with, and contributes to, open source is its relationship with the PHP Community. The company's involvement includes contributing to the PHP Engine, optimizing PHP 5.3 to perform strongly on Windows, and working to improve the performance of numerous PHP applications on Windows. Then there is the ongoing participation in various Apache Software Foundation projects, such as Hadoop, Stonehenge and QPID.

"In short, we're focused on building sustainable business strategies for open source at Microsoft ... we see open source playing into three key areas, one of which is the use of 'inbound' open source and the open source development model to make our software development processes more efficient."

"Good examples of this include what we did recently with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008, the implementation of OpenPegasus connectors and adaptors into System Center Operations Manager, and work that the Microsoft High Performance Computing team did with the Argonne National Lab (ANL) to source its MPICH2 implementation, which is a portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) used in cluster computing and super computers," Ramji said.

We'll be posting a number of other articles on the release of the device driver code to the Linux community over the week, several of which will be penned by Hank Janssen from Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, so look out for those.

Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

hanrahat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.

You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.

One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.

The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.

Open Source Highlights at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference

hanrahat — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:32:00 GMT

At last week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, product previews and announcements, particularly of Windows Azure, Windows 7 and Visual Studio Team System 2010, generated a lot of buzz. Throughout the week, an important undercurrent to that story was Microsoft's engagement with the open source community and its support for open source developers.

Certainly one of the open source highlights for the week was Miguel de Icaza's presentation, "Mono and .Net." In spite of arriving on time for the session, I wound up viewing it from the second overflow room. Miguel talked about innovations on which the Mono community has focused recently, including their embedded C# compiler. His game demos of the technology were fun and amazing to watch. You can see them for yourself here.

Members of my team spent the month leading up to the conference developing three demonstrations of Windows Azure's ability to support open source developers and open source applications. We ran all three at the Open Source pedestal in the Microsoft booth and each was highlighted in a session during the conference.

One of the demos shows how developers can use Eclipse to create applications and deploy them as Azure services. It relies on an Eclipse community plug-in "Emonics" for displaying C# syntax and a "proof-of-concept" Azure plug-in we created for building and deploying the application. This demo was highlighted in Steve Marx's presentation, "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service," which you can find here.

The second demo shows how an open source application can access services from Azure. In this one, we chose the popular PHP application Gallery and show how it can store, retrieve and modify photos as binary large objects (BLOBs) in the cloud. To produce this demo we wrote two small modules, one to create wrappers that represent the BLOB REST API as PHP objects and another to create an Azure subclass with inheritance from the Windows NT Platform class.

We created the third demo to illustrate how an open source developer can use OpenID to authenticate users from an Azure service. For this one, we modified a demo blog service (based on BlogEngine.net) and gave users the option of authenticating through either OpenID or Live ID.

Both the Gallery and OpenID demos were highlighted in Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow's presentation, "Cloud Computing: Programming in the Cloud." You can find Daniel and Stefan's presentation here.

The excitement that PDC produced was remarkable. I moved through a steady stream of developers for four days, all of us sustained it seems by tables of fruit, powerbars and various forms of chocolate. I enjoyed meeting and talking with many of the attendees and as always appreciate how much I learn in those conversations.

I want to thank Steve Marx, Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow for sharing the stage with us. Kudos to Hank Janssen, Anandeep Pannu, Garrett Serack and Joel Penner for creating the Azure demonstrations we used throughout the week. And a tip of my hat to Miguel for making the week so fun.