Artificial ignorance

I woke up this morning, and as I usually do, I fired up Techmeme and found this article by Matt Asay titled “Microsoft search to be powered by open source”. Matt’s a good journalist, but as I’ve done before (How to get TechMeme’d – write about something bashing Vista), I want to comment on some of Asay’s points.

It looks like Microsoft’s anti-open-source bubble really has burst.

Our anti-open-source bubble, Matt? For a writer who has written about our Open Source strategies a few times, I’m surprised to read that Asay thinks we have an “anti-open-source bubble”. And to quote Asay himself from an article titled “Muglia: Open Source to permeate Microsoft” he’d written in February ‘09 (about 3 months ago):

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Since the launch of BizSpark, I’ve heard a lot of comments about how Microsoft is targeting "Open Source" with BizSpark.

From OStatic’s post "Microsoft’s Biz Spark is Another Direct Shot at Open Source":

"[Microsoft's] new BizSpark initiative is being rolled out in 82 countries, and offers many types of incentives to developers and startups. It also steers people toward Microsoft’s products, though, and challenges open source in several ways"

From Matt Asay’s post "What Microsoft giveth, Jive taketh away" Continue reading

Today at OSCON, Sam Ramji announced that Microsoft will become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF provides support for the Apache community of open source projects. There are over 60 top-level projects at the ASF that are characterized by an open and pragmatic software license. We have a firm commitment to interoperability with open source and increasing our outreach with the open source development community. As a supporter of open source I am excited that Microsoft has decided to support the ASF.

Sam also announced

• contributions to the PHP community specifically the ADOdb project ADOdb (written in PHP, ADOdb provides an abstraction interface for PHP applications to access many different types of databases). This contribution will enable ADOdb to interoperate with Microsoft’s native SQL Server driver.
• our commitment to interoperability by extending our Open Specification Promise (OSP) to over 150 additional protocols, including protocols built into Windows Server and protocols that are part of the .NET Framework. The OSP guarantees freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

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Last year, Jeff Atwood and I had spoken about ways in which we can encourage development of Open Source projects in the Microsoft Ecosystem. At that point, Jeff decided to throw ads on his blog and to graciously donate a portion of his ad revenue to an open source .NET project.

Today, Jeff picked a project, wrote the check for $5000, and signed off on it. ScrewTurn Wiki is the lucky recipient.

I’d verbally committed to getting Microsoft to match Jeff’s contribution to the project. I personally didn’t want to have much say in the project that gets picked. But I will now work on getting the funds to match the contribution.

Jeff and I will be participating in an Open Source Panel at ReMIX, along with Anil Dash and Joseph Hill with Sam Ramji moderating. We’ll be sure to talk about this in a little more depth then. Continue reading