The company hopes to increase its interaction with the open source world

Apr 13, 2012 11:50 GMT  ·  By

On Thursday, Redmond-based software giant Microsoft announced a new wholly owned subsidiary, known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., aimed at bringing the company closer to openness, including interoperability, open standards and open source.

Jean Paoli, currently the general manager of the Interoperability Strategy team, will be the President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. He mentions in a recent blog post that the team will form the nucleus of the new subsidiary.

The team already worked with other business groups and standard initiatives at Microsoft, including the W3C’s HTML5, IETF’s HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS. They are also familiar with open source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and Phonegap/Cordova.

“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,” Paoli explains.

At the same time, Jean Paoli explains that the team worked with the PhoneGap/Cordova and jQuery Mobile and with some other open source communities to advance Windows Phone.

Microsoft will continue to work with the open source and standards communities, including the Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and many standards organizations.

“Microsoft Open Technologies is further demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities,” Jean Paoli continues.

Various open source standards already benefit from Microsoft’s support, and many of them run on the company’s platform, including Linux, Hadoop, MongoDB, Drupal, Joomla and others.

“This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft’s proprietary development processes and the company’s open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities,” Paoli continues.

Through this new structure, the release of open source software will be faster, the same as the participation in existing open source efforts. The interaction with open standards and open source worlds should increase in time.

“As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments,” he concluded.