Microsoft and FOSS: uneasy bedfellows

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 25 June 2009 07:27

Business IT - Technology

Maybe it's the cynic within that makes me think this way - but at the end of an event titled “Microsoft”.“Open Source” == “unhandled exceptions.” I was left wondering: Is this all an elaborate set-up?
The invitation came from a Microsoft web platform architect evangelist, Jorke Odolphi, whom I met at the Australian national Linux conference earlier this year and arrived just a couple of days before the event. I did post details to the two local Linux user groups but only one person attended from either group.

Was the lack of publicity for something which must have cost the company at least a thousand bucks in tough times (it was held at a venue in the Melbourne CBD, and provided an open bar and finger food) deliberate?

These days it seems kind of cool to organise an event with notifications through things like Twitter - and that seemed to be the way more than one attendee had heard about it.

There are three of these meetings - one in Sydney on June 23 attracted 12 people, the Melbourne meeting attracted 15 (including five Microsoft employees) and one takes place in Brisbane today.

The two Microsoft employees who conducted the Melbourne show were Odolphi and Nick Hodge; the latter bears the official designation Professional Geek. Both were dressed as befits geeks, in T-shirts. No suits at all.

As I expected, the talk was mostly about getting open source applications to work well on Windows. This is something that the company loves - such apps running better on Windows than they do on other operating systems as Windows is still the main cash cow in Redmond.

There was some demonstration of installing PHP applications on Windows and the use of Python for a web application. Third-party applications hosted by Microsoft were also displayed.

Hodge spoke briefly about opening up the Exchange protocol so that outside clients could use the full functionality available to Microsoft mail clients interacting with an Exchange server. In short, nothing very new.

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