By Jonathan Crow

Continuing coverage from EclipseCon 2008. Today Sam Ramji the Director of Platform Technology Strategy at Microsoft speaks on Open Source and Microsoft. This otta be a hoot. A little different from yesterday’s keynote from the Fake Steve Jobs. A side note, we were pleased to announce at the show our support for BPMN 1.1. For more information you can see the release at http://www.intalio.com/news/intalio-announces-support-for-bpmn-11/.

Sam starts out by displaying his developer cred. stints at BEA, background in Java development. He is promising some surprises for the announcement - SuperNova: Visual Studio is taking over Eclipse and all public licenses will be owned by MS. Why? Because Microsoft loves Java. Ok, good joke now onto the real stuff. 1995 MS was seen as the company that missed the internet. Now that isn’t the case (although I think that is debatable). You may be able to say the MS has missed the Open Sourrce boat, but in 2015 you will not be able to see that. There has been a historical position, and now they realize there is a sustainable resource for OS technology. So, they are fully committed to OS communities. Back in 2001 they built a .Net implementation for Unix. They released the source code for Windows CE. They have partnerships with Sun, MySQL, Zend, SugarCRM, Novell, Aras, XenSource and Spikesource. They have pushed out there Open Source initiatives commercially through IronPython, AJAX controls and extensions, ODF/OXML translators, IronRuby, as well as projects in the medical world in AIDS Vaccine Research Tools, Microsoft Health Design Tools. Two Microsoft licenses have now met the Open Source definition. They are doing internal education to define to their developers the difference between shared license and OS license. Looking at what are the interoperability issues in the OS communities. Real change in MS is that they are figuring out how to really connect ongoing revenue streams to OS initiatives so that they can reinvest and reinvest in those types of projects.

Microsoft traditionally divided the world between commercial and OS. They are now seeing that developers are either community or commercial, but often the community developer is the commercial developer in his day job, and you offend any of those groups at their own risk. Used to be the Visual Studio was only targeted for MS platforms, now they are focusing on interoperability. They make exactly the same amount of revenue from a free application as they do a commercial application - zero. They only get money on the platform. Their growth can only come by building a better platform. Making SQL server low cost, high reliability and transactional throughput. Active Directory is another key component. Lack of single sign on has been a major issue for a lot of companies. These key technologies have fueled the Open Source development of applications or commercial applications developed by Open Source tools.

Open Source

Again the focus is on interoperability. Linux, Mozilla (optimizing Firefox for MS platforms). Last Firefox release the President said he didn’t see the same level of support for Media Player on Vista. Sam went to developers and got them to test and dogfood (the first time I have heard that used as a verb) their own stuff to fix the issue. What they learned is that people are super interested - huge number of downloads for this. Apache - helping to tune directly on top of Windows Server. Brought ten of their engineers to Redmon spent three and a half days exchanging information engineer to engineer. Working with Collabnet (which I talked about yesterday. MySQL integrated directly into Visual Studio. The fact that Steve Ballmer talked about PHP running on Windows marks a fundamental shift in the company. Samba - they have had significant conversations to resolve the five issues Samba had. Gave them the documentation under special license. Worked with them to make sure that the license met their development environment so that they could maintain the way they worked. They took that learning and developed same type of licensing free of IP and trade secrets, and were able to publish thousands and thousands of pages of documentation.

Eclipse and Microsoft

Find the best work people are doing together. Higgin and Cardspace - identity protection on the web, phishing filters, letting users know what level of access sites are asking for and what the user is given. In order for this to work you have to have interoperability. SWT for WPF - Eclipse and MS working together to deliver a Standard Widgit Toolkit for Windows Presentation Foundation

Secret Technology

Steve Northover SWT Platform Lead from IBM (helping with Eclipse port on WPF) is up. There are some differences between Win32 and WPF. Small, fixable but they want to be able to build better native support for WPF. They can do that with the help from MS. WPF port of Eclipse - cool rainbow colors, ohh flashy pretty shiny. Ok, terribly not functional, but the possibilities are there to make some dynamic changes.

Q&A from the crowd

Q: When will MS become a member of the Eclipse foundation?

Hmm no answer

Q: What Eclipse projects are you looking at in future>

A: Possibly Silverlight (interoperable browser), could be interesting. Need to be careful about putting things out before there is consideration (press issues)

Q: About the SWT WPF stuff, does this mean that MS will have Eclipse committers (contributing back to Eclipse)?

A: Typically they don’t have coders that are better at writing the projects for Eclipse, where they can contribute most is to understand the gaps, how does the application work. Example, Samba. They know Samba better than anyone, obviously. So, they can provide Samba with support on how it runs on the platform, but Samba are better suited to build the code.

Q: What is budget of MS Open Source Lab budget and how will it change over the years?

A: Lab alone has $5m budget but tie into all the different product lines. Lab is change agent within the company. Shameless plug: Lab’s resources will increase if you guys in the audience tell MS that the lab is important.

Q: What has driven business buy in?

A: Primarily it is the right thing to do for the company. Clearly we have a lot of lawyers (understatement) that are geared to protecting the company’s interest. So, the OS license issues are getting through the lawyers because they get it that it is better for the business. Over and over again they hear that interoperability is driving better adoption of their software.

Q: Why didn’t MS use an existing license like GNU or EPL rather than writing their own?
A: They needed to send a signal that MS was clearly blessing the approach. Practices in IP have changed over time. It was important that they could release clearly written concise licenses. The licenses are 4 paragraphs. They got questions - is this the summary. No that is the whole license. They wanted to make it so that people really read and undertood the model.

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So, I guess the big question is - does this convince you? Are you sold that Microsoft is being more open and working better with Open Source communities?

For other interesting takes see:

Charles Babcock at InformationWeek wrote this (with a quote from me;).

Tony Baer of OnStrategies wrote this.

March 19th, 2008