Microsoft to developers: ‘Open source is a choice
MANILA, Philippines -- At the Cebu open source summit, Microsoft was telling developers it is ready to help them go "primetime." Microsoft's presence in the summit drew quite an impact, if not harmless ribbing.
In a presentation by noted IT entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, mentioning indicators that open source is ready for primetime deployment, one answer reads: "The number of times in a month Microsoft says: ‘We support open source.’"
"My answer to that was: ‘We should have done it earlier,’” said Abet Dela Cruz, Microsoft Philippines platform strategy manager, narrating Monday's panel discussion at the Cebu summit.
Dela Cruz represented Microsoft in the panel along with representatives from IBM and Red Hat.
"It took IBM about 10 years to be at this stage and it is only now that Microsoft is going in the same direction," said Dela Cruz, who is still in Cebu attending the two-day summit.
IBM has been a staunch supporter of open source although the tech giant does sell its own proprietary software.
"Open Source is a broad worldwide phenomenon. There are specific technologies that plug into it, and some of them compete with each other like (Microsoft) Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and IBM," Dela Cruz said in an interview with INQUIRER.net.
"But overall we see it (open source) as a long standing movement that will continue," he added.
Dela Cruz noted that within the SourceForge developer community, there are more than 77,000 listed applications that support Windows, more than half the same number of apps that work on Windows alone.
He noted that Microsoft has opened up APIs (application programming interfaces) on some of its core products such as Windows that enable developers to build applications on top of its platform.
Dela Cruz admitted not too many people recognize open source projects within Microsoft.
"At the end of the day, Linux or Windows were built not for the sake of having an OS alone. My job was to tell developers that they have a choice," he said.
