Announcing one more way Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities
I am really excited to be able to share with you today that Microsoft has announced a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.
My existing Interoperability Strategy team will form the nucleus of this new subsidiary, and I will serve as President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
The team has worked closely with many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft, 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.
We help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS; support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js, PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and work with the PhoneGap/Cordova and jQuery Mobile and other open source communities to support 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 many standards organizations. Microsoft Open Technologies is further demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities.
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.
The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined 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.
As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments.
I look forward to sharing more on all this in the months ahead, as well as to working not only with the existing open source developers and standards bodies we work with now, but with a range of new ones.
Thanks,
Jean
Comments
Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Congratulations on this news.Anonymous
April 12, 2012
WebGL, do you speak it? IE 0%, Chrome 88%, Firefox 42% More numbers there: http://webglstats.com/ Standard waiting to be implemented: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/ Put your money where your mouth is.Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Maybe a webgl implementation in their browser would be good way to follow standard ? :)Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Jean, Congratulations! Patrick Durusau Editor, OpenDocument Format, ISO/IEC 26300Anonymous
April 12, 2012
web web web? gimme one simple engangement in simple old desktop applications. any step is corrupted because a strategy behind. good bye*Anonymous
April 12, 2012
That's the reason I'm with Microsoft. Great news! Go cry, Apple.Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Looking forward to this! Hopefully someone at MS can start working with the internal teams and provider useable drivers for popular OS projects. E.g MSSQL drivers for NodeJS, Python etc.Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Now, could we make C# AND .Net open source and so the debate around Mono could go quiet?Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Wow. Buzzword bingo fans will be exploding after reading thisAnonymous
April 12, 2012
Wow! Please, make Java and Java EE better on Windows platform! Join to JCP!Anonymous
April 12, 2012
Love the direction you all have been headed lately, this is great news!Anonymous
April 13, 2012
Great Work. Love the openess of MS.Anonymous
April 13, 2012
Cher Monsieur Paoli, quelle bonne nouvelle de voir un éditeur majeur s'intéresser au monde de l'opensource ; cobol-it fondée en 2008 offre des solutions opensource aux clients et partenaires désirant quitter les environnements mainframe et offloader leurs applications vers des environnements windows ; espérant rencontre votre équipe quand vous serez prêts. cordialement www.cobol-it.comAnonymous
April 13, 2012
What I find so ironic is open source started as retaliation against Microsoft.Anonymous
April 13, 2012
I don't believe it for a second.Anonymous
April 13, 2012
Cool! Look forward to the next big thing your team has to offer!Anonymous
April 13, 2012
Do you have a twitter account? I'd like to follow your progress.Anonymous
April 13, 2012
i am not sure if this will be the best decision concerning ROI. best regards and all the best kodierschweinchen.blogspot.comAnonymous
April 13, 2012
"Linux is a cancer" - Steve Ballmer I'm assuming the separate corporate status is so that Microsoft can participate in the open source community without having to give up it's ability to then turn around and sue users of the resulting software using the patents of the parent organization? Looking forward to the fireworks!Anonymous
April 13, 2012
phbbt! look at the age old skype clients for linux. that tells the tale.! sorry, i just dont trust MSFT with openness and open source.Anonymous
April 13, 2012
happy about announcement, I wish C# will be open source language one day, making it easily better choice for statups, which eventually grows and keep with existing platform.Anonymous
April 14, 2012
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April 15, 2012
Open source didn't started as a retaliation against Microsoft...It's all about sharing and the concept was there even before Microsoft. Microsoft is late as usual (that's the reason I'm not with Microsoft :) )...but better late than never.Anonymous
April 15, 2012
How about supporting WebGL in IE10? In terms of openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source. //Anonymous
April 15, 2012
Did not realize that Mozilla Firefox was a window's program. 1Anonymous
April 16, 2012
I'll believe it when Microsoft abandons its anticompetitive patent litigation policy and fires Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez.Anonymous
April 17, 2012
So now the real port of the clr to any platform will start? ;)Anonymous
April 17, 2012
I think this is great to hear Microsoft is committed to working with open source as many developers would like to open there .NET apps to other platforms than just Windows (for example OS X and Linux). This announcement presents an opportunity for the C# language to possibly become the defacto of C++ and allow MS to compete more competitively and aggressively with Java. I look forward to more news about this Jean. Keep up the good work.Anonymous
April 18, 2012
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April 19, 2012
Great step forward. I'll be most interested in the Big Data domain; especially around Open Stack, and, NoSQL databases.Anonymous
April 19, 2012
Hi, When will MsOffice will open ODT documents? Can you answer that?Anonymous
April 20, 2012
Thanks for all the congratulations and kind words about last week's launch of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. We look forward to continuing to work closely with all our business groups on Interoperability, open source and open standards, as well as with many of you. Thanks again, Jean.Anonymous
April 20, 2012
After Netscape and a thousand other Microsoft "casualties" you would think a lesson has been learned, I guess not. Even the EU does not yet "get it".Anonymous
April 26, 2012
This is classic PR STUNT. All FUD. Do you think we don't get this nonsence. grow up and embrace opensource in the platform. That said, i like the way azure is going.Anonymous
May 03, 2012
Congratulations, Jean, for your contribution to this turn in MS strategy!! (Your former Kirkland neighbor)Anonymous
May 15, 2012
Wow! Great Work. Love the open of MsOffice.Anonymous
May 28, 2012
That is a great news, but I'm truly confused! I'm receiving contradicting signals from Microsoft. I've been Open Source Software developers for nearly 10 years now. Lately, I've been monitoring and even involved in CoApp.org project - an amazing idea to make FOSS development and use easier. Today, I read this arstechnica.com/.../no-cost-desktop-software-development-is-dead-on-windows-8 Could anyone explain me all these pivots by Microsoft? How Microsoft wants to encourage FOSS developers to target and build their software to Windows platform if Microsoft leaders shut down the main and the only path towards the goal - no-cost access to Visual C++ compiler and libraries?!?Anonymous
May 31, 2012
What are the chances Visual FoxPro goes open source?Anonymous
January 20, 2013
Where is your web site ?Anonymous
January 21, 2013
@MarkB Our site is here: www.interoperabilitybridges.com Stay tuned as we are working on redesigning this site!
- Olivier
Anonymous
December 04, 2013
After moving to Chrome; I've lost the ability to hear "AXIS Web Cams" used for security?! After doing several searches; I got to your "Windows Int Bridges" clicked on the "here" link, and was taken to a site that wanted to install "FireFox"? So before I did something I didn't wish to do I'm emailing you to ask about the instructions. I've pasted them off your site to this note: Visit www.interoperabilitybridges.com/wmp-extension-for-chrome Follow the on-screen instructions to download the plug-in. Click Save for the file in the downloads bar to confirm that you want to download the file. Don't worry -- saving the file won't harm your computer. Learn more about downloading files in Google Chrome. Open the set-up file. Click Run to start the Setup Wizard. Follow the instructions in the wizard to finish installing the plugin. Restart Google Chrome. I got a file downloaded, but was told I would be prompted to "Run" and it didn't, and wasn't a "wmpChrome.crx" file that does nothing? Lastly the Key Code uses ALL CAPS even if the letters are SmAlLer?! This is a Capital K, but your code key shows a lower case k as K vs k (bad display text). I'm Posting this here because the "Chrome Code" wouldn't take my 12 attempts At ENterIng the COde keY as displayed...Anonymous
May 13, 2014
This is really intriguing and ground breaking news. To all the ranters out there I'd observe that Microsoft is at its best (and ultimately commercially successful) when it focuses on making things great for developers - which this does. These are both scary and exciting times for those of us who make money selling software but I expect that the amount of opportunity that this creates will be massive.