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

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.

Sam chats with Bitrock on Open Source Installation and Package Management

Sam Ramji — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:59:00 GMT

Sam recently interviewed Daniel Lopez, Founder and CTO and Erica Brescia, CEO of Bitrock from their Spain headquarters. Daniel and Erica discuss their experiences and challenges developing open source applications and launching the BitNami project. BitRock makes open source software easier to use by providing a complete automated solution for Open Source Application Deployment.

Eclipse Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, Talks with Sam

Sam Ramji — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:21:00 GMT

Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - an open source community - supported by a non-profit foundation - dedicated to building an open source development environment. In this podcast, Mike joins us to discuss some history around Eclipse, the larger open source community - and his varied background in accounting and computer science. Mike also touches on the architecture of participation's impact on the foundation and the development team behind the Eclipse platform.

For interested Eclipse users, Sam will be speaking at this year's EclipseCon 2008 - stay tuned to Port 25 for more information as that draws closer.

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?."

Justin Steinman and Sam Ramji on the Novell/Microsoft Partnership

Sam Ramji — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:51:00 GMT

Back in the Spring, Sam Ramji attended an Olliance event entitled, the Open Source Think Tank. It's a smaller gathering, and well attended by nearly 100 or so executives and influential developer-users of open source software. During one of the sessions, Sam and Justin Steinman took an impromptu moment to answer some tough questions regarding the nature of the Microsoft-Novell partnership. Justin Steinman is Novell's Director of Marketing for Linux and Open Platforms.

Many of the questions had been asked before and in fact have been posited more than once on Port 25. We thought these discussions would be interesting to the community at large - ...so Sam & Justin hopped on the phone recently to answer them in podcast format. Take a listen....I try to emcee - but these are tough guys to keep on one topic :) As always, we welcome feedback and we'll invite Sam & Justin to answer the comments. If you want more information on the Novell partnership - you may want to check out moreinterop.com - home to most announcements, events and information related to the partnership.

Hyperic: Java-based Cross-platform Management

Sam Ramji — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:38:00 GMT

I had the opportunity to sit down with Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic last month in San Francisco at the OSBC. We had a great discussion, which I opened bluntly by saying, “You don’t need to tell me about your software; I’ve seen it, my lab team thinks it’s cool, and we’re impressed.” He was happy to hear it but probably not surprised.

One of the obvious pros of the open source model (like the freeware model of the 90’s) is that you can get what you want without calling anyone or firing off a “please contact me” request to the company’s sales department. Another equally obvious pro is that prospective customers can really walk through the product’s architecture and actual implementation to make sure that the marketing promises (“marketechture”) actually line up with the product being described.

Kishi Malhotra and Stephen Zarkos – the OSSL’s experts on manageability – did a comprehensive teardown of Hyperic and a range of other open source management technologies (such as Nagios and OpenPegasus), which they’ll be posting in the next few days. What they found about Hyperic is that it does a great job of making a low-footprint, easily adaptable management technology and is commercializing it in an open source model. We thought that SIGAR, their agent API, was particularly clever.

Javier and Doug MacEachern (their CTO, and a maintainer for mod_perl among other achievements) spent some time on a podcast with me last week – if you’re interested in hearing their reasons for building Hyperic, how it compares to Nagios, and what they learned in taking their product open source, listen in. They’ll be available to answer questions on this post as well – leave a comment if you’re curious about something they’re doing.

Also, drop us a note and let us know if you interested in more interviews with open source and interoperability technology leaders on Port 25.

Samba, IPv6 and Windows/Linux Interoperability: Sam interviews Dr. David Holder

Sam Ramji — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:36:00 GMT

I got the chance to meet many extremely smart developers last month at SambaXP, the annual Samba developer conference. After attending I’m convinced that the Samba team knows more about how Windows networking works than most Microsoft developers.

One of the most informative sessions I attended was led by Dr. David Holder, an expert on IP networking and Windows/Linux interoperability. Specifically, he focuses on the IPv6 protocol, implementation, and interop, where he sees great opportunities for improved service levels in a range of applications and environments, but also sees a coming wave of interoperability problems between IPv6 implementations on various platforms.

He’s done some very slick stuff in getting Samba to work with Windows Vista and Longhorn’s IPv6 stack, which is encouraging, and lays out a roadmap for future interop work between the platforms.

We are posting the link to his slides along with this podcast of his interview, and David will be available to answer questions posted to the comments section of this page.

Cheers,

Sam

Links:

Dr. Holder's SambaXP “Vista and Samba with IPv6” presentation:

http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/samba-and-vista-with-ipv6v2.pdf.

Details regarding how to IPv6 enable Samba4:

http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=12

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.

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/

Robotics Redux: Demo My Robot

jcannon — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:26:00 GMT

If you missed our post yesterday, we started a fascinating conversation with the Robotics team about the impetus and design goals of new Robotics Studio, from distributed intelligence & network-based agents, to why web browsers can provide strong interfaces to robotics control. In the second part of this conversation, we get a sense of what early work is possible with demos being run in the Robotics lab.

Video: Robotics Redux: Demo My Robot

You'll note the reference to some of the work in the Channel9 sandbox to provide open code sharing - a simulation sample tutorial is here. Feel free to dig around.

Paul Thurrott talks Open Source with Sam

jcannon — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:41:00 GMT

Just a quick note & pointer to Paul Thurrott's interview with Sam on Open Source, the Lab and why these intiatives are so important to Microsoft and to our customers. The interview was conducted back in October, but the podcast just went live at Windows IT Pro.

Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!

jcannon — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:03:00 GMT

Last week, Microsoft released the first version of Robotics Studio, an SDK that contains three sets of tools; first, a common runtime architecture that can be used across robot devices; second, a set of programming tools that harness the power of Visual Studio, and a physics engine, to allow programmers to build & test their robots in simulated 3D space; and finally, a set of tutorials and sample code to get started. In this video (there are two - we'll post the second tomorrow), we learn a little bit about the design goals & architecture behind Robotics Studio...tomorrow we have some very cool demo time with the team.

Why is robotics such an interesting area to watch? According to the latest statistics from the International Federation of Robotics, about 1 million personal robots will be sold around the world this year. And by 2025, the Japanese Robot Association predicts the personal robot industry will be worth more than $50 billion a year worldwide.

Video: MPEG4 Available Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!

Additional Links:
- Robotics Studio Home Page
- Download Robotics Studio (Free for Non-Commercial Use)
- Channel9 Interview