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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