Topic: Q&A 2010: Microsoft and Open Source

[subtalk]

Dedicated discussion space for the following questions:

How are Microsoft integrating with open source CMS?
What are Microsoft's long-term goals from collaborating with the open source community?
Does Microsoft view competing open source projects as a threat? If so, how are they planning on combating it?
Do Microsoft employees use open source? Are they discouraged from doing so?

Plans to release VHDs compatible with Linux-based (e.g. Sun's VirtualBox)?
are there any plans for development of a Linux compatible driver for accessing remote MSSQL servers?
How is Microsoft assisting in the development of Moonlight?
How are Microsoft planning to make it simplier to build development projects on Windows compared to Linux programmes?
Why does Microsoft continue to develop Trident when others on the market are better? Why not adopt an open source rendering engine like WebKit?
What progress has there been made of Microsoft's open source mission statement, that was claimed to support the reading and writing of Word and Excel documents?

[TomHanrahan]

Dedicated discussion space for the following questions:

Hi subtalk,

How are Microsoft integrating with open source CMS?

Well, for one, we've been contributing patches to CMSs to enable SQL Server access.  I'll let Pierre respond in more depth, as well.

What are Microsoft's long-term goals from collaborating with the open source community?

Our long-term goal is pretty straightforward.  There are a lot of great, popular open source applications that lots of people, including Microsoft customers, want to use.  We want to give those people the opportunity to run those applications on Windows.  To do this, we need to work with open source communities and developers to help build the tools and processes they need to make Windows yet another build target, just like Linux or MacOS, and we need to do so in ways that integrate well with how they work today.

Does Microsoft view competing open source projects as a threat? If so, how are they planning on combating it?

Microsoft's a big company.  Clearly some product groups compete head-to-head with open source projects.  What are they planning?  Well, to complete  They need to build products that better meet a large group of users needs than the corresponding open source product.  That's their job.  But the Windows platform is also a product and it needs to compete against comparable products in its class, like Linux.  To do so, Windows needs to support the kinds of software people want to run and when that's open source software then the Windows platform needs to run and support that software really well. 

Do Microsoft employees use open source?

Absolutely.  My team, for example, uses Dekiwiki as our internal collaboration tool.  Not only do Microsoft employees use open source, Microsoft product groups use open source in some of its products.  Open Pegasus, for example, is integrated into System Center, and Bing uses both Hadoop and Hbase.  In both cases, Microsoft contributes as members of those communities. 

Are they discouraged from doing so?

Not as policy.  Do some product groups expect their people to use their products? Sure, but there's no prohibition and people at Microsoft do use open source products.

Plans to release VHDs compatible with Linux-based (e.g. Sun's VirtualBox)?

Well, we certainly support Linux VHDs on Hyper-V, but I don't fully understand your question.  Can you give me more context?

are there any plans for development of a Linux compatible driver for accessing remote MSSQL servers?

This was the highest priority request from attendees at the Microsoft-hosted Web Developers Summit in December, so you can be sure the topic is being discussed.  To be perfectly clear, my response is not a declaration of plan or intent.  I just want you to know we've heard the message.

How is Microsoft assisting in the development of Moonlight?

Microsoft and Novell have both technical and marketing contact regularly on the topic of Moonlight.

How are Microsoft planning to make it simplier to build development projects on Windows compared to Linux programmes?

We plan to continue directly supporting the community's work on PHP on Windows, including improving the build process, and we are looking for ways we can generalize what we've learned to support other open source communities.

Why does Microsoft continue to develop Trident when others on the market are better? Why not adopt an open source rendering engine like WebKit?

Not my focus area.  There are others at Microsoft better suited to respond.  I'll see if we can get someone else involved.

What progress has there been made of Microsoft's open source mission statement, that was claimed to support the reading and writing of Word and Excel documents?

Also not my focus area.  I'll see whether there are others who can respond.

[Kris]

Hi Tom, to provide some context, this was my original question with regards to the VHDs:

Internet Explorer VHDs
With regards to developing on platforms other than Windows, it is not always straight forward testing on Internet Explorer 6/7/8. I am aware than Microsoft have released some time-restricted VHDs specifically for running environments for these versions of IE, but unfortunately it would appear that they do not run correctly on operating systems other than Windows. Do Microsoft have any plans to release VHDs that are compatible with something like Suns VirtualBox running under GNU/Linux?

[GarrettSerack]

Why does Microsoft continue to develop Trident when others on the market are better? Why not adopt an open source rendering engine like WebKit?

Well, there are several answers to this one.

First and foremost, we have a large number of customers that depend on our support for this technology, and will continue to support them as we move forward.

Beyond that, I'd like to think that a pluralism of implementations is always a good thing. If there were only one (or even two) implementations of a particular technology, innovation starts to slow down.  By providing additional implementations, customers can choose the technology that fits their needs best.

That being said, we've had developers from the Mozilla team to campus a couple of times to get them access to the engineers in Microsoft that can assist them in improving their software on the Windows platform.

We've also had developers from the Apache Foundation (many projects, including the HTTP server) come out and get assistance from product group engineers on a wide variety of issues.

G

[TomHanrahan]

Hi Tom, to provide some context, this was my original question with regards to the VHDs:

Internet Explorer VHDs
With regards to developing on platforms other than Windows, it is not always straight forward testing on Internet Explorer 6/7/8. I am aware than Microsoft have released some time-restricted VHDs specifically for running environments for these versions of IE, but unfortunately it would appear that they do not run correctly on operating systems other than Windows. Do Microsoft have any plans to release VHDs that are compatible with something like Suns VirtualBox running under GNU/Linux?

Thanks, S..A.. Guys on my team pointed out that I *should* have been smart enough to understand your question.  They're good at pointing that out when they need to   The answer to your question is 'no' we don't have plans to support the VirtualBox (Linux-based) VHD format.

[/quote]

[ChrisPucci]

How are Microsoft integrating with open source CMS?

To expound on what Tom mentioned, we have worked with, created patches for and submitted patches to almost all of the high profile CMS and community portal applications including:

Drupal 6
MediaWiki
phpBB3
Moodle
Gallery 2
Wordpress

Most of these patches are available to use today and are either included in the project core or downloadable from their respective bug tracking/feature request systems.

We've also added SQL server support to popular database abstraction layers such as ADODB, MDB2, PEAR DB, etc. That means that many smaller community portal or content management applications that may be using one of these abstraction layers can update and connect to SQL Server out of the box.