Microsoft has been somewhat under the radar the last few years. Vista took a long time to ship and frankly companies like Apple and Google in the consumer space and Salesforce.com and Oracle in the enterprise space have garnered more attention. While people have been looking the other way there has been a steady stream of accomplished industry veterans, including several from BEA and IBM, making there way to what use to be an unlikely location: Microsoft. One very positive result of this new blood was the announcement at OSCON last week that Microsoft is becoming a full platinum level sponsor of Apache.
Traditionally Microsoft has been somewhat insular given they built their own platform and generally have maintained an arms length relationship with many standards and open source organizations. Over the years Microsoft has been seen with a wary eye by many people in the industry and that comes out in some of the articles this week.
Microsoft’s history of antagonism to and mixed messages on open source software will likely lead some critics to see the move as a potential trap. Prudence and scrutiny are certainly justifiable wherever Microsoft is involved, but it seems unlikely that there is any possible mischief in this arrangement; the governance model of the ASF just doesn’t leave room for abuse.
This move by Microsoft is probably a lot bigger then what most people perceive. First, it is no small thing for a company to release internally built code to open source. Making that step is a big one. We went through a similar exercise while I was at BEA when we decided to join Eclipse as a board member in February, 2005. I and a lot of people worked on the internal issues for several months that led to BEA making this decision. I would guess it took at least as long at Microsoft to work through the legal issues of the code submission and joining Apache at this level.
Now that this is done I would hope to see much improved interoperability between several core Microsoft technologies and projects being managed by Apache. It is great to see the initial code submission:
PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.
What I will be looking for next is for Microsoft to provide similar support between Microsoft technologies and relevant Apache projects– even when they may overlap with some Microsoft products (for example, the PHP+SQL+Apache optimization for those that are not using IIS). And it would be nice to see specific libraries for .Net available through open source so that third parties can more readily extend and integrate the Microsoft stack with Apache based technologies. One can hope anyway.
So, great job to all the people who made this happen!
Posted by shanepearson 
