Skip to content

Biting the hand that feeds IT

- Cash ’n’ Carrion
- Events

#

Software:

Reg Hardware Channel Register Whitepapers ### News Tools Newsletters & Feeds Reg Mobile Reg Desktop News Alerts ### Reg Shops Reg Merchandise Books/Online Learning ### Top Stories Driving some value into Google's Street View Google Code blacklists Mozilla Public License Microsoft pledges love and money to open source Google unfurls less laughable Wikipedia Microsoft claims heart beats in open source Read more top stories ### Related Whitepapers Creating Cost and Energy Efficiency Through Outsourcing Hosting Solutions An IDC Opinion Paper Virtualization Analysis for VMware CiRBA Data Center Intelligence How to Choose the Right Virtualization Technology For Your Environment A CiRBA Whitepaper Transformational Analytics Virtualizing IT Environments Life online: Mouse rage! A supplementary study by the Social Issues Research Centre Capturing Project Development Success Successful Management Solutions | The Register » Software » Developer » ## Microsoft pledges love and money to open source ### Ponies up to Apache, endorses LGPL By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco → More by this author Published Friday 25th July 2008 18:02 GMT Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at The Register Security Debate, September 24 2008. OSCON After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license. Microsoft told The Reg it's submitted a patch to the community for the ADOdb database abstraction library for PHP to add support for the PHP SQL Driver developed with PHP shop Zend Technologies. The patch is under the FSF's Lesser GPL (LGPL). And, in a further move towards greater support of open source, Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 in sponsorship. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project. Ramji: watching Jakarta That work has also led to a "clarification" of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to re-assure POI developers that subsets and defects of the work are also covered by OSP. Under OSP Microsoft has agreed not to assert claims against implementations of certain of its technologies. Microsoft is also expanding OSP by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. Until now, the protocols had been available under the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program (MCPP) that was ordered as part of Microsoft's anti-trust settlement with the US Department of Justice. Microsoft, though, has repeatedly landed in hot water on MCPP for failing to make the pricing and terms clear to licensees. Sam Ramji, senior director of Microsoft platform strategy, told The Reg Microsoft is moving from participating in open source to becoming a contributor. Ramji, who made the announcements at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Friday, promised "a lot more" PHP patches in the coming months now Microsoft had established processes he said clarified how employees can contribute to open source. He did not provide details of the new policy, but El Reg reported reported on Microsoft's new guidelines last month. It would seem employees can contribute to projects but open source code cannot be used in Microsoft's products, to protect the company from unwanted licenses and IP claims. The PHP SQL Driver does not ship with Microsoft software and must be downloaded. Microsoft's new love for FSF licensing and PHP is not exactly unselfserving. The decision to work on PHP fits with the overall strategy of improving the language's interoperability with Windows and stemming the loss of PHP application deployments to Linux. LGPL allows code to be used with proprietary programs - such as SQL Server - unlike its GPL cousin. Also, while Ramji stressed support for ASF did not represent a move away on the web server from IIS, it is a recognition of the rival Apache HTTP Web Server's enduring number-one status on the web and Microsoft's desire to have it run on Windows instead of Linux servers. Also, in a measure of how far it's willing to contribute, Microsoft does not appear ready to have its engineers actually participate in open source groups, such as Eclipse. "Putting members in to Eclipse may or may not happen," Ramji said. He noted, though, Microsoft is keeping an eye on what it can do to help ASF's Jakarta Project.® Free Security whitepaper: The Need for Vulnerability Management 21 comments posted — Post a new comment #### April 1? Posted: 18:15 25th July 2008 #### The MS-Linux distribution has not been release yet... Posted: 20:08 25th July 2008 #### What The Hell? Posted: 20:33 25th July 2008 #### Finally, Posted: 22:14 25th July 2008 #### Beware of geeks bearing gifts Posted: 23:05 25th July 2008 More comments… Track this type of story as a custom Atom/RSS feed or by email. ### Related stories Google Code blacklists Mozilla Public License (25 July 2008) Sun to support AMP plus Linux (23 July 2008) Re-jigged Intel mobile Linux stack dumps Ubuntu (23 July 2008) Ubuntu man challenges open source to out-pretty Apple (23 July 2008) Ubuntu to get open-source Java heart implant (23 July 2008) Intel juices parallel programming for the masses (22 July 2008) Canonical hippies spread Ubuntu Launchpad love (22 July 2008) New Symbian launches mobile free-for-all (22 July 2008) Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015? (19 May 2008) Microsoft cozies to Eclipse, no tongues though (19 March 2008) Microsoft indemnifies Novell Moonlight users (6 March 2008) Novell fills Microsoft Silverlight hole (5 September 2007) Post to Slashdot Digg this Add to del.icio.us Reddit
Previous Article | Next Article
From small embedded OS to the world's most used open mobile OS How to Choose the Right Virtualization Technology For Your Environment - Free whitepaper
IT & Business Books
Sketching User Experiences: Getting The Design Right And The Right Design Linux in a Windows World The Myths of Innovation The Myths of Innovation Forensic Discovery Head First PMP
| ## Developer Headlines ### The UK's latest developer news from MSDN TechNet Webcast: How Microsoft does IT: Management and Operations in Windows Server 2008 (Level 300) .NET Matters: Asynchronous I/O with WebClient TechNet Webcast: IAG 2007 in Under an Hour (Level 300) All of today's stories How to Choose the Right Virtualization Technology For Your Environment Insights on the viability, stability and success of your virtualization initiative Download here

Top 20 stories • All The Week’s Headlines • Archive • Search