Microsoft received plaudits and criticism for its openness efforts at the MIX08 event Thursday with a Microsoft official also citing an overture toward the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling.
During a panel session, officials from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Microsoft business partner Zend Technologies debated issues ranging from patents to open source and the planned Linux version of Microsoft's Silverlight multimedia plug-in technology, called Moonlight. Novell plans to release Moonlight in June, although a beta release already has been available.
Microsoft's Sam Ramji, director of open source and Linux strategy, said after the session that in two weeks, Microsoft will reveal plans to collaborate with open source Eclipse Foundation projects. Those details are to be aired at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on March 19. Microsoft has been one of the industry's few holdouts from Eclipse participation. (The foundation declined to comment afterward.) Microsoft also plans to work with the Apache Software Foundation.
"I think Microsoft has made tremendous progress," in becoming open, said Andi Gutmans, CTO at Zend Technologies, which offers software for running PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) applications on Windows platforms.
"Microsoft's business was built out of open APIs," Ramji said. But in the last decade, the bar in open source has been raised beyond open APIs, he said. (Separate from Tuesday's panel session, Microsoft offered on Monday Silverlight 2 controls via open source; these controls provide different capabilities for developers.)
Ramji also noted the company's recent decision to open access to various Microsoft technologies. "Obviously, we did announce the interoperability commitment that the company has made in opening the specifications," he said. The company also has made moves to work better with Firefox. "Piece by piece, I think we’re transitioning to [increasingly] support open development," Ramji said.
But questions were raised about Novell's arrangement with Microsoft pertaining to Moonlight. Novell's Miguel de Icaza, a Novell vice president in charge of the open source Moonlight project, said Novell gets access to the regression test suite and codecs from Microsoft as well as to technical people inside Microsoft.
Novell has a patent covenant with Microsoft pertaining to Silverlight. As far as whether these covenants would be extended to third parties, that is something Microsoft would have to discuss, he said. "I wish they were different and anybody could get them, but that is not the case," de Icaza said.
Ramji said persons who download Moonlight from Novell do not have to pay for it. But Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer raised the issue of complicated intellectual property patent restrictions and known patents pertaining to Moonlight. De Icaza cited Microsoft's history of not suing anyone over this issue.
Schroepfer noted Mozilla's own shunning of patents. "We don't hold any patents. We don't have any form of indemnification from anyone," Schroepfer said.
One of the longstanding tensions in open source development has been the existence of patents and settling these issues, Ramji said. "[This] becomes a question of U.S. business law," said Ramji.
This whitepaper explains the terminology and concepts behind Data Replication technologies and establishes some sizing rules through worked examples. Learn the new paradigm in disaster tolerance—protect data anywhere.
Download now »
Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. Another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.
Download now »
The emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.
Included in HP ProCurve WLAN solutions is security technology that alleviates threats from WLANs through:
* Monitoring wireless activity inside and out of the enterprise
* Classifying WLAN transmissions into harmful and harmless
* Preventing transmissions that pose a security threat to the enterprise network
* Locating participating devices for physical remediation
Effectively address data protection challenges, implementing solutions that help store and protect business–critical data while cutting costs and improving efficiency and reliability.
Download now »
Sign up to receive Platforms Resource Alerts
Recommend This
