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Microsoft: We'll consider any license

By David Worthington

July 21, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
Microsoft's contribution of GPL-licensed drivers to the Linux kernel community signals that it is open to participate in open-source projects, regardless of the license, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy.

However grand Microsoft's intentions may be, an analyst views it less as altruism than as a targeted move by Microsoft to further its virtualization strategy.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a set of three General Public License v2 (GPLv2) license drivers, called Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC). The drivers are designed to improve the performance of the Linux operating system when it is virtualized on the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor-based virtualization system.

Microsoft will not charge a royalty or assert any patents covering the driver code it is contributing, Ramji said.

Microsoft is working with Linux driver project lead and Novell fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman so that LinuxIC will be ready for the next release of the Linux kernel, version 2.6.32, according to a blog post by Hank Janssen, principal group program manager of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center.

The code "needs work" and does not meet the kernel team's standards, Kroah-Hartman said. It is currently in the kernel's staging directory. Microsoft will maintain the drivers.

Work on LinuxIC began after Kroah-Hartman contacted Microsoft to create drivers that would allow Linux to run well on top of Hyper-V, Kroah-Hartman said. Microsoft's Linux drivers work the same way as Red Hat's KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), he said. "VMware has drivers for this kind of stuff, and Xen does too."

Microsoft is responding to competition from VMware, said Jeffrey Hammond, a principal Forrester analyst. "It has found that in order for Hyper-V to be competitive, they need to support Linux well. The whole thing is indicative of Microsoft's pragmatic attitude toward open source: They can't get rid of it, so they might as well make money off of it."

Microsoft acknowledges that heterogeneity in the enterprise is a business reality, according to Ramji. "Interoperability is a lever for growth," and open source is becoming part of the engineering DNA at Microsoft, he added, referencing the participation of Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy in the Windows Server, in the LinuxIC project.

Related Search Term(s): Linux, Microsoft, open source

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