Are Microsoft's open-source actions enough?

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Microsoft could struggle pulling off an image change. Kathleen Lau reports

By Kathleen Lau | Toronto | Monday, 13 October, 2008

While Microsoft realises there is benefit to collaborating with the open source community from an interoperability perspective, it may prove difficult to change its pro-proprietary image, says an open source analyst.

Microsoft was a company focused on intellectual property claims where "not more than two years ago it claimed that Linux software infringed on some of its 235 patents," says Jay Lyman with The 451 Group. Yet, he adds, it's hard to argue with the work that the software giant is doing with Novell, and of the presence it has on SourceForge, the development and download repository of open source code.

Indeed, the company announced the Microsoft Open Source Technology Centre this year, which was essentially a unification of the Open Source Software Lab opened in Redmond three years ago, and the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab in Massachusetts a year ago.

While the centre may not physically be one building, the unification "was really an opportunity for us to pull the work together to be very focused on a few areas", says Tom Hanrahan, director of the Microsoft Open Source Technology Centre.

With a total of 15 staff between both locations, the centre is funded by Microsoft but resourced by both Microsoft and Novell. The Cambridge Lab, for instance, has an even split of Novell and Microsoft staff.

The Centre's areas of focus, continued Hanrahan, include promoting cooperation and collaboration between Microsoft and the open source community toward identifying specific projects that will grow that relationship, and work at expanding support for open source software running on the Windows platform, and interoperability between Linux and Windows.

Specifically, one such project, Moonlight, entails collaborating with Novell to make Microsoft's rich internet application technology Silverlight accessible to both Linux and Windows platform users.

The Cambridge Lab is specifically focused on virtualisation and ensuring that guest operating systems in a virtual environment can run well on both Microsoft's Hyper-V and the open source community's Xen. To that end, the centre has in place a uniform testing infrastructure to run and share test results.

"We can really do a deep dive on performance issues and work together to resolve them both on the Windows platform and on the Linux platform," says Hanrahan.

Interoperability of system management using the WS-Management Protocol, too, is an ongoing project to ensure Microsoft's System Centre and Novell's ZenWorks Orchestrator can manage heterogeneous datacentres on both Linux and Windows platforms.

The centre also works with the Samba community on storage technologies, currently specifically around interoperability testing between file and print services, but has begun discussions around identity management as well.

In light of its open source friendly moves, Lyman does believe Microsoft has changed as a company from an open source interoperability perspective, however, like any large entity, he thinks it can't just entertain a single approach. "Most vendors don't have just one view and that's probably a good thing," says Lyman, adding that as a public company, Microsoft has shareholders to answer to.

But scepticism in the open source community of Microsoft's pro-open source moves is justified, thinks Lyman, given the company's history and actions. In addition to the accusations of patent infringement, he cites the sensitive topic of the ISO approval of Microsoft's OOXML format.

"In general there's growing acceptance," says Lyman, "but the progress that it makes it limits itself sometimes with other actions or activities that contribute and reinforce scepticism."

But part of the controversy is the extent to which open source software and open standard developers and supporters should go to make their technologies work with those of Microsoft's, says Lyman. "I think there is some feeling that you can work forever on that and Microsoft will never let it happen."

Hanrahan says the centre is focused this year on its relationship with the Samba community, of which some members are currently in Redmond to do work on Active Directory and identity management.

The PHP community is also a strong area of interest, he says, and the centre recently hired a PHP contributor to help work on interoperability on Windows.