Microsoft launches its new Microsoft Open Technologies subsidiary to focus on open source and open standards.
Microsoft
has announced a new focus on openness, with the launch of a new wholly owned
subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies.
In
an April 12
blog
post, Jean Paoli, the newly named president of the subsidiary, said the
goal of Microsoft Open Technologies is to advance the companys investment
in
opennessincluding
interoperability,
open standards and
open source.
Paolis
old Microsoft Interoperability Strategy team, which has worked closely with
many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft, will
form the nucleus of this new subsidiary. That team worked on issues such as the
World Wide Web Consortiums (W3C) HTML5, the Internet Engineering Task Forces
(IETF) HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in the Distributed Management Task Force
(DMTF) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems
(OASIS), and in many open-source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and
Phonegap/Cordova.
Said
Paoli:
We
help provide open source building blocks for interoperable
cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS;
support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js,
PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and work with the PhoneGap/Cordova
and jQuery Mobile and other open source communities to support Windows Phone.
Microsoft
will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a
variety of ways, including working with many open-source foundations such as
Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and many standards
organizations, Paoli said. Currently, thousands of open standards are supported
by Microsoft, and many open-source environments, including Linux,
Hadoop,
MongoDB, Drupal and Joomla, run on Microsofts platform.
The
new subsidiary represents a long-term commitment to open source, Paoli said.
The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined
manner, he said. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction
between Microsofts proprietary development processes and the companys open
innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards
communities. This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and
release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and
accept contributions from the community.
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