Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

The first time I went to a LinuxWorld conference as a Microsoft employee, a guy passing by me saw ''Microsoft'' on my name badge and stopped.  ''Microsoft? What are you guys doing here?'' he said.  ''I loved Microsoft. You put my kids through college.'' As it turns out, he owned a small IT business during the late ‘80s and early 90s, ...

I was recently at Harvard for two events.  The first, which I'll talk about in this blog, was part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard lunch series. Mario Madden and I were invited to speak at a session called ''Microsoft and Open Source: Opportunity or Threat?'' You can watch the whole thing online at the link - and ...

The city of Matsue, Japan is using Ruby to promote regional economic development. One of the unexpected highlights of the recent GOSCON, was a gentleman from Matsue coming up to me after I had given my talk about open source and Microsoft and saying ''I am using IronRuby. I love it.''  It was a nice moment because - even in the best of ...

Last year, we sponsored GOSON 2007, the Government Open Source Conference, and we're sponsoring it again this year. I will also be presenting a keynote address on how Microsoft participates in a world of choice. I'm personally also excited that Brian Behlendorf (one of the co-founders of Apache) will be on a panel-and, like Sam, I have ...

It is just two months since Microsoft finalized the acquisition of Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. Powerset's goals are to ''change the way humans interact with computers through language''- improving search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words.  ...

Now that we’ve had our first “participate” event in conjunction with OSCON here in Portland, I wanted to share a few thoughts. This was a great experience and a great event—or, really, two consecutive events, the morning case study discussion and the afternoon panel. First I’ll talk about the case study and then build on comments from some folks ...

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in participate08. participate08 is a one-day summit held in coordination with the O'Reilly Open Source Conference(OSCON). It is designed to facilitate dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities and help explore opportunities for ...

The same week that Brad Smith (Microsoft’s General Counsel) keynoted at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), we held our first Microsoft-wide Open Source Day (which Jamie and Mario both blogged about). We all noticed folks expressed interest in what was presented and discussed at Open Source Day, so we’re going to try to share what we said ...

“…Our goal here is to evolve and to hopefully provide information that makes it easier for people using OSS and Microsoft software in the real world.” Bill Hilf wrote this in an April 2006 blog entitled “Who Would Have Guessed?” just one week after Port25 launched. Although in hindsight it seems obvious Port25 was a good idea, back then there was ...

My participation in technology was transformed by the Commodore 64.  That's why I--like others here at Port25 and over at Slashdot--still love it after 25 years.  Natales posts: "I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502..." Neither can I.  I was 10, and needed ...