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MS Open Tech, Linux and Open Source at LinuxFest 2013

  • Artikkeli

I was fortunate to be invited to speak on behalf of MS Open Tech at last weekend’s LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA. This was a local event with a wide variety of developers and tech enthusiasts who gathered at Bellingham Technical College to participate in a broad spectrum of presentations, demonstrations, and labs.

My presentation Microsoft, Linux and the Open Source Community was part of the Developing a Community Track at LinuxFest so, given Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. had just celebrated our One Year Anniversary, I took this opportunity to demonstrate some of the MS Open Tech projects that are enabling the open source community to benefit from new interoperability technology initiatives:

Linux on Windows Azure – Just prior to LinuxFest, the Azure team announced general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Windows Azure Infrastructure Services enable you to deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud. As well as Windows Server options, the built-in image gallery of VM templates includes Linux images for Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE Linux distributions. During my presentation session, I used Windows Azure Web Sites to create a new cloud-based WordPress site including a MySQL instance.

VM Depot – Built on the capabilities of Linux on Windows Azure, VM Depot is a cloud-based catalog of more than 200 open source Linux virtual machine images for Windows Azure contributed by the community. Developed by MS Open Tech, on VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configurations and other freely downloadable images, create custom open source stacks, and work with others to build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.

OData – OData is an open data protocol jointly developed by Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Citrix, and other industry partners and currently undergoing standardization via OASIS. We have recently revamped the http://odata.org website and encourage community contributions to develop consumer and producer services using OData as highlighted in the Ecosystem subsection. My demonstration showed how OData can be used by the community to publish and access open government data using the DataLab open source code on GitHub.

Pointer Events - Pointer events is an emerging standard developed by the W3C to define a single device input model – mouse, pen and touch – across multiple browsers. Microsoft contributed the initial specification and is working to demonstrate cross browser interoperability for Pointer Events. MS Open Tech developed an open source Pointer Events prototype for WebKit on HTML5 Labs and submitted the patch to the WebKit community. We encourage the developer community to learn more about Pointer Events on Web Platform Docs and join the #PointerEvents discussion.

I would like to thank the LinuxFest organizers for the opportunity to participate. Events like LinuxFest are an ideal way for us to share the work we do at MS Open Tech with the open source community and seek feedback on our efforts. I look forward to the next opportunity.