Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy, just announced in his blog (from the OSCON conference in Portland, Oregon) that we are stepping up our participation and contribution to Open Source.

1. First of all we are going to provide monetary sponsorship to the Apache Software Foundation “This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software”.
   
2. We are also supporting the ADOdb effort by contributing a patch for it “This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last”.
   
3. Finally, we are putting an increased number of protocols under Open Specification Promise “We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use”

I think this is one more proof of us Microsoft being extremely serious in partnering with the community and wanting to expand interoperability between Open Source and Microsoft technologies which will provide enormous benefits for businesses and users (which is the ultimate reason for our industry to exists).