Microsoft: 'Open source is a source of innovation'

Microsoft appreciates open source as a source of innovation, and will expand its involvement with the open source community, Robert Duffner, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, said over coffee Monday morning.

During our discussion, he also opined that open source is not Linux, nor should Linux be the poster child of open source. You may want to sit down before you read on.

All sources of innovation are significant to Microsoft - regardless of the methodology that was used, Duffner said. No less than chief software architect Ray Ozzie appreciates open source and envisioned a broader role for it at Microsoft when he hired Sam Ramji (directory of Microsoft's open source software lab), he noted.

update: Microsoft informs me that Duffner misspoke about Ozzie's role in Ramji's hiring. I am told that Ray Ozzie didn’t actually hire Sam (it was Bill Hilf that hired Sam to run the open source lab, but Sam was actually already at Microsoft before that.)

Indeed, Ozzie has served as an internal proponent. It was Ozzie who insisted that Windows Azure, Microsoft's development platform for the cloud, be open to Eclipse tooling and PHP programmers, Duffner said. But the company is admittedly more pragmatic than altruistic.

Microsoft has a market driven approach Duffner said. Duffner, an IBM alumnus, explained that the company's involvement in open source projects is driven by product groups, and is in that regard no different from IBM. However, he conceded that there has been more altruism out of IBM to date.

IBM's early involvement with the Apache Geronimo project was done out of self interest to help it flesh out its Java EE 5 strategy, he said. "Customers demanded [Java EE 5]," and IBM needed another year to complete an update to WebSphere, he claimed. Similarly, customers in the financial industry prompted Microsoft join the AMQP project, he said.

When asked what projects Microsoft is contributing to, he rattled off a list including Apache HBase, Apache, Apache Qpid, AMQP, and PHP. However, Microsoft has not yet contributed code to AMQP, and Microsoft's involvement in HBase happened through an acquisition. Regardless, the fact that its work with HBase has persisted is a, "big deal," he said. Microsoft also funds the Apache Foundation.

Microsoft's PHP work has a lot to do with SQL Server. The company is working to create a database abstraction layer for PHP so that developers will not be beholden to Sun's MySQL, he said. Not surprisingly, Duffner noted that Microsoft is intent on tying PHP to SQL Server to offer developers, "more choices for development and deployment."

The open source technology center team at Microsoft has around 15 dedicated employees, not including contractors or product teams that engage in interoperability work. The team holds internal events to promote the use of open source at Microsoft, and is acting as, "change agents within Microsoft," according to Duffner.

While it is not working with every group at Microsoft yet, the team does work closely with Microsoft Research and the CodePlex open source project hosting team, he said. In our discussion, he expressed a strong desire to collaborate with the SharePoint product team. The takeaway was that the scope of open source is not limited to operating systems.

As a matter of fact, the company would very badly like to shake the perception that open source is commercial Linux versus Windows. "[Linux] never had head to head competition against Windows anyway," he said. "It's UNIX VS Linux and Windows." However, he acknowledged that Linux will become more of a competitor if UNIX market share continue to slip.

While I do share his belief that there is much more to open source than Linux, accepting that Microsoft is not concerned about Linux requires the willful suspension of disbelief. One of the open source team's most recent releases is the new Web installer for Microsoft's Web services stack - Microsoft's answer to the LAMP stack.

In case you were wondering, the 'L' in LAMP stands for Linux. And Microsoft recognizes why LAMP is attractive to Web developers. LAMP has an attractive, pluggable architecture, Duffner said.

Inefficiency of Efficiency

I am unable to work without two computers. I mean, I can get stuff done, and I can complete my daily tasks one a single laptop, and often have. But if I really want to crank out work and research, I need two. Maybe three. One machine for writing and email, one for Web browsing and research, and still a third for a constant stream of AIM, IRC, forums and music.
Sure, all of these could be done on the same machine, but it's just easier to look over at the screen next to me and immediately see if anyone has responded to my questions in IRC, or to see how a name is spelled on a company Website.
Switching between programs is always a pain, and on space-constrained laptops, it's not an option to spread things out to a viewable distance.
And yet, with all these computers on my desk, there is still one major problem I have yet to solve reliably: passing around URLs and quotes. Right now, I use AIM for this. I past the URL into one of my AIM screennames on the desktop machine, and message the info to another screenname on the laptop. That simple URL then travels thousands of miles to Virginia, where it is parsed and directed by AOL's servers, and sent back here to Oakland.
These computers are so close, they could touch. And yet, here I am, using the Internet as a router for my simple textual information. If I wasn't using one of each type of operating system (Mac, Windows, Ubuntu) there might be an easier solution. But until there is a cross-platform messaging standard that doesn't require a central hosted service, I will continue to use millions of dollars worth of infrastructure to accomplish tasks I could just as easily apply a sticky note and a pen to.

The proof is in the pudding

Two years have passed since Microsoft and Novell struck their technical collaboration agreement, and Novell received a windfall of US$348 million in cold hard cash. As my father used to say, "The proof is in the pudding."

Here's the proof: the companies are nearly ready to deliver some software. In the first half of next year, Microsoft will release a management pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise that integrates with its System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 software. Likewise, Novell is completing a beta of Mono Moonlight, a variation of Microsoft's Silverlight run time that works with Linux.

Microsoft demonstrated a technical preview of the management pack at the TechEd EMEA conference earlier this month, my former colleague and Microsoft’s senior open source community manager Peter Galli, wrote in a post on the company's Port 25 blog. It manages Linux and Windows servers from a single console.

Further, Microsoft has been very collaborative with the Mono team. Its engineers are in regular communication with Novell, and has provided test cases to assist with Moonlight's development, Mono project head Miguel de Icaza told me in a recent interview. Significant work has happened.

A handful of other Linux vendors have struck similar interoperability agreements with Microsoft, and there is no doubt more to come. Interoperability is good for customers regardless of what motivates Microsoft, whether it be its enterprise customers' demands for interoperability or the European Commission. Even a cynic would have to acknowledge that the company has thus far stayed true to its interoperability principles.