News from Microsoft: Code name "Midori", Code name "Windows 7", Microsoft Singularity OS, Microsoft on Open Source, and much more...

I generally try to keep it all things Dynamics GP, but I figured it's a blog -- my blog! In addition, I could not help becoming very enthusiastic about a few articles I came across on some of Microsoft Research initiatives. Lets get started!

Code name "Midori"

As many of you may have read or heard, Microsoft has been active on a project to create a new OS code name "Midori" which has been up to now very secretive. According to many sources on the net, Midori is said to be a non-Windows solution, unlike code name "Vienna" also known as "Windows 7" which is currently in development -- any one from Microsoft chip in here -- and is built upon the Vista kernel.

Leaks anyone? According to a Software Development Times article I happened to stumble upon, Midori is being built from scratch and is supposely addressing "challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology" -- I guess by existing technology one must understand Windows. Following up on a podcast posted by Mark Polino, MVP, I came across an article dated June 30th, 2008 on Mary Jo Foley's ZDNet blog which also mentions the existence of Midori. Based on my Google searches, this article seems to be, if not the first, one of the firsts in mentioning anything about the new OS.

According to SD Times, "Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system" with a robust distributed component based and data driven architecture. Translation: ability to transcend the deployment (networking, physical/geographical location, hardware/device, or processing) architecture. If you are interested in reading the latest on Microsoft Singularity OS, click here.

If I have got your attention on this whole Midori project, please read the complete article over at SD Times.

Microsoft on Open Source

The folks over at Redmond Magazine have an interesting article where Microsoft expressed it's intentions in joining the Apache Software Foundation. This was announced during the Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2008 held from July 21 - July 25 in Portland, OR. According to the article, Microsoft has steped up the number of employees working on open source projects around the world, but don't get your hopes up! There are only 112 people out of 89 thousand something employees in the company. Long ways to go before some real effort is really put into open source. The article also mentions that Microsoft developers have submitted close to 300 projects to Codeplex which is Microsoft open source developer portal.

However, most of you attending Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, probably heard first hand from Steve Ballmer on open source when Geoff Colvin, Editor at large for Fortune Magazine asked the question:

GEOFF COLVIN: Right. This leads sort of to another fundamental business model issue that has been expressed by some of the folks here, and that has to do with open source, Linux, and other stuff like that. How do you see Microsoft vis-à-vis or Microsoft versus the open source world, and where is it going?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, okay. There's a few questions. Number one, are our products likely to be open sourced? No. We do provide our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.) With that said, there are a number of different things. Will we interoperate with products that come from like Linux, from the open source world? Yes, we will. Will we encourage people who want to do open source development to do it on top of Windows? Yes, we're proud that the best PHP system in the world is actually the one that runs on Windows today, not the one that runs on Linux. So we're going to encourage open source innovation on our platforms, and around our platforms. And, you know, we see interesting things where bits and pieces of technology, commercial companies are now starting to provide it in an open source form or to digest in an open source form. And we're open to that as well. But our fundamental business model will remain kind of commercial software, advertising, enterprise licensing, etcetera.

You can read the official transcript of the interview here.

As it stands, it seems that Microsoft has a lot of thinking and work to do when it comes to open source, but will continue to be a driving force in the development community for years to come as long as companies continue to see the viability and reliability of commercial software.

I hope you have enjoyed this snippet of information from around the web and please don't hesitate to drop your comments on some of these news developments.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MIS, MVP, MCP, PMP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/