Microsoft continues to express its commitment to open-source software, most recently at EclipseCon and the Open Source Business Conference.
Microsoft continues to express its commitment to open-source software, most
recently at EclipseCon and the Open Source Business Conference.
At EclipseCon, held March 22 to 25, Microsoft joined Tasktop Technologies, which
it described in an October announcement as "a leading Eclipse-based solution
provider," to present the first results of their "joint project to
enhance the overall developer experience of Eclipse on Windows 7," which
the companies announced Oct. 28, 2009, at
Eclipse
Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The open-source project is "designed
to foster interoperability and make Eclipse a first-class tool on the Microsoft
platform," Microsoft said, and to "help developers using the Eclipse
platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008
R2."
Moreover, Microsoft and Tasktop are sharing these results with the broader
community by contributing updates to "the next release (3.6) of the Eclipse
Integrated Development Tool (IDE),"
Vijay Rajagopalan, a Microsoft principal architect, wrote in a blog post about
Microsoft's
participation at EclipseCon. Rajagopalan said of the effort:
"Microsoft is providing funding,
technical & architectural assistance and Tasktop is implementing and
contributing code. The goal is to improve Eclipse to take advantage of new
features in Windows 7. This will empower Eclipse developers to be productive
and have a compelling experience developing applications using Eclipse on
Windows 7. For this first phase, we have been focusing on the user interface
components to allow Eclipse developers to take advantage of the new user
interface features offered by Windows 7, directly from the Eclipse IDE and from any desktop applications built on
top of the Eclipse platform."
Rajagopalan added:
"The collaboration between
Microsoft, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Eclipse community may seem unusual
for some people. But let's be pragmatic, our mutual customers, partners and
developers want greater choice and opportunities. We do believe that improving
interoperability between our technologies is actually helping all
parties."
In addition to the update on its work with Tasktop, Microsoft
also announced updates to two technologies it has developed with Soyatec,
a Paris-based IT solutions provider: an update to Windows Azure Tools for
Eclipse, which includes "many bug fixes and compatibility with the
latest Windows Azure SDK [software development kit] (Version 1.1)" and the
news that the next release of Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL)
for Mac and Windows is planned for spring 2010, Rajagopalan said.
Meanwhile, at the OSBC show held March 17
to 18, Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's director of product management for Developer
Platforms, took part in a panel called, "The Web Is the Platform."
Goldfarb followed that up with an interview on Microsoft's
Port
25 blog for the open-source community at Microsoft.
On the issue of Microsoft's commitment to open source, Goldfarb said:
"Open Source is one of many
business models that surround the creation of software. At Microsoft,
while not always clear in the past, we are completely committed to open
source as one way to address the needs of our customers, while advancing
both the broader ecosystem of partners and developers and our business."
Added Goldfarb to his tale of how commitment to open source has evolved at
Microsoft:
"Microsoft's change in how it approaches open source began pretty
significantly about seven years ago when I joined the company. One of my
primary focuses was on helping bring a strong shift in the way Microsoft thinks
about, participates in, and works with open source communities.
Today, this takes the shape of open source projects, code contributions,
financial contributions, and other ways with a strong focus on being compatible
with existing open source communities. From my team alone, we've made a number
of investments in open source in the last year: These include contributions to
the jQuery JavaScript Library, the Silverlight Media Framework
(SMF), the Silverlight Analytics Framework
(SAF), the Silverlight Control Toolkit, the AJAX Control Toolkit, and Project Orchard.
In addition to projects and code, we also worked closely with open source
application communities like DotNetNuke, Drupal, WordPress and others via our work on the Windows Web App
Gallery. Microsoft is delivering advertising to help increase the size of
the ecosystem for these applications on Windows Server and IIS. This is great
because it drives more opportunities for the ecosystems around these
applications to service customers and monetize and it helps drive increased use
of Windows-this effort has driven over 1.5-million application
installations!"
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