Microsoft and Open Source

It never fails that when I am introduced to a big Open Source supporter one of the first things I hear is "and of course Microsoft hates Open Source." Well actually they don't. Microsoft competes with some Open Source products but that is not the same as hating.

Also Open Source (OSS) is more of a development process than a company and we don't really even compete with different development processes. In fact Microsoft supports a number of open source efforts and Microsoft employees contribute to some of them on their own time as well.

Microsoft just announced a new website to talk about Microsoft, the OSS community and the interaction between the two. The new site is located at https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7185835

Other OSS at Microsoft links:

· Port 25 – Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft (with blog posts by members of Microsoft's Open Source lab)

· Codeplex – Microsoft’s open source project hosting site (I linked to one of the education related projects there last week.)

· Shared Source – Microsoft’s set of programs for sharing source code with customers, partners, governments, researchers, etc.

· John Lam’s Blog – John is a Microsoft blogger who blogs on IronRuby, Dynamic Language Runtime, Silverlight, and related projects. (IronRuby was released last week BTW)

· Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum –  Microsoft Partner Program through with offers for OSS ISVs

Oh and Microsoft doesn't hate Apple either. I like to remind people that Microsoft's large Macintosh Business Unit creates and sells the wildly popular Office: Mac software. Microsoft sells a lot of software for the Apple.