TechNet Port25 has a short little blog from Richard Wilder, the… *draws breath* Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at Microsoft. First off, that is a very long title. I wonder when I will get one of those. Anyway, Richard makes a few notes about his stance and about that he is “pleased” with the direction that Microsoft is taking in regards to open source and openness.

Yet, 99.9% of the code that Microsoft develops continues to be closed source.

Microsoft has made some strides in being open. The fact that we are asked to blog about this very issue, with no editorial oversight by Microsoft, is some evidence of that. Moreover, Microsoft’s other forays into open source are also nice to see.

However, again, 99.9% of the code that Microsoft develops continues to be closed source.

How big of a change has really occurred at Microsoft?

What are the big Open Source projects based on or intertwined with the Microsoft .Net Framework? I knew of a couple of projects. But, I had a hard time getting beyond my personal recollections when I searched using Google in various ways. So, here’s the list of .Net based Open Source projects that I could remember.

- DekiWiki: Wiki
- DotNetNuke: Web development framework
- Mono Project: .Net port for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris
- Moonlight - Mono: Microsoft Silverlight port for Linux based on Mono
- Paint.net: Bitmap graphics editor
- SharpDevelop: IDE for C#/VB.net
- ZedGraph: .Net class library for charts and graphs

I guess I can also include…

NASA World Wind

…even though the .Net version has been abandoned when the project moved to Java.

So, what are the other popular Open Source projects based on .Net?

Microsoft’s John Lam announced the availability of ready-to-use binaries of the IronRuby alpha-release at OSCON last week. You can read more about it in his blog at…

IronRuby at OSCON

You can find the ZIP file download at…

RubyForge IronRuby Project download page

There’s no installer since it really doesn’t need one. Here’s what I did to make life a little easier for me. I installed it on both a Vista PC and an XP PC.

- Open the ZIP file using Windows Explorer. You don’t need any special software to open a ZIP file.
- Copy the folder named ironruby to C:\Program Files (on XP)
- Go to the bin subdirectory
- Right click on ir.exe and select . This will create a shortcut int he bin directory on XP. If you are using Vista, the shortcut will be placed on your Desktop instead.
- Right click the Start button and select Open all useres
- Cut the shortcut from the bin subdirectory and put it where it makes sense in your Start folder/menu hierarchy.
- Rename the Shortcut to ir.exe to something else if you want. I cleverly renamed it to IronRuby on my PC

So, we now have three first-class .Net dynamic languages available for Windows XP/Vista: PowerShell, IronPython, and IronRuby. Nice.

OK, I was caught by surprise (but pleased anyway) by these announcements by Microsoft’s Sam Ramji (Senior Director of Platform Strategy) in his blog entry…

history.forward()

The two that interested me most are…

1. Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Apache Foundation.

2. ADOdb patch for a native driver for PHP”built by the SQL Server team.

My take on both of these announcements is that they will enable Windows shops to more easily seriously consider running an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP and maybe Python and Perl too) stack on Windows (WAMP). This should help AMP based web products get some consideration in these Windows shops.

A powerful 6.8 earthquake struck near Hachinohe, Japan earlier this week (USA Today: Earthquake hits Japan, more than 100 injured). My wife and daughter happened to be about 200 miles south-southwest of the quake when it struck shortly after midnight (my daughter is participating in a sporting event there). Everyone there is safe, btw. But, a curious thing was noted when everyone gathered in the morning: All the parents accompanying their children felt the tremors and woke up. None of the kinds (between 6 and 13) noticed the tremors and slept through the night.

Bryan Kirschner (Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft) in his blog item titled…

Participating Actively

…responds to Infoworld’s Rodrigues & Urlocker commentary…

Microsoft at OSCON

…who wrote: Brian Kirschner pointed out that Microsoft has 400 open source projects. Most people would struggle to name even a handful. (Ok, at MySQL we use WiX, the Windows Intaller (sic), so I know about that one, and also IronPython sounds cool.) Kirschner, Sam Ramji and others are helping Microsoft develop a better understanding of open source, but Microsoft still has a long way to go towards putting it into action..

I think Rodrigues & Urlocker make a good point. And, while I can’t name many of the 400 Microsoft open sourced projects either, I can think of two that could make a huge difference: IronPython and IronRuby. Back in the old days, PC-DOS (IBM) and MS-DOS (everyone else) came with BASIC or GW-BASIC and a couple of sample apps. I’d bet a lot of people started programming with one of these versions of Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter and made their early computing days more productive by writing little apps to get a few things done. That is one of the aspects of computing that has nearly disappeared because Microsoft Windows doesn’t ship with a simple programming environment anymore. Mac OS X, on the other hand, not only ships with a bunch of Open Source development tools like Ruby, but also provides their XCode and Automator to let anyone develop anything from little toy utilities to full blown applications. Microsoft has both PowerShell and Visual Studio Express Editions available as free downloads. But, PowerShell is mostly aimed at system administrators while Visual Studio Express Editions are a bit heavy for even casual programming.

I think Microsoft should include IronPython, IronRuby, and some lightweight (but relatively powerful) editor like Notepad++ in every copy of Windows 7 when it is released. It would not only provide a strong message of Microsoft’s support of interoperating with Open Source products (in this case, their own), but might restart the casual programming movement that fired up the computing revolution.

I’ve been cleaning up and re-organizing my home office this week and found all kinds of stuff that didn’t survive into the 21st century for one reason or other. In the photo above, you can see an OS/2 binder, a 5.25″ floppy, a digital tape labeled 350 but was actually a 170MB (not GB) tape that might get near 350MB with compression, a 56Kbps PC Card modem, a font cartridge for the HP Deskjet, and one of the manuals from Paradox for Windows. In many cases, it appears to me (as an outsider) that many of the entities behind these products simply didn’t notice the various technology quakes shaking the industry and became irrelevant. It should be interesting to see which of today’s products and technologies are irrelevant in 2018.

Now, back to cleaning up my home office. Any suggestions what I should do with a couple of hundred CDs from beta tests and ancient MSDN subscriptions? Some sort of giant artwork? :-)

Yesterday, I commented on Andy Patrizio excellent blog about some potentially high-reward buy-outs/merges, and one of those was Microsoft and Salesforce.com. (Yesterday I focused on Dell potentially buying SGI.) I did some thinking about Microsoft and Salesforce and I like that idea even more than I like the idea of Dell buying out SGI.

Here is why:

• Microsoft is pushing into the whole SaaS world, certainly, but it is lagging behind. This is partially because it has no choice but to keep a lot of focus on its sources of income.
• Salesforce.com definitely knows what its doing and is building a significant platform in the cloud on which to build future enterprise applications.
• Salesforce.com is agile. Microsoft, alas, is not.
• Salesforce.com is not OS-driven, it’s capabilities-driven.

All that said, if Microsoft, as it currently exist, were to buy or try to merge with Salesforce, then Salesforce would simply cease to exist. To counter this, Patrizio talks about Microsoft spinning off its low-end divisions and focusing on the mid- and enterprise-market.

I have to admit I am not so sure about that last part. Much of Microsoft’s advantage is based on the sheer number of users. It can leverage those numbers to get mindshare and to finance projects which begin with a loss but that can develop into new profit centers. So this would certainly be a HUGE gamble.

What do you think?

Computerworld has an article titled…

Study: IT jobs will drop in 2009

…that reports the findings of a Goldman-Sachs survey of top CIOs (100 decision making managers at mostly Fortune 1000 firms). The article quotes Goldman Sachs speaking in terms of a cost-constrained IT budget scenario. OK, that makes sense given the current economic outlook. They go on to say that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. This makes sense too. The 3rd through 5th priorities are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. So far, so good. The summary finishes up saying that the bottom of the priority list consists of grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing.

Charles King of Pund-IT, Inc., is quoted saying that the surveyed managers and CIOs simply don’t understand the value of their low-priority items. I agree with Mr. King. In an budget constrained IT environment, Open Source and Cloud Computing are exactly the kinds of technologies that should at least be evaluated.

If you run into any of the Microsoft Open Source Labs (Port 25) people at OSCON, you might want to ask them if they could say a few words about these items sent to the bottom of the priority list by Fortune 1000 decision makers.

Snazzy headline, no? Andy Patrizio over at internetnews just made a very good case for some e-marriages, including:

• Apple and nVidia
• Dell and SGI
• Microsoft and Salesforce.com

I have to admit that it is difficult to argue with the logic, although I am sure a little more time of thinking on this would end the insanity. Or perhaps not.

Let’s talk about Dell and SGI for one. SGI, which, frankly, I had rather forgotten about, is still out there and focusing on high-end supercomputing. This is not exactly news to anyone, and has not been for a while I suppose. SGI has always focused on the high-end market (although they did make a push toward the mass market if I remember correctly), and when they started getting into financial trouble they began to regear and refocus. It seems that their strategy may be working.

SGI seems to be making the “niche player” come back in style. The computer market is a commodity market. Only the high-end, including mainframes and supercomputers, can be considered specialized. SGI knows this and instead of fighting a losing battle with IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, and others, they instead are taking advantage of their existing expertise.

A Dell buy-out could very well give Dell that high-end appeal that it lacks. However, it could also saddle Dell with a set of skills that it cannot handle or, more to the point, capitalize on. Dell is a mass-market company. That is what they do. It’s not often that I visit a colo facility anymore, but when I do all I really see are blue lights spread across a considerable amount of square feet, and we all know what those blue lights are.

I’m going to give some more thought to Patrizio idea about Microsoft and Salesforce and blog about that tomorrow. Hmm. Interesting.

P.S. Sorry for the whole “e-marriages” word.

Microsoft’s Port 25 announced that MindTouch has a beta MSI installer for their Deki Wiki software. So, I decided to install it in Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and ran into a MySQL problem in my first attempt. Fortunately for me, eagle eye Max noticed the doesn’t have a default value part of the error message and told me that the problem is that the freshly installed copy of MySQL 5.0.51b sets SQL to strict mode that disallows empty fields (no default value). So, I went to C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\my.ini and commented out the line as shown below.

This led to a successful configuration and installation of MySQL tables (see below).

One oddity showed up though. For some reason, MindTouch has Google Analytics code with the key US-68075-16 reporting back. You can strip this out. But, I’m curious why every installation has a Google Analytics code embedded in it (see below).

However, as you can see from the screen cap below, Deki Wiki is indeed running on my virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition now.

I took a look at MindTouch’s Deki Wiki about a year ago. I decided to use Mediawiki for the project but recall being impressed with a number of Deki Wiki’s features. One of the reasons I decided not to use Deki Wiki was the need to install and maintain Mono on my Linux box. Mediawiki just needed a LAMP (where P = PHP in this case) platform stack that was already a supported stack. Adding Mono would increase the stack management support requirements.

So, I was interested to learn that MindTouch announced a beta release of a Deki Wiki MSI installer for Windows Server 2008 (and 2003 later).

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

A WIMP (Windows+.NET, IIS, MySQL, PHP) environment is an easily supportable environment for a Windows-focused shop. So, I decided to take a look at this beta release and create a test installation.

Deki Wiki needs MySQL 5.0.45 or newer. So, I installed MysQL 5.0.51b (the current production release) on a clean Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition installation with all current Windows patches applied. This is running in a VMware Fusion virtual machine. The initial Deki Wiki installation phase seemed to go smoothly. I noted that it enabled FastCGI for IIS7. Looking at the installation directories, I saw that it also installed a PHP engine for its use.

However, as you can see from the screencap above, Deki Wiki’s configuration failed while attempting to insert a record into MySQL. I’ll send an email message to MindTouch support and point them to this blog. it is a beta-release. So, these kinds of problems can be expected. I’m hoping to be able to successfully install and test the Deki Wiki MSI installer on its next release.

So in a recent blog I brought up IBM Lotus Symphony, and during the discussion that followed a mention was made about Abiword. I have to admit, I have not looked at Abiword in a VERY LONG TIME.

I just checked out Abiword again on their website, and I have to say they have made a lot of progress. It is not a bad piece of software. And.. It’s light. Microsoft Office is a big application. OpenOffice is a big application. But Abiword is rather targeted and not all that large. At all. A quick run through a download seems to be pretty snappy.

Hmm. Not a bad choice for PCs that don’t have Microsoft Office installed at the factory..

AbiWord: A Worthy, Free Microsoft Alternative

AbiWord: A Scalpel, Not a Chain Saw

If you come from a UNIX/Linux background, you probably rubbed your chin or scratched your head thinking two things when Microsoft announced PowerShell (codenamed Monad when it the first beta was released in 2005): 1. Well, it is about time! 2. Why didn’t they just port or copy Bash (or csh or zsh or whatever you favorite *nix shell is)?

Linux Magazine’s Marcus Nasarek took the issue literally and wrote a 2-page PDF document comparing and constrasting Bash and PowerShell. The download is linked at…

SHELL GAMES : Comparing Bash with the Windows Vista shell

For me, PowerShell has had a odd learning curve. It sort of looks like the old DOS CMD shell when you first bring it up. But, that is all there is: A superficial resemblance. This might throw off Windows/DOS users. It also has kind of a Bash/Perl feel to it at first. But, the differences show up pretty fast as you explore PowerShell. Nasarek’s article does a good job of comparing and contrasting Bash and PowerShell in the 2 page PDF. Any *nix shell user who may need to work with PowerShell on Windows Servers will find this article interesting.

Microsoft Port 25 PowerShell blog posts

During the next few months, I will be presenting a brand-new talk titled "Suddenly Psychic: Knowing Everything About Everyone" at various conferences around the world. I will be presenting it with Akshay Aggarwal, a good friend of mine. Akshay and I have enjoyed researching the business, security, criminal, social, and psychological implications of this topic, and we look forward to sharing our research with you.

Currently, this talk is scheduled debut at the Microsoft Blue Hat Conference [v8] in October, followed by Hack in the Box in Kuala Lumpur.

Every now and then I get the urge to the the Microsoft Open Source Labs people to talk to the freeware Visual Studio Express group about tweaks to make it aware of various FOSS languages like Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. After all, way back in 2001, Microsoft worked with ActiveState to produce Visual Perl and Visual Python. There’s also a current 3rd party project on Microsoft Codeplex named IronPython Studio that uses the royalty free Visual Studio 2008 Shell runtime that doesn’t need Visual Studio itself to be installed.

I usually back off the idea because there are a number of free and/or Open Source developer platforms and advanced programmer’s editors that are also multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/BSD/UNIX). Four that I have used over the years are Eclipse (gave up on it), NetBeans (playing with it), Komodo Edit (use it frequently), and jEdit (used to use it a lot but have not recently). But, I still think it would be a good idea to tweak a free Visual Studio Express edition for IronPython, IronRuby, and PHP.

There is, btw, a third party for-fee tool for the full Visual Studio 2005/2008 and PHP: VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio. There’s also a prototype form designer for IronRuby: IronRuby Visual Designer.

OK, I admit the subject line is a bit misleading. IronPython 2.0 Beta 3 has nothing to do with Python 3.0. However, since Python 3.0 might be released as early as next month (August), I wondered if there are Python 3.0 related plans for IronPython.

So, I checked various Microsoft IronPython blogs….

- The IronPython Team Blog
- Jim Hugunin’s blog
- Harry Pierson’s blog
- Dino Viehland’s blog
- Srivatsn Narayanan blog

…and didn’t see anything regarding Python 3.0. So, I used Google and found Michael Foord’s blog entry titled…

Python 3.0, IronPython 3.0, Robots, Talks and Python in Interesting Places

…who way back in early 2007 reported from PyCon that… Importantly, Python 3.0 was up on the list. The IronPython team is definitely intending to support Python 3.0.

So, IronPython 2.0 looks like it is on track. Python 3.0 looks like it is close to release. The question is when these two will sync up.

Microsoft Port 25 IronPython blog items

I just read this little news release about the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church moving away from Windows and Microsoft to open source solutions. Very interesting! What really causes my eye was this:

Office will be the first to go. Lymbers had two alternatives for replacing Microsoft Office: OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice source code. He decided to go with the IBM solution, on security and support grounds.

The fact that he went with Lotus Symphony over OpenOffice is more interesting to me than the fact that he is leaving Microsoft Office for OpenOffice. Why? Because IBM is a household name, while OpenOffice is most certainly not.

I wonder how many more consumers, small businesses, and enterprises would be more open to the OpenOffice journey if they were able to go along for the ride with IBM? Lotus Symphony is OpenOffice+, from what I have seen, so you get the benefit of OpenOffice and open source and the name of IBM.

Plus, you have the option of getting support from IBM.

And that is a major selling point.

And read this little ditty:

Organizations which Lymbers’ services — including schools, youth groups and aged care villages — will be able to go onto the Web, and click on an icon which is via thin client that will open an open-source Word. “They can open it up and it’s totally safe and secure,” Lymbers said.

Death of the Desktop you say?

I just read about…

SharpOS 0.0.1

…which is an Open Source project attempting to write an Operating System (OS) in C# based on Microsoft .Net technology. I’m not sure about the .Net part of the statement. But, I downloaded the 840KB (that’s right, kilobytes, not mega- or giga-bytes) ISO file and fired it up in virtual machine using Virtual Box running on a Mac (OS X 10.5 Leopard). As you might guess from the 0.0.1 release number, the project is still in the early stages of development. But, combined with their SharpSQL relational database (no binaries released for this one yet), they should have an interesting platform to look at in a couple of years.

I wonder if someone from the Microsoft Open Source Labs group has spoken with the members of this project yet?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The operating system on your computer is becoming less and less important. Really. In the next three to four years, I think the desktop OS will become a minimal consideration. Why?

Because most people could care less what OS they are running.

They just want to be able to:

• Do their work.
• Access their documents.
• Read and send email.
• Goof around.

That’s about it.

So how is that happening? Well, obviously the whole Web experience is having a huge impact. Moreover, some things that before were a pain or at least difficult, e.g., using webmail as your only email client, is slowly going the way of the dinosaur. Look at gAttach, which lets you use Gmail as your default email application for Windows. You can email people, attach files, and even use Send To right from your desktop.

At a higher level, we have companies like Citrix and even Microsoft which is making server computing more critical every day to enterprises. Server computing is probably going to be one of the strongest motivators for minimizing the importance of the desktop OS. Really, does it matter if you are running Windows Vista if all of your enterprise applications are available via seamless windows on a Citrix server?

This is good for Linux and open source operating systems in general. If the underlying desktop OS doesn’t matter because application compatibility issues go away, then why not run Linux on all of your desktop systems in a corporate environment?

Naturally, this begs a future blog on how these organizations can manage Linux and other open source OSs in the same way that they can with AD and GPOs.

The other month I blogged about OpenOffice and the fact that it tends to be marginalized in the face of free and commercial products. Most readers did not particularly like that stance. Lou Dolinar just blogged about OpenOffice, but focused instead on what is actually holding it back.

Lou makes some good points, including notes on:

• Compatibility
• Lock-in
• OpenXML

Notice that the technology of OpenOffice is not really mentioned outside of how it is able to interact with Microsoft Office files. The OpenXML format was touted as being a way out of this, but OpenXML does not exactly have the best reputation in the open source community right now.

All this said, I am still very curious about the technology side, especially when it comes to manageability in a large environment. How well does OpenOffice fare against Office in terms of automated deployment, configuration, and upgrades? What has been your experience?

Apache released their HTTP Server 2.2.9 on Friday the 13th last month (obviously no superstitious people on the release team).

Apache HTTP Server 2.2.9 Released

Every now and then, I install the latest Apache web server on a Windows server just to see what it looks like there (compared to the Linux installations I use for production and testing). So, it is always interesting to read the Apache Windows README text to see what it says. One of the more interesting warnings is for people running Windows NT 4.0 or older (Windows 95, etc.) to move to another platform (like Linux). It looks like Windows 2000 is still supported. So, this seems like a reasonable request to me. The question that comes to mind though is: Who is running any version of Apache httpd on Windows 95, 98, or NT 4? And, why are they running it on these ancient versions of Windows? I’m guessing there are some pretty interesting stories out there. And, if you have any to share, I’m sure other people are curious too.

Microsoft Port 25 Apache rellated blog items

Just spotted this by Paula Bach over on Microsoft’s Port 25 site…

CodePlex project developers wanted

The data from the project will be used for Paula’s PhD dissertation project which looks at usability support features in Open Source projects.

Teaching Open Source development requires Open Source ways. I teach at Seneca College in Toronto, and we’ve been teaching inside the Mozilla community for the last three years with some very good results (I’ll be talking about this at OLS in a few weeks).

I’m really excited about combining two of my passions this fall: teaching Open Source, and working with the Fedora project. The LUX program will take students with an existing diploma, degree, or industry experience into the Fedora project over the course of a year, enabling them to experience open source from the inside. I’ll periodically blog about our experience here, and if you’re interested in following along, I recommend subscribing to the opensource@seneca planet.