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Port 25

Welcome to Port 25: Join the community & get insights, technical tips and blogs from the open source community at Microsoft.

I have blogged previously about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Now I want to turn to disciplinary chasms in software development. Social aspects such as how people communicate, collaborate, and coordinate interest me because as Andy Begel in the HIP group in MSR found, software development teams when coordinating and communicating with other teams, are like dysfunctional families. I won’t go into details, but software development is socially complex. Software development teams generally consist of software engineers, to state the obvious. But in the last ten years or so, many software development businesses began to implement user-centered design because they realized that software could be frustrating for users. A new discipline arose where people were either trained in Human Computer Interaction, or learned on the job. Professional organizations like UPA and SIGCHI are thriving. But software engineers and usability experts are from different communities of practice. Although they both work on creating software products, their goals, values, approaches, culture, and well, their work practices differ tremendously.

history.forward()July 25

I’m writing this from Portland, Oregon where one of the world’s largest Open Source conferences is taking place: OSCON. This year’s event is focused on a theme of “ten years of open source,” referring to 1998 as the year that Eric S. Raymond, Danese Cooper, et al coined the term. The Day 1 keynote theme was the past, Day 2’s theme was the present, and Day 3 (today) is focused on the future.

In my keynote address this morning I’m announcing three areas of contribution:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

We have tested over 100 community PHP applications and found them to run on IIS with no changes required. Hank Janssen and Garrett Serack of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have been championing this work from the beginning, and I thank them for it.

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Prog

The OSP and YouJuly 25

I am the Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at Microsoft, having joined the company about 9 months ago. My role is to work with a variety of constituencies inside the company and outside to help shape the approach we take to intellectual property. I am new to the company and cannot take credit for it, but am very pleased that in recent years, Microsoft has made progress in participating with open source communities. A part of that has been the implementation of the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which was launched in 2006. We think it is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement specifications. We constantly listen to feedback from community representatives and respond to that feedback – through Q&A’s on the OSP page and directly to the community. Andy Oliver made some positive comments in this regard as recently as yesterday. When asked for clarification of the OSP with respect to the activities of Apache POI, we responded. The concerns were about implementations of specifications covered by the OSP that may be less than fully compliant – in particular due to implementation bugs. Such a situation is not explicitly covered by the OSP since it is meant to

Participating ActivelyJuly 23

Now that we’ve had our first “participate” event in conjunction with OSCON here in Portland, I wanted to share a few thoughts. This was a great experience and a great event—or, really, two consecutive events, the morning case study discussion and the afternoon panel.

First I’ll talk about the case study and then build on comments from some folks who’ve “beaten me to the blog.” In the morning Karim Lakhani from Harvard led the group through a case study about a fast-growing company (Threadless t-shirts) built on community contribution and distributed innovation. This was basically like being in a Harvard Business School class with a bunch of super achievers, complete with questions and counter questions (John Wilbanks from Science Commons blogs about it here). Stepping back and taking a look at a whole bunch of concepts and practices that underlie open source in the software domain in another context (t-shirt design), IMO, really opened the floodgates on discussion—a discussion Karim (with regret) had to close as the buzz in the room kept right on going well over time and into lunch…

In the afternoon I was part of a panel discussion and Q and A that started

Participate08July 18

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