Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

As I stated in my last blog,  I am attending the premier Indian Open Source conference, FOSS.IN, in Bangalore.   This conference had some very technical talks (which I will also blog about) but, like any other Open source conference, it was the people who were the most interesting. There seems to be a large PHP contingent ...

I am writing this during lunch at FOSS.IN, the most prominent Open Source conference for developers and FOSS advocates in India.  FOSS.IN is in Bangalore, which is where I graduated high school.  That was a long time ago - and Bangalore has been transformed from the ''garden city'' to the software capital of India.  Lots more ...

Whenever people get to know that I work in the Open Source Lab at Microsoft, there are a few knee jerk questions they always have. The most common one is: ''Microsoft has an Open Source Lab?'', while another question often asked is: ''So when is Microsoft actually going to be part of an Open Source project and actually participate?''  This ...

I have always been fascinated by clusters.  Some people envision working with desktops or workstations when they think of “working with computers”.  For me working with computers was always with a large collection of computers in a back room somewhere.  And how cool if you could make all those computers collaborate with each other ...

My overall impression was that OSCON was lower key than last year.  There seemed to be fewer booths in the Exhibition floor and less palpable excitement in the venue.  A lot of people were complaining about the quality of the tutorials and the talks.  Or it may just be that this was my second time around attending OSCON and it ...

Michael Koziarski (a.k.a) Koz is one of the core group of about 12 people who holds the keys to the code repository for the Rails framework (also known as Ruby on Rails).  They’re all listed on the Rails core page with name and mug-shot. (I checked, a guy who looks like the Michael I interviewed has his mug shot on the page!). According to ...

Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn.  He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology. Samir and I share  more than ...

I just got back from Cambridge (in the United Kingdom,  not the one by the Charles river) from the Microsoft Research / Technische Universitat Darmstadt  “Reliability Analysis of System Failure Data” conference.  Microsoft Research has a very nice lab near Cambridge University.  This was my first visit to ...

I am writing this from the Big Apple.  The Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit is in New York and running from February 13th through February 15th.  I questioned the wisdom of holding a conference in February on the East coast rather than the milder shores of the West Coast - since I arrived the middle of a snowstorm after  a day's ...

I am an avid reader of Joel On Software – I find his insights great and very revealing. I was reading a recent blog post by Joel entitled “The Big Picture”  in which he has this to say about open source “Open source doesn’t quite work like that. It’s really good at implementing copycat features, because ...