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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.