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

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.

Microsoft Teams up With Black Duck Software

Peter Galli — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Microsoft and Black Duck Software this morning announced an agreement under which projects from CodePlex will be fed automatically into Black Duck's open source KnowledgeBase repository, and which will also will be searchable through Koders.com, a search engine for open source and other downloadable code.

This means that those customers who use the Black Duck KnowledgeBase to leverage, manage and detect the use of open source components in software application development projects, will now get comprehensive coverage of CodePlex-hosted projects, many of which are Windows .NET based.

Developers will also now be able to use Black Duck's Koders.com search search engine for CodePlex projects. While not all of the 9,000 CodePlex projects will be searchable in Koders as of today, most are expected to be by the end of June.

You can read the news release here.

Given that Black Duck's KnowledgeBase is a useful resource for development managers tasked with managing open source code in mixed-source development environments, the addition of CodePlex projects makes this a more powerful development resource, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft's Senior Director of Platform Strategy.

Black Duck, which is a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry and Windows Embedded Partner, scours the Internet, collecting open source and other downloadable code into its KnowledgeBase, a searchable repository of more than 200,000 open source projects collected from more than 4,100 Internet sites. More than 40,000 new projects have been added to the KnowledgeBase since January 2009.

As CodePlex is one of the fastest-growing open source hosting sites, this agreement will make it easier and faster for Black Duck to manage the steady stream of new projects on the site, said Peter Vescuso, Black Duck's Executive Vice president of marketing and business development.

CodePlex currently hosts 9,000 projects and adds about 100 new ones each week. "By teaming with Microsoft, we are assured of comprehensive, ongoing coverage of CodePlex projects in the KnowledgeBase," Vescuso said.

Open Source Interoperability Projects

Jean Paoli — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:21:00 GMT

Interoperability has always been a focus area at Microsoft. Being a platform company, Microsoft has engaged in interoperability at many levels - product features, participation in standardization bodies, publishing many technologies under open licenses and working closely with customers, governments and partners to understand the heterogeneous IT landscape and discuss practical interoperability solutions.

Earlier this year, these activities were formalized under the Interoperability Principles for all of our high-volume products.

I am the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, and I have worked across the company on many interop initiatives. I am happy to see many interop projects now coming out of Microsoft and, personally, having many of them based on XML makes me doubly happy.

My team has built several bridging technologies and solutions for many of our products to enable interoperability. These are being run as open source projects and released under a broad BSD license so that our customers and partners can use them in many open and broad scenarios.

Interoperability has been getting enhanced attention at a lot of conferences lately and Microsoft has also upped its participation at many open source conferences such as OSCON, the Eclipse Conference and ApacheCon.

At Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference last month, the interoperability story was part of almost every announcement and keynote address. As Sam Ramji writes in his latest blog, Microsoft is also participating at ApacheCon and highlighting the interoperability work we are doing. These are indeed exciting times!

On the interoperability front, my team has been working with the WSO2 since the TechEd 2007 Conference to demonstrate interoperability using our StockTrader reference application.

This week, the WSO2 proposed a new Apache incubation project, known as Stonehenge, to further this work. The aim of this project is to set up sample applications to demonstrate interoperability with multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. We look forward to working with WS02 on the scope of this project, and having discussions with the community.

I also want to highlight some open source interoperability projects that my team has been working on with third parties, companies and members of the community at large, which may be very relevant to the readers of this blog.

Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Eclipse4sl allows Java developers to develop code for the Silverlight platform within the Eclipse development environment, and contains both an advanced project system for creating Silverlight applications and media experiences as well as a compiler for packaging Silverlight applications for deployment.

Interoperability with the Azure Services platform

Announced at PDC recently, the Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. Microsoft .NET Services is a key component of the Azure Services Platform that offers a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide the key building blocks, like, Access Control, Service Bus, and Workflow service.

The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability and in that spirit, we have built two cross-platform SDKs for .NET services - for Java and Ruby.

Information Cards Interoperability

Windows CardSpace is Microsoft implementation of Information Cards on the Windows platform. Information cards are a core part of Identity Metasystem and help both site owners and visitors to manage, control, and exchange digital identities more safely and consistently.

We have also built four open source projects that help Web developers support information cards on diverse platforms:

OpenXML-ODF translators

The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on ODF (OpenDocument) standard and Office Open XML standard. The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing, and is available on Sourceforge under a BSD-like license.

OpenXML-UOF translators

The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on UOF (Uniform Office Format) standard and Office Open XML standard.

UOF is an emerging standard, which is being developed by the Chinese Office Software Work Group (COSWG), led by the China Electronics Standard Institute (CESI), the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), major suppliers of Chinese office software suites, and other academic institutions.The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing. It is available at SourceForge under a BSD-like license

I would like to hear your comments and feedback on these projects and also welcome open engagement on what Microsoft should be doing for interoperability. Tell us what other interoperability scenarios we should be looking to address.

I also want to thank the multiple third party companies and the community members we cooperate with, as well as the members of my team: Vijay Rajagopalan, Sumit Chawla, Kamaljit Bath, Claudio Caldato, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere and many others for working on these projects and building technical solutions for interoperability with key Microsoft products and technologies.

If you're surprised, you're not paying attention

Sam Ramji — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:03:00 GMT

First, let me say thanks to Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell for their decades of hard work and their optimism.

Back in March, Jeremy invited me to talk about Samba and Microsoft, and how we could work together. It turned out that our first opportunity to meet was actually at the annual Samba developers’ conference, SambaXP in Gottingen, Germany in late April. I spent three days there listening to the Samba Team's reports on work they were doing, their observations relating to Microsoft protocols, and at breakfast with Tridge, Jeremy, and other team members we established a potential roadmap for collaboration. Frankly, I think my commitments were viewed with disbelief by some but with cautious optimism by Tridge and Jeremy – as well as by Dan Shearer and by John Terpstra, a man of vision and entrepreneurial spirit.

I worked with legal and engineering teams at Microsoft once I returned from Germany, and over a few weeks in May I got consensus that we could help the Samba Team by delivering on the roadmap. This included donating software licenses (MSDN Premium subscriptions) to the core team, building a test bed and beginning to share testing tools, preserving the UNIX extensions in CIFS to ensure that the work Jeremy and Steve French were doing would continue to be compatible with Microsoft implementations, accepting Samba Team’s observed bugs in Microsoft’s CIFS implementation and vice versa, providing some technical support on CIFS questions, and sending Microsoft engineers to the CIFS Conference @ Google in September 2007.

About the same time, Tom Hanrahan of IBM’s Linux Technology Center and the OSDL joined my team at Microsoft. His experience in working with Linux – and with Tridge – made it clear that we could sustain the work required to support the roadmap. Apart from his three decades of software engineering and management, one of Tom’s greatest assets is his combination of patience and perseverance; we knew it would take time and progress would be slow, but worthwhile. We’re still early in the process of doing joint testing and engineering with the Samba Team, and have many milestones to achieve (for example, shared test suites & frameworks). Thanks to Tom’s work with key engineers and managers in the company, we have already made progress and are committed to the long term.

Based on the dialog we’d established with Tridge and Jeremy, when the European Commission published the terms that would satisfy them in regards to Microsoft protocols, I saw an opportunity to continue aligning our work with the Samba Team. The terms were good, but the Samba team wanted Microsoft to make some changes to fully conform with the existing practices of the Samba developer community. Jeremy and Tridge saw the opportunity as well, and thus began a 6+ week process of improving and correcting the agreement to arrive at terms that both dramatically expanded their access to protocol information and enabled the Team to continue developing Samba as they have in the past. Attorneys and technologists (always an odd combination) on both sides worked hard to refine the language and do so in a clear and cooperative way. The discussions were masterfully led by Microsoft’s GM of Protocol Programs, Craig Shank (ex-Lineo!) and Samba’s Andrew Tridgell.

Today the Samba Team announced that they’re satisfied with the agreement, and are taking a Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) trade secret and copyright license. This will give them access to Microsoft specifications for the protocols in WSPP (such as file, print, and user and group administrative services) and allow the Samba Team to create, use, and distribute implementations. I expect that this will significantly improve the process of Samba development, and produce better quality interoperation between Windows and Linux/UNIX environments.

What this process has shown me is that if we focus on technology, and patient, diligent execution, we can make real progress together.

This is a historic moment, and one that I’m proud of. But it is only a moment, and now it’s time to get back to working on interoperability, one day at a time.

Cheers,

Sam

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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.

Accessibility on Windows and Linux

Sam Ramji — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:05:00 GMT

Back in Windows 95, Microsoft made a major contribution to accessibility to computers for people with vision and hearing impairments: MSAA, or Microsoft Active Accessibility. At that time it was an additional download, but from Windows 98 on this technology was built into the OS.

MSAA allows users to run screen readers, Braille devices, and other accessibility technologies that work across multiple desktop programs without requiring custom adapters for each program. Back in 2000, Rob Sinclair, now our Director of Accessibility, published the architecture for MSAA. It continues to be a core part of the OS in Windows Vista (detailed information here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms788733.aspx )

Why am I talking about this? It’s background for some work we’ve been developing with Novell to improve cross-platform accessibility experiences, which we’ve announced today – work by Rob Sinclair and Norm Hodne at Microsoft and Michael Meeks at Novell, along with our legal teams.

Update: See Michael Meeks' blog on the work here: http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2007-11-09

The User Interface Automation (UIA) specification is an advanced accessibility framework, and we are releasing this to the community, including an irrevocable pledge of patent rights for anyone implementing the specification. Novell will build a Linux implementation of the UIA and an adapter to make it work well with Linux accessibility projects. This will mean an advance in interoperable accessibility.

We’ve already gotten great responses from the National Federation for the Blind in the U.S. and from Janina Sajka, the head of the Open Accessibility Work Group at the Linux Foundation.

It is great to see the industry coming together with specs, words, and code to build a better world for people with disabilities.

Cheers,
Sam

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.

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab – Sneak Peek

Sam Ramji — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:06:00 GMT

Based on the email I received I would say that many Port 25 readers noticed my post last week on job openings in my new lab. Thank you for your positive responses (and especially the resume submissions)! Brad Cutler, my counterpart at Novell, has been overwhelmed with responses as well, so thank you on his behalf.

I’ve called this a sneak peek because there is much work ahead of us, but it’s time to talk in a little more detail about what the lab will be doing. I and my colleagues at Novell and within Microsoft have been putting in long hours for the last several weeks – nights and weekends as well – detailing the plans for our work together. As you may have seen covered in the news this week (“Microsoft and Novell Announce Collaboration for Customers”), we’ve got a solid long-term plan that covers our cooperation in the following areas:

Virtualization: We will rigorously test the functionality and reliability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the next generation of Windows Server virtualization as well as Longhorn Server on Xen. This focuses on paravirtualization and enlightenments. Here’s a great discussion of Xen paravirtualization and a set of presentations on Windows Server enlightenments. Part of the challenge in delivering enterprise-grade heterogeneous virtualization is in ensuring correct behavior and performance across a broad range of hardware – AMD and Intel, single/dual/quad socket, and single through multi-core CPUs.
Directory and Identity: Directory interoperability is the basis of identity interoperability - directories contain the structure and content that provides the raw material for identity. Through our ongoing testing in the lab, Microsoft and Novell will improve directory and identity interop between Active Directory and eDirectory, using open specifications such as WS-Federation and WS-Security.
Management: We’ll test WS-Management for interop between Microsoft System Center and Novell’s WS-Management implementation, which Novell is developing in the open source community under the openwsman project.

Why are these the most important areas for us to work on?

As part of the Interoperability Customer Executive Council, I heard from the heads of IT from Goldman Sachs, UNICEF, American Express, NATO, and 25 more global organizations that server consolidation is essential in allowing them to reduce costs. In order to fully achieve server consolidation, they need to be able to move their existing workloads – both Windows and Linux – to a common set of server hardware. Without interoperable hypervisors, IT shops would be forced to support two separate sets of hardware, software, and personnel in order to consolidate their servers: one set for Windows and another for Linux. We don’t think that’s good enough.

Hypervisor interoperability is critical, but for this scenario it isn’t enough to deliver the full benefits of virtualization for an enterprise. Once the workloads are running on the same server and the same hypervisor, access control and authorization needs to work across the entire environment consistently – otherwise you’re just shifting the interop problem up the stack, only to suffer later. This is where WS-Federation is essential – implementing an open specification to federate identity between existing directory servers enables you to have consistent security policies across your heterogeneous workloads. This is a continuation of work we’ve done with IBM, Apache, Ping Identity and SXIP Identity.

Operations relies on strong management tools to provide availability and reliability across a broad server environment. Ops teams typically have training on specific toolsets to monitor, administrate, and manage their infrastructure. Realistically, moving Windows and Linux workloads onto the same set of servers requires that existing management tools be extended to the new environment. We believe (as do HP, IBM, BMC, CA, and many others) that WS-Management is the solution. Implementing this open specification will enable servers, applications, and services to communicate with management consoles from multiple vendors.

I’ve had a few people approach me about this project who pontificated “If you [Microsoft] would just implement the specifications as they’re written, you wouldn’t have to do all this work!” In fact, this is an incorrect understanding of software engineering and interoperability. Making protocols truly interoperate in every realistic circumstance is one of the great challenges in engineering. In real life, you have to implement the specification correctly – and then the work begins. Were there platform-specific assumptions in the code (as basic as big-endian vs. little-endian format)? Were there parts of the spec that were subject to interpretation? Due to the extensive development and testing embedded in technologies like TCP/IP and HTTP, it’s easy to forget that it took years of work by many parties to deliver what we now take for granted.

This work across virtualization, identity, and management is a pretty awesome undertaking, and I expect that as we continue to progress here we’ll discover new things we need to do in order to deliver interoperable computing. I’m looking forward to reporting on it here, and have submitted a presentation abstract for OSCON ’07 to walk through the Joint Interoperability Lab’s operations in detail. Hopefully I can shed a little light on what makes interoperability so challenging, even in an age of open specifications.

Cheers,

Sam

Now Hiring: Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Labs

Sam Ramji — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:30:00 GMT

Back in November 2006, Microsoft and Novell committed to a long-term technical collaboration between the two companies. The agreement covers several areas - Virtualization, Office OpenXML/ODF interoperability, WS-Management interoperability, and directory federation.

With my colleagues at Novell, I am opening a Joint Interoperability Lab. This lab will be around for the long term, and will focus on interoperable virtualization between the Windows and SLES. This lab will be part of the product engineering teams for both companies.

In order to get the best candidates for this lab, I'm posting the job descriptions here and inviting the Port 25 community to contact me directly if you're interested in one of the positions. With Novell's permission, I am also posting the Novell job descriptions for their openings in the lab.

There are two position types: Program Manager (PM) and Software Design Engineer in Test (SDE/T).

To inquire about the Novell opportunities, please contact Brad Cutler, Director of Engineering at Novell (mailto:brcutler@novell.com)

To inquire about the Microsoft opportunities, please contact me (Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Technology Strategy) at mailto:sramji@microsoft.com.

Microsoft: Software Design Engineer in Test, Linux Interoperability

Do you want to be part of a group that is changing the future of the operating system platform at Microsoft? Due to recent developments in the Server and Tool Business division at Microsoft, we are looking for an experienced Software Development Engineer in Test who can take on the challenging role of qualifying Microsoft’s new Longhorn Server Hypervisor based virtual machine solution in a collaborative project with Novell. This position will require candidates with substantial knowledge of Microsoft’s device driver models; strong experience in developing and testing software written in C, C++ or C#; working knowledge of Linux (preferably SLES); and knowledge of Microsoft’s server class feature and applications.

We are looking for an individual contributor with broad technical experience and a passion for developing skills in new areas. Strong planning and test design are key attributes of a successful candidate. It is essential that candidates have a proven track record of working independently and excellent communication skills. A BS (or equivalent) degree in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering is required. We are looking for individuals who possess a strong drive for results and a passion for understanding and meeting the needs of our customers. Familiarity with Microsoft’s testing standards, processes, and tools would be a benefit. If you want to challenge your technical expertise then this is the right team for you!

Novell: Software Design Engineer in Test, Windows Interoperability

We are looking for an experienced Software Development Engineer in Test who can take on the challenging role of qualifying SLES10 based virtual machine solution in a collaborative project with Microsoft. This position will require candidates with substantial knowledge of Linux device driver models; strong experience in developing and testing software written in C, C++ and various scripting languages; working knowledge of Microsoft server environment ; and knowledge of server class feature and applications on Linux.

We are looking for an individual contributor with broad technical experience and a passion for developing skills in new areas. Strong planning and test design are key attributes of a successful candidate. It is essential that candidates have a proven track record of working independently and excellent communication skills. A BS (or equivalent) degree in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering is required. We are looking for individuals who possess a strong drive for results and a passion for understanding and meeting the needs of our customers. Familiarity with Linux testing standards, processes, and tools would be a benefit. If you want to challenge your technical expertise then this is the right team for you!

Microsoft: Program Manager, Linux Interoperability

Be a part of the Platform Technology Strategy team, drive change and make a difference.

This highly visible senior program management position will have the opportunity to work in one of the core areas of growth for Microsoft. The Platform Technology Strategy group is the engine for technical analysis, including the Linux/Open Source Software labs. Our goal is to provide deep and relevant technical analysis and to deliver strategic guidance and messaging from this research.

The main focus of this position is to drive interoperability between Linux and Windows, including planning and leading the Microsoft/Novell Joint Interoperability Lab. This is a multi-million dollar, multi-year effort that will ensure high performance and availability of both SUSE Linux on Viridian and Longhorn Server on Xen.

Specific responsibilities include:

Lead a small team of SDE/Ts in virtualization product development, including direct engagement with both Microsoft and Novell virtualization engineering teams
Drive influence across development and product planning organizations by analyzing key customer and strategic trends, including direct involvement with Fortune 100 customers
Engage with Open Source communities to drive understanding of the value and technical depth of this work
Key contributor to Microsoft's Interoperability Roadmap
Scale impact of interoperability work across the company, including worldwide field engagement

We are looking for a highly motivated individual with strong business acumen and a strong background in technology. Candidates need strong leadership abilities with proven experience leading technical teams and delivering significant and provable results. Candidates need demonstrated excellent problem resolution and decision making skills and be able to deliver results on multiple projects in a complex, fast-moving environment.

This is a high visibility role that involves strategic and technical communication at all levels. You should have a proven track record in analyzing technologies, and building programs to respond accordingly. In addition, you will have proven excellence in cross group collaborative projects, including the very important ability to drive non-reporting groups to perform and deliver. You should also have a track record of starting, building, and finishing large projects. The ideal candidate will have 5+ years of related industry experience in software development and one or more of the following: strategic consulting, program management, IT management, partner engineering management, and/or server industry marketing.

A technical background is very important to succeed in this role. 25% travel will be required. Some international travel may be involved. A BS/BA degree required; MS degree preferred.