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Microsoft mulling open-source strategy in SharePoint


By David Worthington
December 23, 2008 —  In an interview with SD Times, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, talked about how the company approaches open-source software. In particular, he talked about Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab intent to work with the SharePoint product team. Ramji elaborated on what open source from Microsoft means for SharePoint developers.

SD Times: We have been told that Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab would like to begin collaborating with the SharePoint product team. Can you tell us more about that?
Sam Ramji: I think, first of all, that is a great example. SharePoint is a product that benefits from open source through the applications sitting on top of it. PHP applications like Moodle [an academic course management system that can integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007] and Microsoft's SharePoint Learning Kit (a commercial product that we open-sourced and made non-commercial) are examples. We have heard the conversation internally about SharePoint as an example of a platform of great opportunity for open-source application strategy.

How can the open-source community know that Microsoft is truly supporting the principles of open source development vs. doing so as a matter of convenience? I.e., "How can we trust your motives?"
That is a great question that I am asked frequently. The process of building trust is one that develops over time, based on coherence between what a person and organization say and what they do. I've been very cautious to always talk about things we are doing, have done and have shipped.

One of the things we did this year is ship documentation on internal protocols for Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Office under a pretty liberal licensing scheme. We committed that any developer of any persuasion can go ahead and build implementations of any of those protocols.

We recognize that many developers are commercially minded, getting paid for time and material as consultants. We want to continue to enable that and tried to make that clear in a community promise around our interoperability principles.

Another set of protocols was announced in July and made available under the Open Specification Promise. Those ranged from .NET remoting to things like AppleTalk and IPv6. The purpose was to demonstrate through OSP that we declare peace across a wide range of industry protocols. We wanted to show that whether you are developing [in] open source or [commercially], that it is critical to have open IP for commonly adopted standards.

We were [writing] into agreements and public statements ways for developers to see that this is a development opportunity, and Microsoft is not a company that [they] have to worry about.


Related Search Term(s): open source, SharePoint, Windows, Microsoft


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