Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Video, Industry Conferences

Team Microsoft Sings "Them Incubator Blues" at ApacheCon

Peter Galli — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:33:00 GMT

As you probably know, Microsoft was both a sponsor and active participant at ApacheCon 2009 in Oakland, California last week.

But what you might not know is that we also showed our lighter, more fun side, when we participated in the Lightning Talks, which were held on Thursday evening, November 5, during a reception with plenty of popcorn, beer and wine.

As my colleague Jas Sandhu noted in his blog about this - and where you can also find the song's lyrics - the talks are a lively, spontaneous ApacheCon tradition with speakers getting about 5 minutes to poke at each other, the projects, technology, community etc ... and have a bit of fun!

The singing and dancing Microsoft team was led by Kent Brown, the Product Manager for Windows Communication Foundation, who was not only the singer, songwriter and guitar player, but also the author of 'Them Incubator Blues,' which is very tongue-in-cheek and loosely based on his experience participating in the Stonehenge Project and working with the community.

He was joined by me, Microsoft's open source community manager; Tanya Young, our chief cat herder at the conference; and Jas Sandhu, a Senior Technical Evangelist. It was great fun and we hope you enjoy it!

Video courtesy of Mladen Turk from Red Hat.

Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

Sam Ramji — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:15:00 GMT

I got to spend an hour with Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) today. We talked about a range of things, from open source calculators (WikiCalc) to the future of Sharepoint as a platform for open source development and the shift in Microsoft's approach to open source. Ross graciously gave us an extra ten minutes to capture part of our conversation on video.

Socialtext was the first commercial wiki company, built initially on the Perl-based Kwiki and Ross has been a leader in the democratization of this collaboration technology for many years. For more on social computing, you can check out Wikipedia. By now, unless you work with a group of card-carrying Luddites, you have probably even browsed a wiki within your company run by your own IT department or wiki enthusiasts. In this case you’ve already entered the current wave of “enterprise social computing” a.k.a. “Enterprise 2.0”. Our internal wiki at the Open Source Software Lab currently runs on Plone.

About five months ago, he open-sourced part of this platform. The Socialtext Open Source Wiki has the details on this project. It currently runs on PostgreSQL and Ubuntu… but since it’s based on Perl I hope that the porting effort to SQL Server and Windows wouldn’t be too much.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint"). This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure. My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis. I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications. We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

Ross is thinking about releasing these modules under open source licenses. I’m hopeful that the MS-PL (BSD-like) or MS-CL (Apache-like) will prove worthwhile to him, and that Codeplex will turn out to be the right repository for the work - but regardless of the license or the community site, I'm excited to see that the Microsoft platform and open source software companies can propel great technology into broad adoption - carrying innovation into remote corners of the enterprise.

For more details on the conversation - and to catch Ross' insights first-hand - check out the video interview.

Cheers,

Sam

Video: Socialpoint - Socialtext on Sharepoint a conversation with Ross Mayfield

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Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages, Ruby and .NET (Part 2)

MichaelF — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 18:38:00 GMT

In part two of two, Sam and Professor Gough continue their conversation focusing on Dynamic Languages and Professor Gough's work with Ruby and .NET.

Part One of this interview, as well as some background on Professor Gough and the LANG.NET symposium can be seen here.

Video: Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages

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Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages, Ruby and .NET (Part 1)

MichaelF — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:30:00 GMT

Last week Microsoft hosted the LANG.NET symposium in Redmond. From the program: "The conference program will focus on the pragmatics and experience of designing languages, implementing compilers, and building language tools that target managed execution platforms such as the .NET CLR and other implementations of the ECMA CLI."

During the conference we had the opportunity to meet with a few attendees and film interviews to share with you on Port 25.

In part one of a two part interview Sam talks with John Gough, Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology, about his background in compilers and virtual machines, Dynamic Languages and how he became involved with the .NET project.

Video: Sam Ramji and Professor John Gough talk Virtual Machines, Dynamic Languages

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Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

MichaelF — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:33:00 GMT

Matt Asay, formerly of Novell, now VP of Business Development at Alfresco and co-founder of OSCON took some time out of his busy conference schedule to sit down with Bill for an interview. Matt, author of the AC/OS Blog (Matt Asay on OS) is a vocal supporter of Open Source Software and has some interesting insights on where commercial Open Source Software is headed.

In this interview Matt and Bill discuss Open Source business models, monetization opportunties for open business apps, and thoughts on the first days of OSCON.

Here is a link to a recent blog post by Matt that further explains some of the concepts he mentions around Open Source business models.

Big Thanks to Matt for taking the time to join us on Port 25!

Video: Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

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Tim O'Reilly sits down with Bill Hilf at OSCON2006

MichaelF — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 03:09:00 GMT

While we were at OSCON this week we were fortunate enough to get some time to sit down with Tim O'Reilly. I dare say Tim, author of the O'Reilly Radar, needs no introduction but just in case: Tim is an Open Source Software advocate as well as the Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. He is also one half of the duo that founded OSCON along with Matt Asay. While this is his first time on Port 25, Tim also joined Bill Gates at Mix 06 for a conversation and Q&A session.

In this interview Bill and Tim discuss the redefinition of "Open Source", Web 2.0, and some other topics that arose in the first two days of the conference.

Stay tuned: Monday we will post another interview from the conference between Bill and Matt Asay wherein they discuss mixed environments and commercial OSS trends. If you haven't already, sign up for our RSS feed and we'll notify you when this interview is published.

Video: Tim O'Reilly sits down at OSCON 2006

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Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

MichaelF — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:01:00 GMT

On day two of OSCON we snuck into the vendor fair during setup time and spent some time with Mindtouch, a Microsoft partner looking at new ways to leverage Wiki's to enhance data sharing and collaboration. Interestingly, at the same time that we met them, Mindtouch was making some announcements (CNET, NYT) regarding their company and their Open Source solution: OpenGarden, built on Mindtouch Dream.

Jamie Cannon makes his first appearance on camera to conduct the interview with Aaron Fulkerson (Co-founder, COO) and Steve Bjorg (Co-founder, President and CTO) from the floor of OSCON wherein they discuss Mindtouch, wiki's and the start-up's recent announcements.

Video: Mindtouch: Open source approach to Collaboration and Wiki's

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