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

Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft

billhilf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:47:00 GMT

It's been a while since I made an appearance on Port25. I felt it was important to provide some thoughts to the Port25 community on Sam Ramji's impending departure from Microsoft.

After many years helping to carry the open source software banner for the company, Sam is leaving Microsoft at the end of this month. You may have also heard that he has accepted the position of interim President of the CodePlex Foundation as well as a leadership position at a startup in California. (I'll let Sam and his new company share more details there.)

Sam joined my team three years ago to drive open source technical strategy. I have eagerly supported him as he passionately articulated a vision that Microsoft could coexist - and even thrive - in a heterogeneous IT world.

The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft's open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab' on campus - now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source - development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities - and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.

And, because we recognize the importance of having that strong internal advocate for open source, we are actively seeking someone to fill Sam's shoes at Microsoft.

We will not waver in our commitment to open source.

To my friend Sam: Best of luck to you and your family as you move on to your next great adventure, and THANK YOU for all of your efforts and passion.

Opening Day: Azure Platform Debuts

Sam Ramji — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today at PDC in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie unveiled the Azure Services Platform, which will enable developers to build the next generation of applications - spanning all the way from the cloud to the enterprise data center. My team's focus has been on making sure that this platform treats open source development technologies as first-class citizens.

A key components of the Azure Services Platform is Windows Azure, an infrastructure that provides core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage, and automated service management. Developers will be able to build or extend parts or complete service-based applications using Live Services, .Net Services and SQL Services.

They will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.

The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure.

This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits.

We are also funding these open source projects, under the BSD licensing model, in collaboration with Thoughtworks Inc. and Schakra Inc., and they will be run on open source portals RubyForge and SourceForge.

Much of this interoperability work was undertaken by Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy, and his team, including Vijay Rajagopalan, the Principal Architect for Interoperability Strategy, so a big thanks is due to them on this front.

In addition, as part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and working with open source communities, I asked the Open Source Technology Center (led by Tom Hanrahan) to come up with some specific examples that show how open source communities can access Windows Azure.

This work has allowed us to deliver several ‘proofs of concept' which show open source developers that they can create applications that run as services and have access to services in the cloud. These ‘proofs of concept' demonstrate that:

A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage
A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.

Specific to Gallery, we've done two simple things: we created wrappers to convert the Windows Azure API to PHP objects, and we created a Windows Azure subclass inherited from the Windows NT Platform class. The net of all this is that, with a small amount of code, we were able to connect one of the top PHP application to Windows Azure, specifically, photo images stored as BLOBs in the cloud.

Finally, Microsoft is also going to publish the "M" language specification, including MSchema, MGrammar and MGraph, under the Open Specification Promise. This will facilitate the interoperability of the "Oslo" declarative modeling language, codenamed "M," with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols and security standards.

Stay tuned, because there's more to come.

Cheers,

Sam

An interview with Codeplex's Sara Ford

Sam Ramji — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:20:00 GMT

It has been a month or so since the Codeplex announcement of server support for SVNBridge, which enables TortoiseSVN to talk to Team Foundation Server, and the team is looking for feedback now this has been out for a while. I also recently interviewed Codeplex's Sara Ford on this, and wanted to share her responses with you.

Sam Ramji: So, Sara - this has been a top request for some time. What are the most interesting comments you've received requesting this feature?

Sara Ford: There have been countless requests and comments for this feature, but one of the more memorable ones when we first announced the SVNBridge project last year is "It's so crazy it just might work," was one.

Many of our users view CodePlex, when compared to other open source hosting sites, as Team Foundation Server (TFS) versus Subversion (SVN). Now, our users can use either TFS or SVN clients against any of our projects. It's like soccer fans and American football fans are unexpectedly findings themselves in the same arena, conversing for the first time.

Sam Ramji: What made it hard to deliver this feature?

Sara Ford: When we first started investigating this, we were skeptical that it could be done, since TortoiseSVN and Team Explorer are so different. But once we began comparing the protocols used for Subversion and Team Foundation Server, we were surprised by how much of it could easily be translated. So a lot of things started working quickly, but there were a couple of areas that didn't map directly, and those represented the bulk of the effort to get all the kinks worked out.

Sam Ramji: What can Subversion fans expect next from Codeplex?

Sara Ford: Well, as always, we look at the features users have voted the highest on the CodePlex Issue Tracker. Now that we're closing our number one most requested feature, we're asking our Subversion fans to visit our Issue Tracker and start voting for what they want to see next!

Sam Ramji: It's interesting that now we have Subversion support in Visual Studio through the AnkhSVN project, and SvnBridge support from Codeplex on the server side. You can probably do round trips via SVN from Visual Studio to Codeplex. Interesting? Or just plain strange?

Sara Ford: VisualSVN and AnkhSVN are both popular plug-ins for Visual Studio that provide integrated IDE support for Subversion, and several users have mentioned they've tried them against CodePlex and they work great! We really like the idea of providing the broadest support for different clients and tools, so users can pick the tools they prefer.

Tom Hanrahan: Director of Linux Interoperability

Sam Ramji — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:34:00 GMT

Most of Port 25’s readers are aware of my commitment to interoperability between Microsoft and Linux, as exemplified in the OSSL’s work on IPsec and now the three-sided virtualization, identity, and systems management work with Novell.

I’m proud to announce a leader at Microsoft who has the sole purpose of bringing Windows and Linux technologies together: Tom Hanrahan.

Tom will join as the Director of Linux Interoperability, and will head our Linux/Windows interoperability work, including leadership of the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab. This development lab will undertake much of the engineering work involved in the multi-year technical partnership. Among other things, Tom has much to teach us on “developing in the open” – how to work in a transparent way with a broad engineering community.
Tom brings 30 years of engineering, management and community development experience to this effort – and the larger Microsoft community. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tom was the Director of Engineering at the Linux Foundation where he was responsible for managing a variety of technical initiatives. Earlier in his career, Tom led IBM’s Linux Technology Center in Portland, and spent 11 years at Sequent Computer Systems in the early days of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing).

It is excellent to have Tom on board, and he is already making an impact. His outstanding history of Linux engineering will greatly contribute to our focus on interoperability. You can also expect to see some of Tom’s work (and thoughts) show up on Port 25.

Please join me in welcoming Tom Hanrahan.

Freedom of Port 25 Content

MichaelF — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:49:00 GMT

We've spent several weeks going through the process of freeing the content on Port 25 so that it can be freely reused. I feel that this is very important in order for this site to be truly useful to the community.

The changes we've made (which are detailed here) are basically this:

o All code posted on Port 25 (from a legal perspective, compilation and setup instructions are considered code) can be freely reused, excerpted, modified, commercialized, or just about anything else, unless otherwise noted and we’re trying hard not to make exceptions. The specific license for this is the MS-PL, or Microsoft Permissive License, located here. It's a BSD-like license that encourages broad use, granting worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free copyright and patent rights.

o The articles (including video interviews and podcasts) can be copied and hosted elsewhere, printed, etc., as long as they are reproduced in whole - similiar to the Creative Commons by-nc-nd license (Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives).

We decided not to standardize all Port 25 content under a standard Creative Commons license because it would make it harder to get material up to the site - for example, interviews with and articles by third parties would have to go through a whole new level of process to get their authorization to move the content to Creative Commons. Frankly, my day job running the lab takes enough time and energy as it is without taking on additional licensing negotiations for our content.

We'll be considering licensing articles & interviews under Creative Commons licenses which would allow remixing, etc. on a case-by-case basis.

I think this is a big deal. It took us quite a while because no Microsoft site has ever done this (like other things on Port 25, such as interviewing Miguel de Icaza - thanks for your time and candor, Miguel!). But it's done, I'm happy with it, and I believe that you'll find this to be a great change.

Cheers,

Sam

Release Often

jcannon — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 22:15:00 GMT

We’ve rolled out additional updates to the site this past Friday in response to feedback, and created a new section of the site: Forums.

You’ll also notice:

Threaded comments update – replies are now visible in flat view
Count of comments visible on the feature listing page
Trackbacks (at last!)
Changed the home page font to improve readability
New “Mission and Contributors” page with Port 25’s mission and short bios of the lab crew

We are behind on providing transcripts for all of the interviews, but this work is still under way. It’s important to us both for accessibility and to make it easier for non-English speakers (enabling machine translation). We got a suggestion to try using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for transcription but we haven’t tried that yet ;)

Finally, I hope that the podcasts are useful. I enjoyed learning about Martin Woodward’s work on an open source, cross-platform (Eclipse-based) integration to Team Foundation Server.

Hope you have a great week,
Sam

Through A Glass Darkly

admin — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 19:18:00 GMT

We are launching the MPEG-4 versions of our interviews today (now linked on the interview pages themselves), and future interviews will be posted in MPEG-4 and WMV simultaneously. This was overwhelmingly the top request for formats from the community. MPEG-4 files are fairly large (our typical interview of 30 minutes is about 70 MB) and will need to be downloaded to view.

I’m interested in getting your feedback on the formats. No doubt you will have feedback on the interviews as well – but those responses are best posted back to their respective posts.

We’ve considered other approaches - for example, we’ve explored posting these as Flash, which is x-platform and streaming by default – but wanted to focus on doing what the Port 25 community has specifically asked for.

Hopefully this solution will work well. If not – what do you think would be better?

Cheers,
Sam

Community Registration

admin — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:30:00 GMT

When we launched Port 25 we felt that it was important to leave the comments area open – to invite participation. Our goal is to encourage thoughtful, open exchange of concerns and ideas. Many of the comments we’ve received have included requests to require registration on the site in order to raise the quality of the discussions.

We are rolling out the first version of our registration feature today – please let us know if you have issues with it or you think it needs to be changed in some way.

Thank you for the time and energy you are spending on this conversation with us. Please keep the feedback coming – both about the lab and how we can keep evolving the site to meet the needs of the community.

Sam

We are receiving…

admin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:58:00 GMT

Thank you for bringing your honest thoughts to the site in the last two days. No productive conversation can exist without candor - and you all have been candid. We've gotten around 800+ comments, nearly half of which have been angry, congratulatory, suspicious, engaging, or surprised. (The other half were from spam bots, in case you were wondering.)

Some of the comments were the beginning of longer discussions, and we'll carry those on over the coming weeks. Others gave us a great to-do list which we're working on over the next couple of days.

So, the mea culpas:

Videos: Believe it or not, we hadn't considered the WMV issue. We've already translated those files to AVIs and will use that format for future videos. The AVIs will be up on the site next week.
Readability issues: We're going to darken and enlarge the text on the site.
Phishing filter: We've dealt with a few errors that caused phishing alerts in some browsers - please let us know if you see otherwise.
Safari: We are going to fix the "missing submit button" as soon as possible

Due to requests from the community, we're going to implement a registration system (NOT Passport!) that will let us deal with spamming more effectively.

I wasn't surprised to see some paranoia in some responses - before joining Microsoft in 2004 I was often convinced of various conspiracy theories involving Redmond - and I am going to address this up front.

One poster suggested that the quality of comments overall was significantly lower than the dialog on other sites:

Friday, April 07, 2006 2:50 PM by David Cherryholmes
It looks suspicious to me that so many of the posts attacking MS and supporting FOSS has been poorly written and rabid. I contrast that with the degree of literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments that I read on other pro-FOSS sites and, well, it just makes me wonder.... could there be some moderating going on here in an effort to deliberately mis-portray the community? Of course the question is beyond proof, a point anyone still inclined to give MS the BOD will rapidly point out. But still, the character of the posts are at odds with many, many other data points out there to be garnered.

We actually believe that many of these comments are from linux.org.ru, and not community members. We're going to deliver a "modded comments" area in the near term where you can dig in to see what comments we've modded down. We are NOT modding down intelligent discussion - it is "literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments" that we hope to see here.

Longer term, I want to establish community moderators. It will take us a bit to implement this, but if you are interested in being a mod, please let me know.

So again, I thank you for being part of our community at our launch. Have a great weekend.

Sam