Microsoft has closed its MS Open Tech subsidiary to bring the staff back into the Microsoft fold.
In a blog post, Jean Paoli, president of MS Open Tech, said Microsoft was subsuming his unit back into the company because it had completed its goal of bringing open source front and center at the parent company.
“Today, MS Open Tech has reached its key goals, and open source technologies and engineering practices are rapidly becoming mainstream across Microsoft,” Paoli said. “It’s now time for MS Open Tech to rejoin Microsoft Corp., and help the company take its next steps in deepening its engagement with open source and open standards.”
Today, Microsoft engineers participate in nearly 2,000 open source projects on GitHub and CodePlex combined,” Paoli said in his April 17 post. “Through open source collaborations, Microsoft has brought first-class support for Linux to Azure, worked with Docker to integrate it with Azure and Windows, built Azure HDInsight on Apache Hadoop and Linux, and delivered developer tools for Android and iOS, and for Node.js and Python. And Microsoft is actively building open source communities of its own.”
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, which is a major open-source community of tools, projects and collaborative working groups, welcomed the Microsoft news. “I think that this is a good move by Microsoft,” Milinkovich said. “It shows that open source is now embraced as mainstream there, as opposed to be something to be feared. MS Open Tech was a bit of an organizational and legal hack to ensure that their open source activities were isolated. That said, it was an effective first step for Microsoft, but one which is no longer necessary.”
“Through the .NET Foundation, Microsoft has open sourced .NET, and dozens of .NET-based projects, and is bringing them to platforms such as Linux,” Paoli said. “We’ve built a strong open source community around TypeScript, and partnered with projects such as Angular and Ember to bring it to new audiences of developers. We’ve open sourced technologies such as WinJS and the Windows Driver Frameworks. And we’ve recently acquired Revolution Analytics, a leader in open source technology for data.”
Sam Ramji, CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and a former senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, where he led the company’s worldwide open-source and Linux strategy, said this move was not unexpected.
“It’s smart—MS OT was an island and now the work of open source engineering is rejoining the mainland,” Ramji said. “I see this as the mainstreaming of open source engineering at Microsoft. Those engineers are going into product teams like Azure.”
“I have actually been expecting something like this to happen,” said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. “In light of the new Microsoft, which is becoming a much more open company as a whole, this move makes sense. Open source is now a lot more pervasive at Microsoft, and the company has switched from fighting it a few years ago to embracing it and building on it today. The team at Open Tech has been instrumental in driving this change from inside and out.”
Prior to MS Open Tech, Paoli led a group known as the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy team, which worked closely with many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft. That group formed the core of MS Open Tech. That team worked on issues such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML5, the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS), and in many open-source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and Phonegap/Cordova.
MS Open Tech staff will continue their roles inside Microsoft. “As MS Open Tech rejoins Microsoft, team members will play a broader role in the open advocacy mission with teams across the company, including the creation of the Microsoft Open Technology Programs Office,” Paoli said. “The Programs Office will scale the learnings and practices in working with open source and open standards that have been developed in MS Open Tech across the whole company.”
Originally published on eWeek.
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