Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : sam ramji, ~FeaturedPost

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.

Releasing the Linux Integration Component Drivers...

Sam Ramji — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:38:00 GMT

Microsoft on Monday contributed the Linux Integration Component drivers to the Linux community for the reasons stated in our release. Microsoft chose the GPLv2 license for the mutual benefit of our customers, partners, the community, and Microsoft.

Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers.

The primary reason we made this determination in this case is because GPLv2 is the preferred license required by the Linux community for their broad acceptance and engagement. For us to participate in the Linux Driver Project, GPLv2 was the best option that allowed us to enjoy the tremendous offer of community support. The community's response even within a few hours of posting the code was welcoming and we appreciate it greatly.

We arrived at the decision to release the drivers to the community under the GPLv2 through this process. Both Greg K-H and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation have reiterated that this is the same process that other companies follow when deciding how to release new device drivers to the Linux community.

We are looking forward to the positive collaboration and acceptance that has marked the vast majority of our interactions with customers and community members regarding this important project.

Cheers,

Sam

Updated 7/25/2009 @ 11:54 AM Pacific: Dave Roberts of Vyatta posted a blog entry rebutting recent cloims that we were accused of a licensing violation with some detail on the technical issues.

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.

struct.new("future", :open, :microsoft)

Sam Ramji — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:49:00 GMT

I delivered the keynote at ApacheCon in New Orleans today, where I talked about some of the new milestones we have chalked up on the journey inside Microsoft towards greater participation and growth with open source communities, and our strategy of "architecting for participation."

This strategy focuses on four significant themes: community; contribution; partnerships; and choice. Microsoft believes that the next ten years of software will be a time of growth and change where both open source and Microsoft communities will grow together.

We also believe that in an increasingly interconnected world, where more people have a greater opportunity to use more technology to do more things than ever before. We support those choices and are expanding interoperability between open source technologies and Microsoft technologies.

So, on the interoperability front, we have been working with the WS02 since our TechEd 2007 Conference, to demonstrate interoperability using our StockTrader reference application. Today, the WS02 announced they would build an open source version of the sample application under "Project Stonehenge," which hs been proposed as a new Apache incubation project.

WS02 will use the project to set up sample applications that demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies, using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.

My team has been working closely with that of Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, whose team is driving much of this interoperability work. You can read more about all this in Jean's blog post.

Microsoft has also decided to move the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor - a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer - to an open source model, on CodePlex, which will host the development of parsers for public protocols and for protocols described in our Open Protocol Specifications for Windows.

An updated parser package has been released and a source tree created on Codeplex. We want Netmon to be the best-of-breed tool for network monitoring at Microsoft, not just for Windows.

Microsoft also recently joined the AMQP Working Group as a participant, with the goal of contributing towards the development of the specification and to enable greater customer choice in the marketplace.

At the request of community members, we have now committed to participate in the Apache Qpid project, a widely adopted open source implementation of the AMQP specification that addresses the customer need for choice and improved messaging interoperability.

Our customers are telling us that they would like to see the Apache Qpid project extended to interoperate with Windows, so the next few months of participation will be focused on understanding the community's effort to build Windows based AMQP software.

Participation will give us the opportunity to learn from other project participants, so that we can be in a position to consider making a valuable contribution. But it is important to note that the Apache Qpid project is just one of many AMQP specification implementations, and we are open to supporting additional projects.

You can read an interesting technical research paper from Ohio State University analyzing the performance of the Qpid implementation of AMQP here.

Microsoft also announced, at PDC 2008, our commitment to include "Oslo" - an upcoming set of technologies for modeling - in the Open Specification Promise. This will ensure that the "Oslo" declarative modeling language, codenamed "M", is interoperable with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols, and security standards.

Two of the core focuses for Oslo are integration and interoperability. As such, it will integrate with next-gen Microsoft technologies, including System Center, Visual Studio and BizTalk Sever. We also plan to work with partners and the industry, so as to make Oslo interoperable with important standards and industry protocols.

One of the key ways we think customers will achieve customization for their platforms is through the use of textual and visual DSLs, which can be written uniquely by the developer for vertical industries and specific domains, or they can use pre-existing DSLs in these same scenarios.

The hope is that we will establish a broad and open ecosystem around "M" that will enable customers to bring the power of model-driven applications and systems to their heterogeneous environments.

Finally, on the Live Search front, the Powerset team recently resumed its participation with HBase, which is elated to infrastructural storage technology enabling large scale data processing.

The HBase project receives significant lift from the active community that supports the project, and Powerset's continued participation on HBase could allow us to accelerate the integration of Powerset's technology into Live Search, resulting in improvements to the end-user experience.

So, stay posted. There's a lot more to come!

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

Open Messaging

Sam Ramji — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:00:00 GMT

We've been working with a range of open source projects in the last few years, and each one has taught us something - both what to do more of, and what to change. One of the things we've learned in listening to very specific customer needs, is that there is an emerging pattern of shared software development that will drive changes in how companies buy vs. build software.

Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP.

The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ. The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.

It's my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has been invited to join the AMQP working group by the six founding members. We have committed to participate in the development of the specification and are keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging.

While message-based transports with security and transactional integrity are a vital infrastructure component throughout financial institutions, the AMQP specification and related implementations may also provide greater interoperability for a number of other vertical scenarios, including insurance and healthcare. AMQP specifies a wire-level protocol (think of a transport like TCP or HTTP) and FIX, FpML, SOAP, and other messages can be sent of AMQP in LAN and WAN environments.

I think it's particularly interesting to see this trend of industry-specific shared software and protocols. In the case of AMQP, the known implementations are open source (using MPL, BSD, GPLv3, and Apache licenses). In a sense the customer/end-user organizations involved in AMQP - competitors in their core business - are choosing to act as a technology keiretsu within a highly competitive industry.

Our work in AMQP will be consistent with the commitment to openness outlined in July. The AMQP Working Group requires a limited royalty-free patent licensing commitment from its members and, as a participant, we have agreed to grant royalty-free patent licenses on specified terms to implementers of the specification.

The AMQP Working Group is also not a formal standards-setting organization like ISO or a standards consortium such as the IETF, OASIS or the W3C, but rather a group of companies and organizations that have come together to develop a specification to improve interoperability for messaging solutions. Microsoft will help, as appropriate, the Working Group to take the AMQP standard specification to another standards-setting organization, should it decide to do so at a later stage.

So, in short, we hope to contribute to the development of the AMQP specification in ways that will promote interoperability for existing and new implementations.

Cheers,

Sam

Sandcastle Redux

Sam Ramji — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT

I am very pleased to announce that the Microsoft SandCastle project team has reconfirmed its strong support for the Ms-PL and is preparing to release all source code for the Sandcastle project immediately. This was a non-trivial effort and I applaud them for it. I think these actions demonstrate Microsoft’s desire to abide by the OSI’s Open Source Definition with regard to source code when releasing open source projects on CodePlex. The project itself is a valuable one, and I received many comments and emails about this.

Some people felt it was draconian to pull the project from CodePlex, others thought that didn’t go far enough; some were upset because they loved the project and couldn’t find it; some thought we were holding ourselves to a higher standard than necessary. I believe that as we continue to build our practices across the company to participate in open source development, we must strive to achieve the highest possible standards.

This has also called our attention to our governance and processes on Open Source. Scott Stein (Director of Open Source Programs) led an exhaustive effort across our code hosting properties, with great support from Jim Newkirk, Jonathan Wanagel, and Sara Ford of the Codeplex team as well as Steven Wilssens of Code Gallery, and found other cases where Microsoft-led projects had been licensed under the Ms-PL but hadn’t shared the source. These have also been unpublished and will go through the same review process. What we’re finding is that the positive intent and excitement underneath sharing source code is something that exists in teams across Microsoft, and that we have a great opportunity to help more teams build their skills in following Open Source best practices.

So congratulations to Anand Raman and the SandCastle team for responding gracefully to the situation and coming through with flying colors!

Cheers,
Sam

Sandcastle Removed from Codeplex

Sam Ramji — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:48:00 GMT

A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code.

This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy. I take it extremely seriously.

I have directed the project to be unpublished from Codeplex immediately, including removal of the project’s use of the Ms-PL. If the team chooses to publish the source code and follow Microsoft policy, then the project may be re-published in the future. If not, we will remove all references to Sandcastle from Codeplex.

I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake.

We are strengthening our controls on Codeplex projects and the governance process that we use for Microsoft-led external projects to ensure that this type of error does not happen again.

Our policy regarding use of the term Open Source is clear: Open Source refers to projects using OSI-approved licenses.

Managing Towards Open

Sam Ramji — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:59:00 GMT

I have the privilege of interacting almost every day with technical and business experts who are creating the future of software—including both core engineering teams at Microsoft and thought leaders across a broad spectrum of open source communities. Especially in the last few months, I’ve been able to take more time to articulate where I think this is going – such as writing how open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and participating in Infoworld’s roundtable on the state of open source.

I think that many people are seeing that the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is being changed fundamentally (and for mutual benefit).

Today, Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson announced that System Center will have the ability to deliver automated management across heterogeneous IT environments, such as UNIX and Linux. What I see as a best practice for commercial and community engagement with open source technology plays a big part in this.

Specifically, Microsoft will deliver an agent infrastructure and management packs (MPs) for monitoring Linux and UNIX platforms for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Early partners like Xandros and Quest are delivering cross-platform MPs for MySQL and Apache, and Oracle, respectively. Microsoft and Novell are collaborating on the SUSE Linux Enterprise MP.

The agent infrastructure Microsoft is building to interoperate with UNIX and Linux is built leveraging industry standards and open source such as WS-Management and OpenPegasus. Pegasus is an open-source implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards coded in C++, designed to be portable, and licensed under an MIT license, and work is underway to integrate with the newly DMTF ratified WS-Management standard. Pegasus already ships as part of major Linux and UNIX distros.

It simply makes great technical and business sense to cooperate with the OpenPegasus community to build upon an industry-standards based, cross-platform technology. Just as important, however, is preserving the virtuous cycle of contribution, benefit, and subsequent contribution: Microsoft is joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee. The agent technology—being built will be contributed back to the community under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), an OSI approved open source license.

I greatly appreciate Allen Brown's positive comments (Allen is the President and CEO for The Open Group) and the support and education we’ve received from the sponsors and maintainers of Pegasus. He said:

“We are pleased to have Microsoft join the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and welcome their commitment as a positive step for the global open source development community. Since The Open Group initiated the OpenPegasus project seven years ago, it has been deployed across a wide range of IT platforms worldwide. We look forward to Microsoft’s active participation in the continuing development of the project.”

Today’s announcement and the business and technical decisions made by the System Center team are a great example of the fact that commercial innovation, industry partnerships, and open source participation can all work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. My enthusiasm and excitement—and my applause for the System Center team, partners like Xandros, Quest, and Novell, and the OpenPegasus community—is tempered solely by my conviction this is not the only or last example of the best of Microsoft, partners, and open source growing together. This is a great day – and there are more great days to come.

Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

Sam Ramji — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out:

Modular architectures
You can find these wherever you see participation at scale – and often a rearchitecture to a more modular system precedes expanded participation. Great examples of this are Firefox, OpenOffice, and X11 – from both the historical rearchitecture and the increased participation that resulted. The Apache HTTP server and APR are good examples that have been modular for as long as I can recall.
Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers – the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux.
Feedback-driven development
The “power user” as product manager is a powerful shift in how to build and tune software – and this class of users includes developers who are not committing code back, but instead submitting CRs and defects – resulting in a product that better fits its end users.
Built-for-purpose systems
Most frequently seen in applications of Linux, the ability to build a system that has just what is needed to fulfill its role and nothing else (think of highly customizable distributions like Gentoo or BusyBox, as well as fully custom deployments).
Sysadmins who write code
The ability of a skilled system administrator to write the “last mile” code means that they can make a technology work in their particular environment efficiently and often provide good feedback to developers. This is so fundamental to Unix and Linux environments that most sysadmins are competent programmers.
Standards-based communication
Whether the standard is something from the IETF or W3C, or simply the implementation code itself, where these are used projects are more successful (think of Asterisk and IAX2) and attract a larger ecosystem of software around them.

So where did we apply these ideas to the development of Windows Server 2008?

Modular architectures was applied in multiple areas, but the one that stands out most to me is Internet Information Server 7 (IIS7). IIS7 has been rearchitected for flexibility as 40 individual modules, enable more to be written by community developers or delivered as out-of-band releases. This has already enabled performance improvements and independent evolution, and I expect to see further enhancements.
Programming language agnostic is something we’ve delivered on with support for PHP on IIS7 and the enhancements to FastCGI (which can be used by any of the P* languages). We set a goal of having PHP certified on Windows Server 2008, and we’ve achieved that. We’ll continue to improve runtime, security, and manageability support for non-.NET languages and the applications that are built on them, as well as testing the full stacks of PHP-based applications running on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server.
Feedback-driven development based on developer and customer trials (RDPs, TAPs, and Betas in our process) led to a range of “feature completion” developments that connected different components – like connecting Windows Firewall with Active Directory central policy, and the end-to-end improvements in SMB 2.0. Features like the RODC (Read-Only Domain Controller) have become more and more solid through experience with early alpha and beta customer deployments, and requests to enforce things like BitLocker encryption of user disks from a central authority have achieved full support.
Built-for-purpose systems such as DNS, DHCP, file and web serving can be created through wizard-driven configuration thanks to Windows Server Core. The goal of having a minimum attack surface and a small hardware footprint, inspired by the capabilities mentioned above, yet achievable by a broad base of admins has been achieved. Additionally, this has created an opportunity for Windows admins to become much more knowledgeable about the low-level structure of the operating system.
Sysadmins who write code are first-class citizens in the PowerShell-driven infrastructure. We’ve increased Windows administrators’ opportunity to master the full surface area of WMI and demonstrate that mastery in reusable, low-level scripts. As we evolve this to support multiple language bindings and bash aliasing, this should become a comfortable home for highly skilled sysadmins.
Standards-based communication such as in CardSpace (with support for X.509, SAML, Kerberos tokens, and more) and the Web Services stack (not only are all 38 Web Services standard under the Open Specification promise, but our implementations have achieved a high level of interop with Apache’s Axis web services stack), and beta support for emerging standards like Xen virtualization represent a small subset of the standards built into Windows Server 2008.

Overall, we’ve learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market.

I’ve focused here on “what Microsoft has learned from Open Source” – and ironically, I’ve agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on “what Open Source can learn from Microsoft”. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we’ll learn from each others’ best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward.

Why I’m excited about Yahoo!

Sam Ramji — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:31:00 GMT

There are no guarantees that a future of Microsoft + Yahoo! will arrive, but the possibilities have me feeling positive. These are just my personal opinions – and who knows what will happen – but a few things described below give me optimism for an increasingly high-performance, multi-platform, PHP-infused and developer-driven future.

Here are a few reasons why I’m excited.

Yahoo! is famous for its culture of openness. Outstanding technologies like Hadoop have been developed and contributed to the community, and the fundamental concepts of open Internet culture at Yahoo! are core to its success. Microsoft has made strides in the last few years in understanding and embracing open source developers, development models, and technologies – I’d say we’ve gone from 1 to 100 and are still going. Yahoo! would speed our progress from 100 to 1,000.

One important reason? Technical leaders like Rasmus Lerdorf, Doug Cutting, and many others….

Those who read Port25 often know that we are at the heart of the shift at Microsoft to embrace PHP on Windows. My team has had the privilege to work with Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski and their engineering team. Just through this collaboration with community developers and our partners at Zend, Microsoft engineers and product teams learned a lot.

We have also learned a great deal from Jim Hugunin (Jython and Iron Python architect) and come a long way in our openness to new languages and community development. John Lam has shown us the light on Ruby. I think we are at a point in time where we could thrill developers with Rasmus’ leadership on PHP. Having the inventor of PHP in the same company with the language runtime performance wizards in the Developer Division under Scott Guthrie, makes my mind boggle.

Similarly, a major focus at Microsoft is understanding the developer – and those of you who have been watching have seen the shift from strictly “let’s show PHP developers that ASP.NET is cool” to “and let’s show PHP developers that we understand that PHP is cool”, a result of learning from day-to-day work with PHP developers. The sheer mass of PHP-focused voices that this combination would bring would make PHP absolutely fundamental to the company. Many of these developers are actively contributing to code beyond the core Yahoo! web platform and are leaders in their own right.

And, finally, we’ve taken a great leap forward in Windows/Linux Interoperability in both virtualization (SuSE Linux on Hyper-V) and protocols (identity, management, file systems, networking), with major customer, partner, and engineering commitments. I have no access to information on Yahoo!’s server farms, but I expect Microsoft + Yahoo would accelerate our capabilities in Windows/ Linux interoperability significantly as well. The modern datacenter is a heterogeneous environment, and I have heard over and over again from customers the value they place on our recognition and technical competency supporting that real-world heterogeneity.

The world is different today than it was 10 years ago, and so are we. Here on the Redmond campus, MacBook Pros aren’t unheard of, and people with knowledge of Linux are in demand. Some of those MacBooks are running Vista, administrators are running PHP and ASP.NET on the same machine, and we’re seeing adoption of open source in and on top of a range of Microsoft technologies. As the world has changed, so has Microsoft, to the benefit of the company and our customers. This would be an exciting next step—here’s hoping!

A Brief History of Open at Microsoft

Sam Ramji — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Four years ago, we started the Linux Lab at Microsoft.
Two years ago, we established the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.
One year ago, we initiated the Linux Interoperability Lab at Microsoft.

Yesterday, we announced the broadest change to the way the Microsoft builds software and works with open source communities and developers.

By now you’ve probably read the announcement – “Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability” and are wondering what it all means, and where it came from. In a nutshell, the documentation for the APIs, document formats, and protocols used in Windows Vista, the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be made publically available. All developers will be able to access the documentation with no need to sign a license or pay any fee.

We are also announcing the launch of the Open Source Interoperability Initiative – a framework that will let us consistently support community development teams who build implementations of these specs with labs, technical support, plugfests, and joint testing and development.

To me, it’s a logical progression from the work and learning we’ve done with the Mozilla Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, the Samba Project, MySQL, and PHP. We’ve learned how to make agreements with community projects – including those which lack a legal entity for formal agreements; how to deliver technical support; who to listen to; and how to prioritize our work. We have seen how positively developers and users respond to these kinds of collaborative efforts. This is reflected by the progression of our approach: the creation of the OSP (Open Specification Promise), the IECC (Interoperability Executive Customer Council), the IVA (Interoperability Vendor Alliance), the submission and approval of the Ms-RL and Ms-PL by the OSI, and the PFIF/Samba agreement and ongoing collaboration.

It’s also a major evolutionary step, and significant commitment for our engineering teams. Ray Ozzie says it best: “Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions. By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

In order to meet these new and higher standards that we’re setting for ourselves, engineers will need to build public documentation of the new formats, protocols, and APIs they develop as they advance our products. For those of us who write (or have written) code, we realize that this is a significant additional phase to the development cycle: design the feature, specify the feature, implement and test it, then proof and test the documentation of the specification, build user documents and sign off on the whole thing.

Because we are a platform company first and foremost, it will be entirely worth the investment both due to the increased transparency to developers, and due to the expanded range of innovation that can be built on Microsoft technologies.

I think this is a great day not just for Microsoft, but for the software industry. And I thank the people who have helped us learn what it’s taken to get here – most notably Jeremy Allison, Matt Asay, Mike Schroepfer, Andi Gutmans, Jim Zemlin, Mike Milinkovich, Zack Urlocker, Marten Mickos, Andrew Tridgell, Miguel de Icaza and Stephen Walli. We will continue to look to their perspectives and advice as we continue down the open road.

Here are a few of the responses we’ve seen – and I’ll quote from the industry publications and blogs:

LWN.net: “The announcement is sweeping enough to make one check the calendar, but we are still a month and a week early for pranks. Microsoft is making available specifications for APIs and communication protocols for Exchange, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, and others without requiring a license or royalty payments. They will indicate what patents they believe cover any of the protocols and "will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates." There may be lurking dangers, but it appears to be a sincere effort at providing interoperability.”

Matt Asay (Alfresco/The Open Road): “As a Microsoft admirer, critic, and competitor, I can't help but applaud the depth and breadth of this move ... All in all, a huge day for Microsoft. Will there be gaps in Microsoft's efforts? Undoubtedly. For one thing, it hasn't really made much progress on its covenant not to sue commercial open-source providers, despite what Ina writes. But I'm impressed that it's even bothering to try.”

Andi Gutmans (PHP/Zend): “I believe Microsoft has finally understood that their closed nature has significantly hindered the growth of their eco-system. In many ways the threat of Linux has by many been interpreted as a threat of open-source (wrongly so in my opinion) …. Microsoft is now enabling the open-source community to grow its contributor base around such technologies and significantly improve the delivered quality. As most open-source developers and users live in heterogeneous environments this will benefit many.”

Jeremy Allison (via The Register): "It's definitely a positive step. Doesn't mean any change for us [Samba] as we already had all these docs, and the promise not to sue is only for 'non-commercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless. But that's the same thing we had really (they're listing the patents etc.). At least everyone now gets access to the same info, which I'm very happy about. As for the rest, the devil is in the details. If they can follow through with this, the world will be a better place.”

Zack Urlocker (MySQL/Open Sources): “… even if it was legislated, it's still good for the industry. And it’s good for Microsoft customers. And ultimately, it's probably good for Microsoft to be more open. If Microsoft wants to attract the next generation of developers and users, they should take the hint: Open works.”

We recognize that the communities’ judgments of the significance of this announcement will be entirely based on the actions that follow. The optimistic undertone that I’ve seen so far suggests that we can make real progress.

We will report back frequently on the progress and details of this work – especially on the Open Source Interoperability Initiative – here on Port 25. This announcement is the starting point of the next phase of Microsoft’s work with open source, and as Port 25 readers know, we are here for the full marathon.

The interoperability principles are posted here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx