Microsoft cozying up to open source community

Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 August 2010 18:02

IT Industry - Strategy

Microsoft is preparing for an expected rapid growth in the use of open source software. Hint: open source is not synonymous with Linux.

Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft's open source technology centre, told iTWire that is keen to help open source developers and users to get a good experience. One way this is being done is by encouraging developers to appropriately abstract technologies so that users can, for example, use MySQL or PostgreSQL or SQL Server to provide the database functionality for a particular application. Getting this right provides customers with flexibility while maintaining efficiency for the developer.

An example of this approach is the Silverstripe CMS. The version released earlier this year provides the database flexibility Hanrahan was talking about. According to Chris Levanes, who leads Microsoft's Asia-Pacific platform strategy team, a large proportion of Silverstripe users run the software on Windows for security and reliability reasons. Silverstripe is certified for use on Winsows, and this provides "enterprise credibility," he said.

Rob Evans, Levanes' counterpart for Australia, suggested local open source developers are largely platform agnostic. Hanrahan agreed, saying that the proportion with a 'Linux only' mentality is shrinking as developers want access to a wider market.

Other ways in which Microsoft is addressing the needs of open source developers and users can be seen include Linux support in System Center, the release of Microsoft projects as open source, and and the company's contribution to open source projects.

Linux support in System Center has been provided in a joint manner. Microsoft has joined the OpenPegasus board, and Novell (Microsoft's partner for Windows/Linux interoperability) has written a package to inteface OpenPegasus and system Center, Hanranan said.

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