Port 25: Open Source Community at Microsoft

Participate08

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:09:00 GMT

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in participate08. participate08 is a one-day summit held in coordination with the O'Reilly Open Source Conference(OSCON). It is designed to facilitate dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities and help explore opportunities for greater participation in the design, development, and deployment of software in the modern IT environment.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (...that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

Sometimes we have to focus on what I’ll call day-to-day issues: like what if a Microsoft team releases an application under an open source license (the Ms-PL) without making the source code available? (The answer is: the team, whose disconnect with our policy was 100% accidental and unintended—stepped up to strongly affirm their commitment to OSS best practices and voluntarily released it with source code, to their great credit.) These are important. Most of the time (as in this case) things turn out positively. But participate08 is focused on the big picture, or macro level issues—the future of distributed innovation in software and beyond; being a part of that sort of discussion with folks like our panelists is just mind-blowingly cool.

In the morning, we’ll be holding a small group, facilitated “executive session”—in the afternoon, the panel will star in an open session where we hope to have a great dialogue among the panel—and with the audience. If you will be at OSCON I hope you’ll join us in E145 at 1:30 PM!

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

jcannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:59:00 GMT

Our community knows that open source businesses are important to Microsoft. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that open source was a key theme in the recent Windows Server 2008 Launch. You can read more about that here.

One of the individuals we highlighted was Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO at Mindtouch. Mindtouch develops an open source collaboration platform. Today, I'm excited to have Robert Mason, Mindtouch Platform Engineer, update us on the progress Mindtouch has made in delivering a first class open source experience on Windows. Take it away Bob....

Short Demo Video: MindTouch Deki 8.05.2

This demo video goes through a lot of information quickly. It shows the basics of collaboration in MindTouch Deki and then demonstrates a mashup with a Microsoft Silverlight charting package. NOTE: With MindTouch Deki creating mashups, dynamic reports and dashboards does not require programming ability.

Hello! It’s great to be asked to guest blog here at Port 25. Last you had heard from us, we had written about MindTouch Deki from the start being written in C#, but running solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment. Well, that’s all about to change… I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

MindTouch Deki is an open source collective intelligence platform. In other words, it is an enterprise wiki that sits atop a web-services framework and enables mashups, dashboards, and dynamic reporting from disparate systems and databases. MindTouch Deki provides a unique collaboration tool for enterprises and workgroups. Rather than taking the less useful approach of other collaborative and Enterprise 2.0 applications by providing a simple walled-garden / point application, MindTouch has developed Deki with the collaborative intuition of a highly polished and robust enterprise wiki, but is also able to federate and mashup application and data silos. It was developed on Microsoft .NET using C#, and, until today, has only officially supported installations on Linux using Mono.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Download the MindTouch Deki MSI today. We're very excited to at last be offering support for Microsoft IIS 6 and 7 on Vista, Windows Server 2003, and 2008. MindTouch Deki has enjoyed a groundswell of adoption with daily downloads in the thousands; by (finally) introducing an easy and officially supported means of installing on Windows Server and Windows Vista we are expecting great things! Now, Systems Integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by "adding the 2.0" to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collaborative surface atop the existing infrastructure that they've already deployed.

Write MindTouch for more information about our web-oriented architecture or for a high level explanation read about our technologies at the website. Finally, expect to see more Microsoft-related updates from MindTouch in the coming months… Subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at www.MindTouch.com to stay up to date on new Microsoft related products and offerings.

Thanks,
Bob Mason

Sandcastle Redux

Sam Ramji — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT

I am very pleased to announce that the Microsoft SandCastle project team has reconfirmed its strong support for the Ms-PL and is preparing to release all source code for the Sandcastle project immediately. This was a non-trivial effort and I applaud them for it. I think these actions demonstrate Microsoft’s desire to abide by the OSI’s Open Source Definition with regard to source code when releasing open source projects on CodePlex. The project itself is a valuable one, and I received many comments and emails about this.

Some people felt it was draconian to pull the project from CodePlex, others thought that didn’t go far enough; some were upset because they loved the project and couldn’t find it; some thought we were holding ourselves to a higher standard than necessary. I believe that as we continue to build our practices across the company to participate in open source development, we must strive to achieve the highest possible standards.

This has also called our attention to our governance and processes on Open Source. Scott Stein (Director of Open Source Programs) led an exhaustive effort across our code hosting properties, with great support from Jim Newkirk, Jonathan Wanagel, and Sara Ford of the Codeplex team as well as Steven Wilssens of Code Gallery, and found other cases where Microsoft-led projects had been licensed under the Ms-PL but hadn’t shared the source. These have also been unpublished and will go through the same review process. What we’re finding is that the positive intent and excitement underneath sharing source code is something that exists in teams across Microsoft, and that we have a great opportunity to help more teams build their skills in following Open Source best practices.

So congratulations to Anand Raman and the SandCastle team for responding gracefully to the situation and coming through with flying colors!

Cheers,
Sam

CodePlex project developers wanted

Paula Bach — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:14:00 GMT

I would like to invite CodePlex developers to participate in research. If you have been reading my blog posts here on Port25, then you will know that I have been investigating how to integrate usability into open source software development. Now I am seeking research volunteers.

I am looking for developers who are working on projects hosted on CodePlex. The projects could be in the planning stage, alpha, beta, or stable. As a volunteer, you would be asked questions about your activities performed on CodePlex. The interview should not take longer than 60-90 minutes.

Data from the research will be used to help design support for usability on CodePlex and analyzed as part of my dissertation at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. I work with Dr. John M. Carroll at Penn State and Rob DeLine at Microsoft Research. One part of the study data collected from CodePlex users will inform the design of new usability support features. The other part of the study is to understand how developers work on open source projects. This research has been approved by The Pennsylvania State University Institutional Research Board, IRB #27804. As such, data will be used for the above research purposes only.

If you would like to participate, (participation is voluntary) or have any questions, please email codeplexresearch@live.com.

Is High Performance Computing naturally Open Source (ie. for tinkerers)?

anandeep — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:17:00 GMT

I have always been fascinated by clusters. Some people envision working with desktops or workstations when they think of “working with computers”. For me working with computers was always with a large collection of computers in a back room somewhere. And how cool if you could make all those computers collaborate with each other working to solve cool things like genome mapping, movie special effects, simulations of car crashes or simulations of molecules being formed!

So you can imagine I jumped at the chance to work with the Windows High Performance Computing team. This is the same team that builds Windows HPC Server 2008.

I think most of the people working in the team are from the “large collection of computers in back room somewhere” school. Would be really different in the Mac software division I assume!

I work with the Open Source Software Lab and we are all things “Open Source” to the rest of the company. The HPC Server team wanted us to make sure that their product played nice with Linux infrastructure and vice-versa. The usual suspects like AD, Samba, LDAP. CIFS etc were involved. We had to make sure that these recurrent interoperability themes were addressed in the HPC environment. I also got a chance to dig into ROCKS, OSCAR, MPI stacks and job schedulers etc etc.

This was a very rewarding experience not only for the technology exposure that I got but the pervasiveness of knowledge of Open Source within the team. They were far ahead of the other product groups in this regard and “got” the Open Source ethos. In fact, prior to my interactions with them they had released an open source MPI stack based on Argonne National Lab’s MPI implementation.

The other reason was that a lot of their customers were relentlessly open source! The conventional wisdom is that HPC applications and infrastructure require a lot of tinkering. Of course, there are some applications like FEM and CFD and that are well understood, but the general feeling was that complete control and access to the underlying infrastructure is a must for getting the most performance out of a cluster. And performance is the main thing in “High Performance Computing”.

Linux is seen providing that access by HPC customers and there is a large base of Linux for HPC in academia, the national labs and other institutions that use large clusters for doing their thing.

But is this really true?

I think that HPC has gone through a typical evolution – it starts with a few people who have a pressing need. There is a cross disciplinary team formed that builds software to do their job and a community grows around it. The community reaches critical mass and people start making building tools to make it more convenient. ROCKS is an example of this. Great skill, knowledge and ability is needed to get the job done.

However, these skilled people now become overloaded. The tools and the infrastructure that they created become so popular that everyone, including people who do not have background that was assumed before, wants to use it for their ends. So the community responds and builds standardized, easy-to-use infrastructure pieces that start to fit seamlessly together. Some control is lost, but ease-to-use is the primary focus.

The infrastructure for HPC has reached that stage (ROLLS with ROCKS). Windows HPC Server 2008 is built for this ease-of-use too.

However, the applications have not reached the stage of ease-of-use. They have to be coded with a lot of domain knowledge and have to built from scratch to truly scale while running on clusters. That means that the application writers demand more control of the underlying infrastructure and want more access to it than the users and maintainers want.

I am going out on a limb and making a prediction here – soon end users will be able to specify instead of coding applications, be it genome comparison or physics simulation. This is similar to accountants finding spreadsheets. There will probably be a few different models for different types of applications but that stage will come pretty quickly.

The infrastructure that runs these user-specified applications will be adaptive and will take these specifications and automatically tune them for high performance on the clusters.

This is where the perception of needing control to the lowest levels will be moot. The best adaptive infrastructure will be the one adopted.

Bold enough for you?

Technical Analysis: Security Considerations for rdesktop and Windows Terminal Services

jcannon — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:10:00 GMT

Abstract: Microsoft Terminal Services provides an important set of functionality for remote administration and centralized application management. This service allows administrators to log in remotely and with full access to the system. Similarly, users can log in and run specific applications, which are centrally managed by IT personnel. The standard client for Linux systems is rdesktop. Rdesktop is shipped with many Linux distributions and this paper briefly looks at common security considerations around using this client application in Windows environments.

Download Security Considerations for rdesktop and Windows Terminal Services

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Technical Analysis: Remote Administration of Windows Systems with SSH

jcannon — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:22:00 GMT

Abstract: SSH has largely replaced Telnet for remote administration of UNIX and Linux systems, but has not yet been used much on Windows. SSH is generally considered to be more secure than Telnet and the Berkeley remote commands (rlogin, etc). This paper uses SSHWindows, a minimal package of Cygwin and OpenSSH. It is available from http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net. The paper is written such that an average Windows system administrator can get an SSH server up while understanding how to make use of security features.

Download Remote Administration of Windows Systems with SSH (PDF)

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Go Hybrid

Paula Bach — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:29:00 GMT

I am back in Redmond. For those of you who don’t know, I spent last summer here in the open source software lab conducting research on integrating usability into open source. My last blog talked about how I have made some changes to my research program. One change is to situate the research argument within the broader scope of how open source has been changing. My favorite paper discussing this is titled “The transformation of Open Source Software” by Brian Fitzgerald and is only available if you have a subscription to the MISQ journal, but you can download an audio mp3 version read by Fitzgerald himself here. He coins the term ‘open source 2.0’ and characterizes software development in open source and compares it to proprietary, and shows that open source software development has elements of proprietary software development and proprietary has elements of open source. Any of the big open source projects with paid developers, and my favorite example, Mozilla, with paid UX professionals, is an example of the former, while Microsoft is an example of the latter. When I first met Bryan Kirschner (now director of open source strategy at Microsoft) he introduced me to the idea that API developer communities are a lot like open source communities.

The most interesting part of my research is that it is situated right in the middle of open source hybridization. A hybrid open source software development model combines a business model, either open source or proprietary, and open, two-way community input. The basis of my argument for the research is as follows: open source software development has been so successful that proprietary companies have been paying attention to incorporating open source strategies into their business model and very successful open source projects have had business models created around them. Both of these phenomena share some characteristics of software development, but taking a well-developed model of usability and transplanting it into a hybrid software development environment will be challenging because the hybridization landscape is still being cultivated. Because Microsoft has been successful with integrating usability activities into its production of software, it makes an interesting case to investigate how one of their hybridization strategies, CodePlex, integrates usability.

I am working with the CodePlex team to develop usability support for CodePlex. This means that the CodePlex community will have a say in how we design the support. Traditionally, open source projects are challenged for usability resources so the support has to range from being able to support code-centered and usability-interested developers to the possibility of usability professionals. The project addresses three main challenges for usability in open source: merit and trust, chasm between work activities, and incommensurable tools and methods. If you have a project on CodePlex and are interested in participating in this research, then please contact me: codeplexresearch at live dot com.

Sandcastle Removed from Codeplex

Sam Ramji — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:48:00 GMT

A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a Microsoft project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself “open source” yet never posted the source code.

This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy. I take it extremely seriously.

I have directed the project to be unpublished from Codeplex immediately, including removal of the project’s use of the Ms-PL. If the team chooses to publish the source code and follow Microsoft policy, then the project may be re-published in the future. If not, we will remove all references to Sandcastle from Codeplex.

I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake.

We are strengthening our controls on Codeplex projects and the governance process that we use for Microsoft-led external projects to ensure that this type of error does not happen again.

Our policy regarding use of the term Open Source is clear: Open Source refers to projects using OSI-approved licenses.

Technical Analysis: OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication

jcannon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Abstract: Secure remote access to UNIX and Linux systems is generally accomplished through SSH. The most frequent implementation of that protocol is OpenSSH, originally written for the OpenBSD project but now ported to a wide variety of platforms. This paper will show how to use OpenSSH with the Kerberos portion of Active Directory to automate authentication.

Download OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication

Microsoft & Sourceforge

jcannon — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:36:00 GMT

Over the past four years, we’ve been working with Sourceforge on a number of unique programs to help connect developers with the code and communities that interest them. In 2004, we started the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolkit project on Sourceforge, licensed under the Common Public License. WiX is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. In 2005, we started the open source ODF Converter project. Then, in 2007, we launched the ‘World of Choice’ destination to provide helpful connections to free community and software offerings available from Microsoft.

Developers have told us these interactions are important and that it’s important that we continue collaborating with open source communities. We understand that the language of that collaboration is code. As a result, I’m excited to share that this year, Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor of the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards (CCA), joining O’Reilly and the Linux Foundation in supporting the recognition of world-class open source developers and projects.

For the uninitiated, the CCAs are an annual appreciation of open source projects that allow any OSS project to be nominated and voted on by the Sourceforge community. This joint collaboration will result in two important additions to this year’s Community Choice Awards:

1. The CCAs are now open to open source projects that are hosted on Codeplex. This means that projects hosted on Codeplex, and licensed under the MS Public or Reciprocal License, are eligible for nomination, voting and recognition.

2. As a part of our sponsorship, we’ve also worked with Sourceforge to create a new category for ‘Best Project for Educators’: Whether you're working in grade school education, high school, or college, teaching is difficult. Open source can help! This award goes to the project that makes it easier to educate and share knowledge together.

This is an important program for Microsoft – we believe strongly in supporting developer choice and collaboration. Open source is all about choice and collaboration. I can’t think of a better venue to support and cheer the fantastic work that these individuals and communities do every day. Education is another important theme from Microsoft. Worldwide, access to knowledge is a serious social and economic issue. Technology can be a key to closing this gap. We want to recognize development work being done in this area.

So here’s how to get involved: If you’re a project contributor, maintainer, or user – visit http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08/ - Select ‘Nominate’ and get started recognizing your favorite OSS Projects. You can ‘Search’ for projects too – Sourceforge has developed a clever widget that returns results across forges. In the case below, I searched for ‘XNA’ and received multiple Codeplex results.

This summer, winners will be recognized at OSCON in Portland, OR. If you will be in town, you’re welcome to attend.

This is an exciting time to be a developer. Let the recognition begin.

Technical Analysis: VIM, PowerShell and Signed Code

jcannon — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Abstract: In the UNIX and Linux world, vi and EMACS have long held positions as the best-developed editors for handling large amounts of code or other text. More recently, an improved vi clone has emerged named VIM (Short for Vi, IMproved). VIM features syntax highlighting, a vi-like command-line interface, and many powerful features for editing large text projects. It has quickly become one of the favorite text editors outside the Windows world. This analysis looks at using VIM with Windows PowerShell, with considerations for code signing.

Download VIM, Powershell & Signed Code.

Now Hiring: Open Source Community Manager

jcannon — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:54:00 GMT

As many frequent readers of Port 25 are aware, Microsoft is committed to the long-term growth of open source. This includes technical collaborations, business partnerships, industry participation – and community outreach.

As we continue to grow our investments around open source, we’re looking to add a new Community Manager to our team. This position will be part of the Platform Community team and will be responsible for growing Microsoft and open source communities together. More specifically, this individual will be a core contributor to our long-term open source strategy & how we increase the potential of all developers, everywhere.

There’s no better place to start than the very community we work with. As a result, I’m posting this job to Port 25 – the full job description follows below. This is a community & marketing position, located in either Redmond, WA or the San Francisco Bay Area.

To inquire about this opportunity, please apply online and shoot me an e-mail.

Position: Senior Marketing Manager – Open Source Community
Join the team leading one of the companies most exciting & dynamic initiatives, driving Microsoft’s overall community strategy around Open Source Software. As a Senior Product Marketer on the Platform Strategy team, you will have the opportunity to bring our platforms to life by fostering community and thought leadership designed to promote better connections between Microsoft and Microsoft technologies with open source communities. This strategic position will work across Microsoft’s worldwide business groups and segment teams as well as industry influentials to help drive interoperability between Microsoft and open source software.

Your core responsibilities will include assisting in defining and driving core marketing initiatives – most specifically online & offline community-building. You will have the opportunity to help drive the strategy for customer-driven marketing designed to further the dialogue on the value of the Microsoft platform to open source audiences. You will work regularly with technical R&D teams and business strategy owners to define customer requirements and drive customer-ready evidence to arm customers and partners with the benefits of Microsoft platforms and open source stacks. Your work will be a cornerstone for a global thought leadership website and will be regularly featured in industry press around the world. You will also be responsible for ensuring that WW field sales & marketing teams have the right message and content to effectively communicate value to customers.

In addition, you will act as a visible external evangelist for Microsoft with respects to our Open Source strategy, helping to drive a balanced dialogue to the IT Pro and Developer audiences in both one-to-one and one-to-many events. You will regularly work with industry analysts to help shape and inform our market strategies and execution as well as supporting regular press engagements with senior management and executives. Finally, you will serve as a key point of accountability and representation to worldwide executive leadership with respects to our community outreach efforts. This involves regular opportunities to engage executive management with regards to strategic direction, priority setting and progress updates.

Qualifications
The candidate should have strategic marketing capabilities coupled with a strong gene for execution. Excellent analytical skills, as well as the ability to work with and influence industry influentials and analysts are important. Building collaborative relationships across the organization, motivating and leading that organization to achieve collective impact will be essential. The candidate must also be a highly motivated self-starter, with a strong competitive spirit. Familiarity with the Linux & OSS market / products is a plus, but not required for those candidates with strong aptitude. A BS/A is required, MBA preferred with experience in a related field working on projects that require strategic thinking, broad market impact, and business / technical marketing message development & delivery.

Featured Project: Family.Show on Codeplex

jcannon — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:09:00 GMT

Over the course of the past year, we've highlighted various community and open source projects on Codeplex. This morning, I wanted to do the same with a very cool open source project that I came across over the weekend called Family.Show. Family.Show is a genealogy project that visualizes family mapping and relationships. The project was released in July 2007 and it's currently at version 2. While the project is backed by Vertigo Software, it is Open Source and licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Here's a small screen grab from the project home page:

Over the weekend, I used some free time & a family BBQ to start building my own family tree. Frankly, while I'm impressed with the application and it's ease-of-use, I was more amazed at the interest and enjoyment everyone in my family experienced using it. Everybody from my 83 year old grandmother to my 19 year old sister were excited to explore and add to the family tree. It gives new meaning to the collaborative potential of open source :>

See above, the Cannon family tree (yikes) - but infinitely fascinating to self-described family historians. It's worth noting that Family.Show also supports the import/export of GEDCOM standard files, so your work can interchange with other genealogy software packages as well.

I encourage anyone interested to download & tinker with it. Additionally, here are some additional resources:

Visit the Codeplex project home page
Family.Show at MIX07
Watch a Channel9 Video with the core development team

-Jamie

Managing Towards Open

Sam Ramji — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:59:00 GMT

I have the privilege of interacting almost every day with technical and business experts who are creating the future of software—including both core engineering teams at Microsoft and thought leaders across a broad spectrum of open source communities. Especially in the last few months, I’ve been able to take more time to articulate where I think this is going – such as writing how open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and participating in Infoworld’s roundtable on the state of open source.

I think that many people are seeing that the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is being changed fundamentally (and for mutual benefit).

Today, Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson announced that System Center will have the ability to deliver automated management across heterogeneous IT environments, such as UNIX and Linux. What I see as a best practice for commercial and community engagement with open source technology plays a big part in this.

Specifically, Microsoft will deliver an agent infrastructure and management packs (MPs) for monitoring Linux and UNIX platforms for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Early partners like Xandros and Quest are delivering cross-platform MPs for MySQL and Apache, and Oracle, respectively. Microsoft and Novell are collaborating on the SUSE Linux Enterprise MP.

The agent infrastructure Microsoft is building to interoperate with UNIX and Linux is built leveraging industry standards and open source such as WS-Management and OpenPegasus. Pegasus is an open-source implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards coded in C++, designed to be portable, and licensed under an MIT license, and work is underway to integrate with the newly DMTF ratified WS-Management standard. Pegasus already ships as part of major Linux and UNIX distros.

It simply makes great technical and business sense to cooperate with the OpenPegasus community to build upon an industry-standards based, cross-platform technology. Just as important, however, is preserving the virtuous cycle of contribution, benefit, and subsequent contribution: Microsoft is joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee. The agent technology—being built will be contributed back to the community under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), an OSI approved open source license.

I greatly appreciate Allen Brown's positive comments (Allen is the President and CEO for The Open Group) and the support and education we’ve received from the sponsors and maintainers of Pegasus. He said:

“We are pleased to have Microsoft join the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and welcome their commitment as a positive step for the global open source development community. Since The Open Group initiated the OpenPegasus project seven years ago, it has been deployed across a wide range of IT platforms worldwide. We look forward to Microsoft’s active participation in the continuing development of the project.”

Today’s announcement and the business and technical decisions made by the System Center team are a great example of the fact that commercial innovation, industry partnerships, and open source participation can all work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. My enthusiasm and excitement—and my applause for the System Center team, partners like Xandros, Quest, and Novell, and the OpenPegasus community—is tempered solely by my conviction this is not the only or last example of the best of Microsoft, partners, and open source growing together. This is a great day – and there are more great days to come.