Today at OSCON, Sam Ramji announced that Microsoft will become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF provides support for the Apache community of open source projects. There are over 60 top-level projects at the ASF that are characterized by an open and pragmatic software license. We have a firm commitment to ...

 I met both Aras and MindTouch last year. They are interesting companies because their business model is open source but their platform is the Microsoft stack. Oxymoronic?  Surprisingly, no.  I met Mark Lind, VP Marketing of Aras, last May at Software 2007. I was intrigued by Aras’s commitment to open sourcing their high end ...

April 18-19, 2008 | San Jose, California | The Tech Museum of Innovation   In the past three years, Ruby has become one of the most talked-about programming languages, and Ruby on Rails has become the framework of choice for many new web applications.   At the conference: ·         Hear John ...

I attended the 2nd Annual Microsoft Open Source Partner Forum yesterday in San Francisco.  The panel in which I had the most interest was a VC panel comprised of Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and executives of Jaspersoft, Mindtouch and SpikeSource, all Microsoft ...

March 24, 2008 | San Francisco, California | The Palace Hotel Based on the success of last year's forum and request for similar events from attendees, Microsoft is pleased to announce the second Open Source ISV Forum for solution providers using open source and open commercial software. This forum is for senior executives and decision makers ...

  Last week, we officialised an 8 months partnership with Talend, a french Open Source ISV, editing an ETL called Talend Open Studio. (Backed by AGF Private Equity & Galileo Partners). Talend is both a competitor and a partner for Microsoft: more than 70% of their users base runs on Windows and we have a competitive offer called ...

  IDC released a new study October 17 (commissioned by Microsoft annually). Microsoft has the largest partner ecosystem in the IT world From the c|net blog by Martin LaMonica: “There are about 14 million people working at companies that touch Microsoft software in some way, either as hardware distributors, services companies, or software ...

As you certainly know, CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback. Codeplex hosts Open Source project written on several platforms (not only ...

Excellent artricle in Computerworld, and subsequent posts, on the topic of Open Source. From the Computerworld article, Has Open Source Lost its Halo? the author, Eric Lai, sets out the inevitable conclusion: Despite occasional protests from oldtimers -- the heated backlash against the Microsoft-Novell détente, for example -- ...

Next week I'm on a panel at the WSA Investment Forum 2005. The panel will discuss software platforms, but it's really to discuss OSS vs MS. I'm MS. I feel al little like a human in Animal Farm. The moderator asked for "themes and questions." Ive laid out mine below (thanks to a lot of insight from Sam Ramji at MSFT). As far as I know, ...