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

Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

Sam Ramji — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:15:00 GMT

I got to spend an hour with Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) today. We talked about a range of things, from open source calculators (WikiCalc) to the future of Sharepoint as a platform for open source development and the shift in Microsoft's approach to open source. Ross graciously gave us an extra ten minutes to capture part of our conversation on video.

Socialtext was the first commercial wiki company, built initially on the Perl-based Kwiki and Ross has been a leader in the democratization of this collaboration technology for many years. For more on social computing, you can check out Wikipedia. By now, unless you work with a group of card-carrying Luddites, you have probably even browsed a wiki within your company run by your own IT department or wiki enthusiasts. In this case you’ve already entered the current wave of “enterprise social computing” a.k.a. “Enterprise 2.0”. Our internal wiki at the Open Source Software Lab currently runs on Plone.

About five months ago, he open-sourced part of this platform. The Socialtext Open Source Wiki has the details on this project. It currently runs on PostgreSQL and Ubuntu… but since it’s based on Perl I hope that the porting effort to SQL Server and Windows wouldn’t be too much.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint"). This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure. My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis. I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications. We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

Ross is thinking about releasing these modules under open source licenses. I’m hopeful that the MS-PL (BSD-like) or MS-CL (Apache-like) will prove worthwhile to him, and that Codeplex will turn out to be the right repository for the work - but regardless of the license or the community site, I'm excited to see that the Microsoft platform and open source software companies can propel great technology into broad adoption - carrying innovation into remote corners of the enterprise.

For more details on the conversation - and to catch Ross' insights first-hand - check out the video interview.

Cheers,

Sam

Video: Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

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Lessons from OSCON Part 2: Sara Ford interviews James Howison

MichaelF — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 20:42:00 GMT

About a month ago, I did a presentation on What I Learned from OSCON, based primarily on James Howison's talk on OSS Communities. Since James had such great and interesting feedback on my presentation, we decided to do a follow-up podcast. I'm trying to publically capture as much of this journey as possible of a team at Microsoft learning how to go open. Maybe this journey will make for an interesting OSCON '07 talk, I hope. =)

-sara

Introductions:

James Howison is a doctoral student on Kevin Crowston's NSF-funded research team at the Syracuse University Information School and a regular presenter at O’Reilly events. At OSCON '06, James gave a talk on OSS Communities, where Sara Ford took notes until her fingers went numb.

Sara Ford is the Program Manager for the Power Toys for Visual Studio. Her mission is to explore the various ways Microsoft developers can have conversations with the Visual Studio community at the source code level, while providing great after-market solutions to developer pain-points via Shared Source.

Distributing the Future: Open Source at Microsoft

jcannon — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:58:00 GMT

Last week, O'Reilly Media posted portions of two conversations that took place at the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing. One between Tim O'Reilly and Brian Behlendorf about lessons from Apache and CollabNet, and the onter between Bill Hilf and Danese Cooper of Intel about Open Source at Microsoft. O'Reilly was kind enough to allow us to re-post these discussions on Port 25 - we're hoping you enjoy the lively, and frank discussion as much as we did. Details below...

From O'Reilly:
Distributing the Future August 21, 2006: "Open Source at Microsoft"
Total running time: 33:40

0:50 Software as Service
There's a lot of software that you use each day without downloading to your own machine. From the O'Reilly Radar's Executive Briefing at OSCON, CollabNet Founder and CTO Brian Behlendorf talks to Tim O'Reilly about the lessons he's learned from Apache and CollabNet. (9:42)
10:32 Microsoft on Open Source
It can't be easy being the person who speaks for Microsoft about its Open Source strategy. Microsoft General Manager for Platform Strategy Bill Hilf talks to Intel's Danese Cooper about licensing, the Open Document Format, and more generally, about Open Source at Microsoft. (22:26)

Production Notes
The initial montage is from Tim O'Reilly, recorded at OSCON '04 in a phone interview with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations, and used with permission. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet" is a quote from author William Gibson that Tim used with attribution.

Credits include special thanks to David Battino for composing and performing the theme music. David can be found at Batmosphere.com, and he also edits O'Reilly's Digital Audio site. David provided a lot of help and feedback getting this program launched. We used Soundtrack Pro, Bias Peak, and Audio Hijack Pro to put it together.

Daniel H. Steinberg is a developer, a longtime technical writer, and currently spends most of his time podcasting for O'Reilly.

Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages, Ruby and .NET (Part 2)

MichaelF — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 18:38:00 GMT

In part two of two, Sam and Professor Gough continue their conversation focusing on Dynamic Languages and Professor Gough's work with Ruby and .NET.

Part One of this interview, as well as some background on Professor Gough and the LANG.NET symposium can be seen here.

Video: Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages

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Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages, Ruby and .NET (Part 1)

MichaelF — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:30:00 GMT

Last week Microsoft hosted the LANG.NET symposium in Redmond. From the program: "The conference program will focus on the pragmatics and experience of designing languages, implementing compilers, and building language tools that target managed execution platforms such as the .NET CLR and other implementations of the ECMA CLI."

During the conference we had the opportunity to meet with a few attendees and film interviews to share with you on Port 25.

In part one of a two part interview Sam talks with John Gough, Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology, about his background in compilers and virtual machines, Dynamic Languages and how he became involved with the .NET project.

Video: Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages

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Black Hat US 2006: Networking & Heap Manager Updates with the Core Windows Team

jcannon — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:38:00 GMT

At this year's Black Hat Security Conference, several engineers on the Windows Networking & Security teams will be presenting <for the first time, ever> on a number of technical topics, ranging from the new improvements made to the reliability & performance of the OS Heap Manager, to the NetIO stack—a re-architected and re-written TCP/IP stack. Our discussion on this podcast has three distinguished engineers discussing their work with Sam, including:

Noel Anderson - Group Manager on the Windows Wireless Team (IP Stack for Bluetooth & Wi-Fi)
Adrian Marinescu - former member of the Windows Kernel team, LPC, Object Manager & Heap Manager. This past year, Adrian has focused his work on Vista's Heap Manager.
Aboldate Gbadegesin - Architect on Core Networking on Windows (TCP/IP & related protocols, tools & components)

We'll cover their respective areas of work & discuss the topics being presented at Black Hat for those that cannot attend.

Related Links:
- Direct Link to MP3

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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