Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Tom Hanrahan

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.

Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

hanrahat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.

You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.

One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.

The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.

Open Source Highlights at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference

hanrahat — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:32:00 GMT

At last week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, product previews and announcements, particularly of Windows Azure, Windows 7 and Visual Studio Team System 2010, generated a lot of buzz. Throughout the week, an important undercurrent to that story was Microsoft's engagement with the open source community and its support for open source developers.

Certainly one of the open source highlights for the week was Miguel de Icaza's presentation, "Mono and .Net." In spite of arriving on time for the session, I wound up viewing it from the second overflow room. Miguel talked about innovations on which the Mono community has focused recently, including their embedded C# compiler. His game demos of the technology were fun and amazing to watch. You can see them for yourself here.

Members of my team spent the month leading up to the conference developing three demonstrations of Windows Azure's ability to support open source developers and open source applications. We ran all three at the Open Source pedestal in the Microsoft booth and each was highlighted in a session during the conference.

One of the demos shows how developers can use Eclipse to create applications and deploy them as Azure services. It relies on an Eclipse community plug-in "Emonics" for displaying C# syntax and a "proof-of-concept" Azure plug-in we created for building and deploying the application. This demo was highlighted in Steve Marx's presentation, "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service," which you can find here.

The second demo shows how an open source application can access services from Azure. In this one, we chose the popular PHP application Gallery and show how it can store, retrieve and modify photos as binary large objects (BLOBs) in the cloud. To produce this demo we wrote two small modules, one to create wrappers that represent the BLOB REST API as PHP objects and another to create an Azure subclass with inheritance from the Windows NT Platform class.

We created the third demo to illustrate how an open source developer can use OpenID to authenticate users from an Azure service. For this one, we modified a demo blog service (based on BlogEngine.net) and gave users the option of authenticating through either OpenID or Live ID.

Both the Gallery and OpenID demos were highlighted in Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow's presentation, "Cloud Computing: Programming in the Cloud." You can find Daniel and Stefan's presentation here.

The excitement that PDC produced was remarkable. I moved through a steady stream of developers for four days, all of us sustained it seems by tables of fruit, powerbars and various forms of chocolate. I enjoyed meeting and talking with many of the attendees and as always appreciate how much I learn in those conversations.

I want to thank Steve Marx, Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow for sharing the stage with us. Kudos to Hank Janssen, Anandeep Pannu, Garrett Serack and Joel Penner for creating the Azure demonstrations we used throughout the week. And a tip of my hat to Miguel for making the week so fun.

Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab Announcement

hanrahat — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:19:00 GMT

We’ve announced this week the opening of the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With this announcement we can now talk about the work that’s been underway at the lab since the beginning of summer.

The lab itself is well equipped. It consists of 2500 square feet and contains over 80 servers. The servers are x86-based, dual-core and quad-core systems with hardware virtualization technology enabled and our storage area network has terabytes of capacity. Here’s a look at the lab layout.

For now, we’re focused on testing three areas of interoperability. The first is virtualization, where we’re intent on validating the interoperability of SLES running on Windows Server virtualization and Windows Server 2008 running on Xen. This is a development lab, so we’re running current bits from the development organizations at both Microsoft and Novell. We’re part of the integrated development teams at both companies and are actively involved in the testing process for pre-released software.

Our second area of focus is web-services management. We are currently working with the development teams at both Microsoft and Novell to identify the test cases we want to use to validate client-server implementations of the web-services management protocol from both companies. Our third area of interest is identity federation where our planning for the lab is just now getting underway.

Those of us who work at the lab have strived over the past few months to create an environment that is not strictly Microsoft and not strictly Novell. We’ve successfully created a unique entity, a development lab, at which there resides a single team of engineers whose individuals are involved in and supportive of each others’ work. We’ve pushed both companies to share resources and pushed their boundaries of openness. I’m excited to be part of this team. I look forward to working with my colleagues at the lab and to identify more areas of common interest for us to pursue.

Observations from OSCON and Linux World Expo

hanrahat — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:02:00 GMT

I’ve been a regular attendee of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland and Linux World Expo – San Francisco for several years, but this is the first time I represented Microsoft at them. Between the two conferences, I met a lot of people with whom I’ve worked for many years. I appreciate the encouraging words I received from many of them and I respect the concerns others expressed regarding my decision to join Microsoft.   A lot of our conversations were about what I thought I could accomplish by making the change.

One observation I’ve made while working with companies involved in open source is that every one of them wrestles with the balance of working within the community for the better good and reserving value for their own need to compete successfully for business.   There are few, if any, companies that are purely open-source directed. There are also few that are purely proprietary. Microsoft is in the spectrum of balance between proprietary and open source just like everyone else.

Clearly Microsoft’s balance tends toward the proprietary, but we demonstrated at both conferences that we take participation as a member of the open source community seriously and announced several significant actions. One of these announcements was that Microsoft is submitting both its permissive (MSPL) and community (MSCL) licenses to OSI for certification. Another was John Lam’s announcement of release of Iron Ruby and Iron Python as open source projects and that these are both open to community contributions.   Both of these efforts reflect serious attempts by Microsoft to participate in the development of truly open source software.

What’s also interesting is that the role of individual developers is changing, too. In his presentation at OSCON, “Current State of the Linux Kernel,” Greg Kroah-Hartman made the point that the largest group of contributors to the kernel is composed of “Unknown Individuals” who have no affiliation to a company with respect to their contributions.   Roughly 18% of contributions come from this group, and 13% come from another group called “Amateurs.” But, a member of the audience pointed out that this means the work of nearly 70% of contributors is being sponsored by industry. Of those 70% few are employed to be purely open-source contributors; most have responsibilities to their individual companies to ensure that some value is retained for their own business purposes.

We’re all finding our balance, companies and individuals alike, and that balance is rarely stationary. It frequently changes as we assess our roles in the software development industry. One of the things I want to accomplish is to find ways that Microsoft can adopt open source methodologies and can contribute to the greater good. Two areas I will concentrate on for now are interoperability, through the work we’re beginning with Novell in the areas of virtualization and web services management, and engagement with the SAMBA community to help ensure the quality of interaction between SAMBA and Microsoft products. I hope to attend the CIFS Workshop at Google next month to see where Microsoft can work with the SAMBA community beyond our current level of sharing bug and test data.

One of the first activities I engaged in when I joined Microsoft was to help draft the mission of Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab. Here in a nutshell is what I hope to accomplish at Microsoft.

Produce mutual respect and understanding between Microsoft and the Open Source community such that both act responsibly together for the sake of better software and human potential & inclusion.

I invite those of you I have worked with over the years and all of you I spoke with at OSCON and LWE to make this our common goal and to join me in the effort.

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.