Microsoft funds Apache

Microsoft, one of the biggest rivals to open-source programming, has begun funding the Apache Software Foundation, one of open-source software’s biggest supporters.

“Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software,” said Sam Ramji, a senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention, and noted Microsoft’s support of Apache on the software company’s Port 25 blog as well.

Obviously you might think this an opportune moment to cue up the soundtracks of record needles screeching and cars crashing into each other. But hold your horses.

For one thing, some within Microsoft have for years been making various encouraging words about open-source software, even though others have engaged in serious trash-talking. The company has no apparent desire to let the programming world have its way with Windows, as is possible with Linux, but Microsoft has been trying to make nice in some circles.

Playing nice with open source
For example, Microsoft has released its own open-source licenses and has put some technology under its Open Specification Promise, which lets open-source programmers use it. Also on Friday, Ramji said that policy makes it clear the promise applies to commercial uses of the technology, too.

Another example: Microsoft has been working closely with Zend for Windows support of PHP, an open-source project that lets servers create Web pages on the fly.

PHP is often used in conjunction with other open-source components: Linux, the Apache Web server software that’s used to dish up Web pages, and the MySQL database that’s used to store the data used to build Web pages elements such as online catalog pages or online forum postings. In fact, the four are used often enough that there’s an acronym for it: LAMP.

But there’s also the idea of WISP, which substitutes many of Microsoft’s own components: Windows, Internet Information Services for a Web server, and SQL Server for the database. On Friday, Microsoft released a patch to ADOdb, a package PHP uses to access databases. The patch lets PHP use SQL Server.

In other words, some parts of Microsoft are learning how to play nice with some parts of the open-source world.

Apache’s liberal license
Second is the Apache License that governs the foundation’s projects. Many of Microsoft’s attacks on open-source software were aimed at the General Public License, which has a reciprocity provision: If you make a change to a GPL project, then distribute software employing that change, you must share the change under the GPL.

The Apache License, though, lets programmers take software and combine it with proprietary software in any way, with no obligation to share. That’s how IBM, for example, uses the Apache Web server software in its proprietary WebSphere product.

For Microsoft, that means Apache’s projects can be used within Microsoft. And there are some that could be of interest.

Apache: Useful projects
Third is what the Apache Software Foundation is up to.

When it began, Apache didn’t have too many projects under its umbrella besides the HTTP Web server that has surpassed Microsoft’s competing products in market share since at least 1995, according to Netcraft’s Web server survey.

Now Apache has dozens of projects.

Here’s one that Microsoft, given its so-far fruitless efforts to catch up to Google in search, might enjoy: Hadoop, an open-source version of Google’s MapReduce algorithm that’s instrumental to processing huge data sets. Yahoo contributes to Hadoop and uses it in its own operations.

There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from using Hadoop or any other Apache project without funding Apache, but sponsorship makes some sense for political and practical reasons.

~GGG~

Google Browser Sync is now Open source!

The technology “Browser Sync” developed by Google has been made open source.

Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

check out : http://code.google.com/p/browsersync/wiki/HackingBrowserSync

The browsersync extension is however no longer available for download. So roll up your sleeves and start developing!

#gnufreak GGG

Symbian Shifts Mobile World to Open Source

On Tuesday, companies including Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone announced that they will work together to make the Symbian OS open source. They will offer it under a royalty-free license to members of a new nonprofit group called the Symbian Foundation.

Symbian’s decision to make its source code freely available tips the scales in favor of open-source software in smartphones and could make it harder for Microsoft, and even other open-source platforms like Google’s Android and Linux, to compete.

Symbian is used in about 60 percent of the world’s smartphones, which means that open-source software will soon drive the majority of those devices. The proprietary model behind mobile operating systems from Microsoft, Research In Motion and Apple, then, will for the first time be in the minority. Symbian will become the biggest, but not the only, open-source game in town. Others include the LiMo Foundation, which is working on a mobile Linux-based operating system, and Google’s Android, also an open Linux-based OS.

“If you look at the assets being contributed to the [Symbian] Foundation, we’re talking about a platform with 200 million users, 10 years of development, support from multiple shipping vendors and operators ready today” Mary McDowell, Nokia’s chief development officer, agreed. She may have been referring to a report on Tuesday that Google’s Android project is progressing more slowly than expected, due in part to challenges involved with working with mobile operators. Google is running up against the same difficulties that any new entrant would in developing a new mobile operating system.

However, Symbian competitors say it remains to be seen whether the open-source effort will be less controlled by Nokia. “One of the challenges for Symbian will be to transform what’s been a for-profit, vendor-driven organization into something that produces a handset OS that truly does reflect the requirements and market demands of the entire mobile ecosystems,” said Andrew Shikiar, director of global marketing for the LiMo Foundation. “I think they may face some challenges in finding Nokia competitors eager to support the output, due to some of the history behind the Symbian platform.”

Microsoft thinks differently. “I’ve been asked, Are we changing our strategy?” said Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for Windows Mobile. “Absolutely not.”

By moving to open source, Symbian “opens themselves to the same challenges that other open-source OSes have encountered, which is fragmentation,” he said.

The shift that Symbian is causing toward most smartphones being open source is a significant one for the mobile market.