Microsoft gives Apache cash to promote open source
Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project.
Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the
open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software
Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing
open-source project.
Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext
Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free
specifications for Windows Server and .NET Framework protocols as part
of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company
announced its plans at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now
being held in Portland, Oregon.
Under increased global pressure from technology regulators and
open-source competitors, Microsoft has moved toward a more open
development policy for some time. In February it made its boldest move
yet to support open source by promising greater transparency in both
its software development and business practices, and opening up
previously proprietary APIs to some of its major products, such as
Windows and Office, for third-party use.
On Friday, Microsoft strengthened those efforts by becoming a platinum sponsor
of Apache, a sponsorship that includes a US$100,000 donation to the
organisation. According to Microsoft, it has communicated with Apache
in the past but has never contributed to the foundation in this way.
Microsoft also is providing code to a project called ADOdb, which is a
database abstraction library that allows PHP-based applications to
communicate with a range of databases. PHP is an open-source, freely
available scripting language developers widely use for web development.
Through Microsoft's contribution, ADOdb can now communicate natively with SQL Server's database driver, the company said.
Microsoft is adding to the list of protocols covered under its Open
Specification Promise (OSP) as well, including protocols for
technologies built into Windows Server and the .NET Framework.
The company launched OSP in September 2006 as a pledge that it would
not take any patent-enforcement action against those who use certain
technology APIs. Protocols released as part of OSP can be freely used
by third-party developers.
In addition to its increased open-source investments, Microsoft
released updates to IronRuby, an implementation of the Ruby programming
language for Microsoft's .NET programming framework. The company said
it plans to ship all standard Ruby libraries implemented in the Ruby
programming language as part of its IronRuby distribution.
It's also participating in the RubySpec project, which aims to write a
publishable specification for the Ruby programming language, and has
created a separate open-source project under the Microsoft Public
Licence called IronRuby-Contrib. That project aims to promote
collaborative development of code for IronRuby.
