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

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.

Chatting to Students at Michigan State University

Peter Galli — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:08:00 GMT

As Microsoft continues to engage in active dialogues with a variety of communities, including academic institutions, Sam Ramji - Microsoft's Senior Director of Platform Strategy - talked to a group of Computer Science students at Michigan State University (MSU) on Friday May 1.

Given that Friday was the last day of school for students, the good attendance at the talk underscores the level of interest in hearing about Microsoft's Open Source strategy.

Ramji was invited to give an address as part of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Spring Colloquium Series, where he talked about the evolution of Microsoft's Open Source strategy and what an increasingly diversified technology landscape means for future software engineers.

Ramji told the students and academics that the company firmly believes that Microsoft, Open Source companies and developers, computer science students and others, all play an important role in the overall future of information technology.

He also talked about how Microsoft sees heterogeneity as a reality for the business world, and building technology and partnerships to embrace this reality is a part of a companywide commitment to greater openness and transparency.

Ramji also spotlighted some innovative Open Source projects the company is supporting at universities across the world, including PlugBlog, which is focused on Windows Live Writer and is being developed by students from Croatia.

The primary goal of the project is to help developers and companies that run blogging services integrate with Live Writer by providing them documentation, samples, screencasts and Visual Studio templates. The project is also focusing on developing a set of Live Writer plug-ins as well as documentation to enable developers to build plug-ins more easily.

He also talked about the KDE Education Apps, an Open Source project from undergraduate students from computer science, computer information systems and design courses at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil.

This project takes a small initial group of education applications and ports them to run on the Windows version of KDE.

The third project he talked about was OpenMP to MPI, a development framework for writing distributed memory applications, and works very well for developing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications for Windows HPC Server 2008.

Typically, though, developers have had to choose between writing for a single system SMP environment, which is what OpenMP was designed for, or writing for a distributed computing cluster environment , where MPI is the standard.

This project, which is taking place in India, translates OpenMP code to be deployable using MPI, so that application developers can develop using OpenMP but deploy in a cluster environment if they choose to.

Ramji also stressed how Microsoft works in partnership with the worldwide academic community and is committed to utilizing the power of Microsoft software and technologies to help inspire, encourage innovation and expand opportunities for students and educators in a heterogeneous technology world.

He also mentioned the Open Source Technology Center, Microsoft's open source technology research and development organization, which supports and promotes the creation of regional programs, such as the Interoperability Labs in the Philippines, Germany and Brazil.

But, while students were interested in hearing more about how to establish a Microsoft-sponsored Open Source project at MSU, what was clear from their questions was their concern about finding employment in the current tough economic environment.

During, and after his talk, Ramji talked to worried Computer Science students about what Microsoft looks for when recruiting new staff, how to craft a compelling resume, and what the benefits are for working at the company.

The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit

Peter Galli — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

A lot has been written by the press and blogosphere since the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit was held earlier this month, particularly about the panel that included Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Sun Microsystems' Ian Murdock, and Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.

The panel was entitled "Why Can't We All Just Get Along," which struck me as not only divisive, but also a little outdated given the level of collaboration that already takes place between proprietary and open source software vendors alike.

For example, Microsoft and Sun already have a long-standing working collaborative relationship; Microsoft also has a technical collaboration agreement with Novell, an agreement with Red Hat to test and validate our respective server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors, and a number of arrangements in place with other open source companies.

The panel discussed this in greater depth, looking at how collaboration, cooperation and competition exist: not just between proprietary and open software vendors, but also between Linux and open source ones.

This prompted panel moderator Zemlin to suggest that the three make an even greater effort come together and collaborate where it makes sense.

Interestingly, the Summit also spurred renewed discussion about whether there need to be more critics in the Linux community, with one blogger taking Zemlin to task for what he described as the "tall claims" he made at the Summit.

Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also used the panel to remind the Linux and open source communities of his offer for them to reach out to him and others within Microsoft and share their frustrations, problems and issues, so that they could be better educators and advocates on this front across the company.

Ramji also, again, stressed that Microsoft's customers want interoperability with open source software, including for PHP on Windows, but that making this happen sometimes took time.

Sun's Murdock seconded this, talking about internal inertia and how Sun also had had to deal with hearing from customers and developers that they wanted interoperability with technologies other than their own.

At Microsoft, there are cross-group, company-wide open source discussions and initiatives underway, with each group given the autonomy to decide for itself how this plays out with regard to their product set and business model.

While Port 25's mission is to be the voice of the open source community at Microsoft, it is far from the only voice on this topic. There have been blogs across the company on open and interoperability initiatives, from groups including security, Live and the Mac Business Unit, to name just a few.

It is also important to remember that Ramji and other executives like Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server & Tools business, have often said that open source is a journey that Microsoft is on and that much more needs to still be done. Many groups across the company are already responding to that call.