Sam Ramji - history.forward()

We are hosting a confab in Seattle this week with fellow evangelists from around the world.

We kicked the day off with a keynote from Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy.

He was pumped from all the announcements from OSCON on Friday July 25th.

In summary, he covered :

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.  

We have tested over 100 community PHP applications and found them to run on IIS with no changes required.   Hank Janssen and Garrett Serack of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have been championing this work from the beginning, and I thank them for it.

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.  

We have established a clarification to the OSP that guarantees developer rights to build software of any kind and for any purpose using these specifications, including commercial use.

I am grateful to Andy Oliver, the creator and maintainer of Apache POI, for contacting me back in June with a hope that Microsoft could supply the necessary rights for POI. These include: rights for Office Binary document formats; Open XML; and the right to intentionally subset, have partial implementations, or defects in implementation of these specification. Andy offered his thoughts here .

Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

More details on the Port25 Blog : history.forward()

Techmeme has a lot of coverage

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Pretty cool!

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