Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : Open Source

Eclipse Revisited - this time Windows 7

brentphillips — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:13:00 GMT

Back in February we posted about Eclipse support for SIlverlight, and this week we announced a major milestone to tune Eclipse for WIndows 7. We're working with Tasktop technology to drive the project which will consist of developing updates to the Eclipse IDE that will incorporate new features available in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2. Check out the press pass article here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-28eclipsepr.mspx

GPL v2 double play

brentphillips — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:39:00 GMT

A couple of great milestones this week related to code contribution. Yesterday (perhaps the shot heard around the world in terms of software interoperability), Microsoft, for the first time, released code - some 22K lines - to the Linux community for inclusion in the Linux kernel (nothing more on this, as I think the trade press has covered it pretty well). Likewise today, Microsoft has released a free live services plug-in to enable calendaring, email, and instant messaging for Moodle (an open-source course management system). Further, the plug-in enables single sign-on which fosters a more seemless experience for users. For more information, please see Peter Galli's post on Port 25.

common ground between Microsoft and the OSS community is more common than not these days...

brentphillips — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:15:00 GMT

When I speak to an audience about Microsoft's partnership with Novell, I often frame the discussion around two themes: customer centricity and IP bridge building. The former deals with the fact that vendors should proactively work together to solve interoperability issues in the market (with partners and competitors alike), while the latter deals with a healthy respect for diverse business models and finding common ground on how to partner and work together. In the case of Novell, we worked through an innovative patent cooperation agreement that paved the way for healthy business and technical collaboration. The resulting partnership has yielded a number of technical innovations, a joint lab in Cambridge, MA, and has served hundreds of customers. While we continue to compete, we also acknowledge that this model is a successful one - - for the pragmatist IT community who needs to improve operational efficiency in their data center, cut costs, and get better support from their vendors - we are succeeding.

In a similar spirit of cooperation - this time to support the broader software ecosystem - Microsoft in partnership with the Linux Foundation, sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute, last week, expressing concerns over its draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. You can follow the link to download the letter, but to summarize briefly, there were concerns about 1) how the principles were drafted (apparently with little or no input from industry) and 2) proposed principles not supported by contract law.

As written, according to the Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, the principles "interfere with the natural operation of open source licenses and commercial licenses as well by creating implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation, which would undermine the sharing of technology." Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, shares similar concerns at microsoftontheissues.com, stating that " certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers."

Our business models differ, ideologies sometimes differ, but we share, as Gutierrez states, a passion for software and a need to keep the industry from being inadvertently disrupted. There is power in such collaboration, and I am glad to see our organizations working together for the good of the vendor and developer community. Its true that we often find ourselves in competitive positions, but ensuring that we sustain a healthy, market-driven economy where the diversity of business models is honored and supported, is well worth the effort.

Check out Stephen McGibbon's blog for additional links and thoughts on how this might apply to the EU...

News from OSCON 08

brentphillips — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT

Check out Sam Ramji's post on port 25, 'history.foward()'. As per his keynote today at OSCON, he outlines some new developments around Microsoft's support for open source interoperability: ADOdb contributions to support PHP connectivity to SQL Server, support for the Apache Software Foundation, and an update to Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. Checking out the PHP driver myself...Will post some feedback.

The connected experience and a bit on how we got here...

brentphillips — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:46:00 GMT

I hate that I missed Bill's keynote at CES, but this article provides a solid recap of some interesting philosophy on the future of technology and how we use it to drive the connected experience. Coming from the wireless space, I am very comfortable with the idea of a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that we (as consumers) navigate with a flexible, sophisticated hand-held device (think 'lifestyle' remote control). Specifically, a PDA, Cell phone, MP3 player (whatever) combines all features required to communicate, self-locate, recieve - manage - create content, and tender transactions. Imagine, now, a seamless computing environment that you simply tap into from wherever you are to access whatever information you need - regardless of the access point, and regardless of the device.

Closing the loop - we're in an age where such possibilities are now being realized and, with the convergence of mobile and fixed infrastructure, the evolution of intelligent devices, and the advancement of storage and processing technologies, the onset of new gadgetry, applications, tools, and "ways to use them" will be limitless. As a colleague of mine likes to say, we talk on computers, we drive in computers, we fly in computers, and we live in computers. The age of ubiquitous computing, suggested to have started almost 16 years ago, is now advancing at a seemingly exponential rate.

And I ask myself [a la David Byrne]...how did we get here? I mean really get here. After all, companies like ours didn't have a master plan to role this stuff out. Nor did all of this innovation happen by just a handful of companies...(Now, to interject for a moment on my own point. I bring this up because there seems to be a great deal of discussion these days about how to accelerate innovation through openness, community, and a removal of IP (think patents) from software...Open source combined with a bit of copylefting, some might argue, is the panacea for society's innovation and technical complexity woes...) It seems to me, however, that innovation has taken care of itself quite well over the years - re: how we got here, and today it is accelerating and maturing just as the market requires. The market, after all, is the community that matters. And the dialogue in that community - broadly through industry associations or standards setting organizations, or more focused through customer engagements - is sufficiently open in my opinion to drive progress and to address integration woes created by rapid innovation cycles. And intellectual property protection gives incentive to everybody in the market to keep on developing...(even the open source guys patent some things)

How do we sustain an ecosystem of heterogeneity and complexity? Keep working. Keep talking and working together. And when we make new islands of technology, simply 1) standardize enough to connect, 2) build technical bridges, 3) seed new markets or 4) all of the above.

I'm going to noodle on this a bit more. Thoughts and feedback welcome!

Open XML approved by ECMA

brentphillips — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:13:00 GMT

Today marks a very important day on interoperability for Microsoft. Following a series of events that include the Open Specification Promise, the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, and of course our partnership with Novell, ECMA (European association for standardizing information and communication systems - phew!) approved Microsoft's Open XML file format specification as an international standard.

The news of standardization is a welcome milestone after many months of work to develop (and document) the new file format. Leveraging an XML core, the format is not only backward compatible with billions of existing Microsoft Office documents, but is also future-proofed by complete openness and extensibility. Companies like Corel and Novell are already adopting the specification (all 6000 pages), which suggests a strong demand for the rich features that the file format will offer.

After hearing the news, I took a scan of the blogosphere to see what folks were saying. I have to admit there were some pretty serious crits out there, and I am floored that anyone can see this as a bad thing. The fact that Microsoft finally unlocked its files is a huge milestone! The fact that the specification is being adopted by other vendors so quickly is great. The fact that Open XML and other file formats (namely ODF) can co-exist - and that a translator has already been developed to go from one to the other - demonstrates tremendous value for the market! All goodness!

For those who are curious, Open XML is a very necessary effort. One file format specification will not work for all document authoring tools as the Open Document format has readily demonstrated. While the ODF became an ISO standard nearly seven months ago, its authors chose "right now" over "right," in terms of features. The specification is largely incomplete - lacking support for such things as accessibility and formulas (currently being addressed), which are key elements needed for effective usability (More on that at McGibbon's blog).

In terms of Microsoft's decision to evolve the file format, we realized that new technologies afforded us the opportunity to make our files more flexible for customers. Years ago, when the binary formats were developed, the technical ecosystem was a much different space. Today, formats and protocols allow us to link virtually any technology to another, suggesting that the nature of documents would, could, and should evolve. Today, we see a distinct seperation of content from presentation or formatting. What sits between the two is metadata providing a description for what the document's content contains. This has become a best practice for web development, and is now happening for documents as well. In the end, documents and their content become much more fluid in terms of how they are used, accessed, and managed. The great news for Microsoft Office users is that they have much greater access to, and control over, their data through this open file format.

OpenOffice, incidentally, is free to implement the specification just as Novell and Corel have done...

As a final thought, I think its very telling that IBM was the only ECMA participant to vote against the standardization of Open XML. For a company who's Vice President of Standards pitches openness, choice, and innovation, it seems odd that they would not support the standardization of a file format that was so valuable to so many of IBM's current customers!
Self serving? Makes me wonder. More thoughts on that in a previous post...

Need details on the Open Spec Promise? Check out Channel 9...

brentphillips — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:53:00 GMT

If you have 30 minutes and are keenly interested in how Microsoft's new Open Specification Promise works, check out this video at Channel 9. Included in the clip are Jean Paoli, General Manager of Interoperability & XML Architecture; Tom Robertson, General Manager of IP and Corportate Standards Strategy; and Amy Marasco, General Manager of Standards Strategy. I worked on parts of the project for Amy and Tom, and work closely with all three on other efforts. Check it out here...

Zend joins Microsoft to optimize PHP for Windows Server

brentphillips — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:22:00 GMT

This morning Zend and Microsoft announced a technical collaboration to drive improved performance for running PHP on Windows Server. Having worked with both technologies on multiple projects, I think this is timely and a great effort toward improved interoperability for the developer community as a whole. Granted, PHP has been running on Windows for some time, but simply 'running on' is not enough. This collaboration ensure that leading technologies - while developed under different models and by different organizations - will work together optimally for the benefit of the user. Specific to the project, I thought the scope was particularly interesting:

Identify and implement improvements for PHP on IIS6 and IIS7 (32 bit and 64 bit) with that will be submitted under the PHP license to the PHP community.
Microsoft will develop and release an IIS add-on component (FastCGI) that will serve as the interface between PHP and the IIS webserver - made freely available for users of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server ‘Longhorn.’
Zend will establish a Windows testing lab and conduct regular tests to foster improved performance as technologies evolve.
Zend and Microsoft will actively participate in community outreach.

Public releases of this effort are expected over the next couple of months. Read more over at port 25...

Is it really open vs. proprietary?

brentphillips — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:41:00 GMT

...Or how well it works together. Its really about how well we connect people, data, and diverse systems to make processes more efficient right? It should not matter what the pieces are. Leave the choice of configuration to those who best know what they need. We'll meet them where they are!

I am borrowing the title from an interesting article by Simon Moores over at silicon.com entitled "Open Source: The New Front," an opinion piece suggesting that the future of technology is all about interoperability. I could not agree more - especially as he frames it so well in the following statement - so I thought I would share and offer two additional cents.

"By interoperability, I simply mean the ability of different IT networks, applications or components to exchange and use information, i.e. to 'talk' to each other.This goal can be achieved by four means - through the development of software that is 'interoperable by design' (e.g., inclusion of XML technology in software to facilitate the easy exchange of data across different applications); through licensing and cross-licensing proprietary technologies and essential intellectual property; through collaboration with partners, competitors and customers; and through the implementation of industry standards (including open standards and broadly accessible proprietary standards) in products and services."

For my part, I also want to offer that proprietary and open development (suggesting royalty free licensing and community contribution) can, in fact, go hand in hand - or coexist to put it more accurately. Consider Microsoft's Open Specification Promise under which we have released a number of web service specifications and most recently the Virtual Hard Disk Image Specification to the community - royalty free - in order to foster interoperability in the market. Likewise, we are seeing tremendous success of open source projects for the Window's platform - consider MeiRou, Phalanger,GibberMonkey and other projects on CodePlex or the ODF Translator over at SourceForge. Also consider the great work that was done between Microsoft and JBoss or SugarCRM for various interoperability initiatives and the Open Source lab team at Port 25. This is coexistence in action and it gets stronger and more collaborative as projects evolve. Do we compete? Of course, but our collective focus is customer need.

To finish my thought, the biggest mis-statement I hear about software these days is that 'open' (standards, source, etc) is the best way to achieve interoperability. Open development models and open licensing are great things if they work for your business - say if you sell services. But don't raise 'open' as a requirement for interop because open solutions can also be incompatible (as can competing implementations of standards). When this happens, as with non-open solutions, we must remember the unique quality of software as a bridging medium. This is unique to the virtual world of course - it would not be as easy to attach a firehose to a kitchen sink (enough duct tape perhaps), but digitally we get it figured out. I offer Biztalk Server as one example - with over 300 adapters - capable of connecting into any number of non-Microsoft technologies - in essence translating between independent systems.

I don't want to over simplify interoperability by any means, but in lock-step with innovation it happens every single day.

Its how the industry evolves.

IBM on Open Source

brentphillips — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 23:25:00 GMT

I found this post over at ipblog.org which puts in perspective how Big Blue really thinks about open source software: So Much for IBM’s Commitment to Open Source.

In all fairness their business model doesn’t surprise me at all. With an emphasis on growth (what else right?), an IP portfolio that – for the 13^th time - won IBM more patents in 2005 than any other company, and middleware sales in excess of $15 Billion – does anyone really believe that IBM’s investment in the open source community is anything less than self-serving?

The following expands on my comments above and serves as a follow on to the ipblog post. Interesting points all taken from the IBM 2005 Annual report.

2006 Priorities? According to their own annual report is as follows:

IBM’s strategic priorities for 2006 include:

Capitalizing on technological, business and social trends and the need of enterprises to innovate in addressing those trends;
Maintaining market-share leadership in systems, middleware software and services, as a platform to drive growth;
Focusing investment and resources on emerging growth areas, including Business Performance Transformation Services an emerging countries;
Continuing the global integration of IBM, driving productivity gains and higher value in service delivery;
Furthering IBM’s leadership in innovation initiatives, including advanced semiconductor design and development, collaborative intellectual capital, business process expertise and integration, and advanced systems for supercomputing capability—including mainframes and “grid” networks;
Acquiring businesses that contribute strategically to its portfolio, and exiting businesses that no longer support its strategy for innovation and higher value.

I do not find anything wrong with these priorities, but I do want to highlight – IMHO - that the link between IBM and Open Source probably ends with what revenue and market-share it can collect.

…And Intellectual Property?
If you read Sutor (and I do because he’s a smart guy) you really get a warm fuzzy about IBM and the world of open source. Keep in mind the following however…

that “IBM’s research and development (R&D) operations differentiate IBM from its competitors. IBM annually spends approximately $5–$6 billion for R&D, including capitalized software costs, focusing its investments in high-growth opportunities. As a result of innovations in these and other areas, IBM was once again awarded more U.S. patents in 2005 than any other company. This marks the 13th year in a row that IBM achieved this distinction. “

…” The company’s investments in R&D also result in intellectual property (IP) income. Some of IBM’s technological breakthroughs are used exclusively in IBM products, while others are used by the company’s licensees for their products when that new technology is not strategic to IBM’s business goals. A third group is both used internally and licensed externally. ”

…And on Open Standards?

“IBM’s support of open standards is evidenced by the enabling of its products to support open standards such as Linux, and the development of Rational software development tools, which can be used to develop and upgrade other companies’ software products.”

(Linux, the last I checked, is an open source operating system. Not a standard…)

…And on Software Sales?

“Software revenues totaled $15.8 billion in 2005, an increase of 4 percent. “ All derived from strengthened middleware brands (according to the report).

So again, nothing new to report here. Nothing profound to bring to the world – all public info. But to echo the point made at ipblog,

…to all the activists who are continually trumpeting about how IBM has embraced open source software, well, guys, it's not quite as ideological as you would like people to think…

It seems rather risky, in fact, for IBM to walk such a superficial line with this community – after all, don’t they need open source more than open source needs them?

Openness @ Microsoft…

brentphillips — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:42:00 GMT

Furthering our commitment to working broadly with the IT community to drive interoperability, Microsoft announced an Open Specification Promise this morning to make a number of web service specs freely available to the development community. Follow the link above to see the text. If you want to know how easy it is, here is a quote from the FAQ on ‘how it works:’

'No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to implement the specification(s), as they wish and do not need to make any mention of or reference to Microsoft…'Pretty straightforward!

...And the specs themselves?

WS-Addressing, WS-RM Policy, WS-AtomicTransaction, Remote Shell Web Services Protocol, WS-BusinessActivity, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Coordination, WS-Security: Kerberos Binding, WS-Discovery, WS-Security: SOAP Message Security, WSDL, WSDL 1.1 Binding Extension for SOAP 1.2, WS-Security: UsernameToken Profile, WS-Enumeration, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Security: X.509 Certificate Token Profile, SOAP, WS-Eventing, WS-Federation, SOAP 1.1 Binding for MTOM 1.0, WS-Federation Active Requestor Profile, SOAP MTOM / XOP, WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile, SOAP-over-UDP, WS-Management, WS-Transfer, WS-Management Catalog, WS-Trust ,WS-MetadataExchange, WS-I Basic Profile, WS-Policy, Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile, WS-PolicyAttachment, Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol, WS-ReliableMessaging

If you are interested in industry adoption of the specifications, see Jorgen Thelin’s blog…

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves in the coming months!

First 'Open' Movie...

brentphillips — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:05:00 GMT

First Open Movie…

I have been fascinated by open source technology and business models for some time - the following caught my attention recently.

Earlier this year, a small team of CG developers and animators, working as part of what is known as the Orange Open Movie Project, completed what they are calling the first fully open film entitled The Elephant’s Dream, released under the Creative Commons license. As part of the effort, project sponsors made the film free to download, along with all supporting files and musical score, giving their audience full access to the content used to create the film. Not surprisingly, custom versions – mostly in the form of videos and short clips – have started popping up from CG enthusiasts. The movie itself runs about 10 minutes and can be downloaded from the website above.

For truly inspired supporters of the project, a DVD set can be ordered online containing all of the above for about 35 Euro (it is also apparently being released as the EU’s first HD DVD title as well).

To summarize, the story is incomplete and, for me personally, was a bit non-specific (I felt like I was dropped into a few pages of a much larger story too complex to grasp in the short glimpse I was given) - but the visuals and score were decent. What interested me from the beginning of the project - specifically - is that it was born out of the Blender Foundation whose 3D Modeling tool was used to develop scenes, characters, and animation sequences.

Blender, if you are not familiar, is a 3D modeling tool that migrated to open-source a few years ago under the leadership of Ton Roosendaal – the program’s creator (also project lead on the film). Briefly, Ton – then owner of the bankrupt design firm NaN - raised funds from CG community members to buy the rights to the software from the company’s investors. 100,000 euros and seven weeks later(according to their website), the solution became open source - offered under the GNU GPL. Since then, Ton has remained head of the Blender Foundation, which is a Dutch non-profit, organized to maintain the core of the software as its primary goal.

As with any open-source project, how Blender grows and how it may or may not evolve into commercial success will be interesting to watch. Not that commercial success is its goal, per se, but I am intrigued at the dynamic evolving around its use. As I mentioned, the foundation is non-profit but its flagship technology (which is incidentally open source with proprietary file formats) is being used by many artists to support their own commercial projects. To me, it seems that the value chain is broken somehow…Contributing developers, I assume, are not paid by the foundation and, I further assume, that not all of them are successful 3d artists (suggesting that they are not benefiting from the capabilities of the tool). All hobbyists? Perhaps. If so, what do they seek to accomplish? Perhaps simply free software (FSF)…Perhaps something more. At any rate, the movie is getting tremendous press at the moment (especially in the EU), and the Blender 3D project seems to be moving forward quite well and at a steady pace.

If anyone from the Blender community cares to offer deeper insight on future direction, please feel free to email me or post here.

Incidentally, Blender is available on Windows (works great on XP), and some of our guys are already getting it setup for Vista’s Windows Presentation Foundation. Check out Daniel Lehenbauer’s blog for additional info…

A little ingenuity and some smart developers...

brentphillips — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 07:21:00 GMT

…Go along way. And we see the results of such efforts paying off in a big way for the government of Massachusetts who decided earlier this week to leverage a new openDocument Format converter built for Microsoft Office. You may remember that, a few months ago, the state of Mass decided that the recently iso-certified OpenDocument file format would be used as the document default by state agencies - leading to speculation that the entire state government may migrate to another productivity tool such as Open Office. Now, for the purpose of this post, I will not get into the ROI or TCO issues related to such a migration (and there are plenty), but I will point out that the converter was noted by Louis Gutierrez – CIO of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division - as being “more economical and less disruptive to end users.(zdnet)”

The end result? Massachusetts gets an open file format to exchange and archive unstructured data (documents) while meeting the needs of its internal and external customers with a best of breed productivity tool. In this particular case, to clarify, accessibility limitations with non-Microsoft productivity tools caused concern for many users. As such, and for the time being, Massachusetts will keep Microsoft Office on its desktops.

Kudos to the folks participating in the sourceforge project for the ODF converter. Interested in checking out the project? Follow on http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter/

Interoperability is People First...

brentphillips — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:39:00 GMT

Writing in from Berlin, where I just saw some great news on the wire...

We often discuss interoperability in terms of technology which, in and of itself, drives intense debate about best practices. Open source proponents posit that interoperability is best achieved through standards, while Microsoft takes a more holistic approach that includes standards - but goes well beyond.

To that end, Microsoft is careful not to forget that interoperability is, first and foremost, about business (processes and work flows), and, fundamentally, about people. The needs of both suggest how IT should behave...

Bringing people together can do alot for interop...For further reading: