Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Microsoft open source efforts noted

September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft open source efforts noted

TAGS: Application Development

Many may believe Microsoft is against the open source movement. But a Microsoft official at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday argued differently.

Just look at the company's direction with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), where the company has endorsed open source, according to Microsoft's Joe Stagner. His title is listed as "Opinionated Misfit Geek" on his business card.

"We ship our entire AJAX stack completely as free, open source, licensed under a permissive license," Stagner said.

"Whoever thought Microsoft would ship open source products and not charge for them," Stagner asked.

Also, Microsoft is offering API-level and technical support to the open source Moonlight project, Stagner said. Moonlight is an effort to port Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia client technology to Linux.

Microsoft also has a deal with Novell for interoperability between Linux and Windows, he said. (That deal, however, in which the two companies exchange monies and agree not to sue each other's customers, has drawn the ire of the open source community.)

Speaking about AJAX, Stagner said the big deal about AJAX is not that it is new technology, but that there is a new perspective on it that problem-solvers bring to the table.

"For me, AJAX is about what kind of applications we can build with this technology that we couldn't build with traditional click and page navigate mechanisms that we've been using to build Web apps for quite some time," Stagner said.

Meanwhile, AJAX has multiple definitions, he said. "I went to, I don't know, four or five sessions yesterday and I think I heard four or five different explanations of what AJAX was," Stagner said.

What AJAX is can depend on perspective. Someone who works at Oracle may see AJAX as a way to expose operational data, he said.

AJAX from Stagner's perspective is about factors such as a rich user interface, media enablement and animation. Standards-based federated logic also is part of the equation.

Posted by Paul Krill on September 26, 2007 06:41 AM

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