Microsoft Announces a New Subsidiary for Open Source!
This new organisational structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft’s proprietary development processes, and its innovation efforts and relationships with the open source and open standards communities.
With the aim of advancing the company's investment in openness–including interoperability, open standards and open source—microsoft has announced a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Jean Paoli, president of the newly formed subsidiary, wrote about the development in a post on the company's of cial blog.
Paoli wrote: "The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly de ned manner. 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. This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and accept contributions from the community. Over time, the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds."
It is worth mentioning here that Microsoft has been contributing to several open source projects for some time now but this is the company's rst initiative of this kind. In an exclusive conversation with LINUX For You, Mandar Naik, director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft India, explained the reason behind such a move. He said, "As interest in interoperability and open source has evolved to the cloud and devices, we believe that launching Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc, as a wholly owned subsidiary is the best way to better serve developers, customers and partners. Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc, has been formed in the US and will deliver critical interoperability technologies in collaboration with open source and open standards communities."
This global initiative will bene t the Indian open source community too. Naik goes on to elaborate, "Microsoft is committed to openness. Microsoft is becoming more open in the way that we work with and collaborate with others in the industry, in how we listen to customers, and in our approach to the cloud. While this subsidiary has been formed in the US, the existing openness initiatives and the ones going forward through this subsidiary will de nitely bene t customers, developers and the open source ecosystem globally, including those in India. As interest in interoperability and open source has grown and matured, the company looked at new ways to respond. Microsoft Open Technologies is a demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities. In India, as more and more customers look at better ways to manage and leverage their mixed source IT investments and embrace the cloud, the innovations as part of this initiative provide another way for us to engage with customers, developers and the open source communities in this exciting journey," informed Naik.
While Microsoft and its business groups will continue to engage with the open source and open standards communities in a variety of ways, the subsidiary provides a new way of engagement that is more clearly de ned. Naik said, "Over time, the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds. As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and nonMicrosoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments. We expect to nalise our operational plan in the next few months and will be able to share more information at that time."
Microsoft is focusing on interoperability, which has been demonstrated in numerous standards initiatives across the company, including the W3C’S HTML5, IETF’S HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS, and in many open source environments such as Node.js, Mongodb and Phonegap/cordova. Naik said, "We help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS; we support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js, PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and we work with the Phonegap/cordova and jquery Mobile and other open source communities to support the Windows Phone. It is important to note that Microsoft and our business groups will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including working with many open source foundations such as Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and various standards organisations. Today, thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux, Hadoop, Mongodb, Drupal, Joomla and others, run on our platform."