14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft, once the anti-open source poster child, says that the company has evolved as the world changed and that it is now committed to openness.
Michaela Kraft, Open Source Strategy Lead Western Europe for Microsoft, notes that the Redmond company is doing nothing more than tailor itself to customers.
The overall trend is for people to embrace a variety of digital technologies, software and devices, spawned by a variety of sources.
Microsoft’s own evolution means that the giant needed to adapt to this trend, while remaining a proprietary software company at heart.
“Microsoft is open to open source technology,” Kraft revealed, sharing a few statistics indicative of the software giant embracing open source.
“More than 350,000 open source applications run on Microsoft platforms. That is 82% of the applications that are available online in the public community repositories (“source forges”) that open source developers use to distribute software.”
One example of Microsoft supporting open source involve contributions made to the “good old” Windows-killer, Linux.
“While we compete with products like Linux, we also have many customers that use both Windows and Linux, and to help improve their experience working with both technologies, we have contributed code to development of the Linux kernel,” Kraft stated.
Microsoft made a critical move in 2006, when it inked a Windows and Linux interoperability alliance with open source vendor Novell.
Since then, both Microsoft and Novell have made investments into making sure that Windows Server and SUSE Linux can play nice together for customers that need to run both platforms in their heterogeneous environments.
“We listen to the feedback of our customers and want to ensure it is easier and less costly for them to own, develop or manage great solutions in IT environments that mix products from many vendors,” Kraft added.
“To achieve this, more than ever before, Microsoft is more open with our technologies. And we‘re open to choice and change. Because openness helps us all move up.”
Illustrative of Microsoft’s strong commitment to openness is the manner in which the company developed its Cloud platform.
Developers are not limited in any way to ASP.NET or any other Microsoft technology when building for Windows Azure. They can just as well use PHP, SOAP, REST, XML, Java, and Ruby.
And there are customers that noticed. “We are taking significant actions to ensure openness in the cloud – a hot topic for the industry and certainly for Microsoft. A great example of this is SugarCRM, a 100% open source company which has chosen to offer its online services on Microsoft’s Azure platform,” Kraft added.