OStatic

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers. In a blog posting announcing the sponsorship, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy and head of its open source software lab, indicated that this demonstrates Microsoft's interest in working along with Apache on many projects. At the same time, he wrote that this does not mean Microsoft is turning its back on proprietary software, including its IIS Web server.

It's not every day that a Microsoft executive as highly placed as senior vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel Brad Smith shows up at an open source conference, but he made an appearance at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week. I enjoyed the title of InfoWorld's summary of his visit: Microsot's Brad Smith Tries to Make Nice with Open Source Community.

Making nice was probably part of his motivation, but there's more to it. Especially after a huge fine from the EU, Microsoft needs to take concrete steps to work more closely with open sourcers. Also, people keep missing how Microsoft's proposed Yahoo deal would force it to embrace open source.

As the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco gets underway this week, the tech publication is posting a series of interesting transcripts from roundtable discussions on open source topics. The roundtables include a number of well-known pundits, including CNet writer Matt Asay, Bruce Perens (credited by many as coining the term open source), Sam Ramji (senior director of platform technology at Microsoft), Zack Urlocker (vice president of products at MySQL) and many others. Much of the talk surrounds the trend toward commercialization of open source products.

We've written before several times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and we've also written about Cloudera, a well-funded company that is focusing on providing support and services for Hadoop, in addition to offering its own Hadoop distribution.

Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here. A look at the companies and institutions organizing and participating in the event shows just how far Hadoop has come, and how it has extended well beyond just search applications.

While competition among smartphone operating systems is raging, with the Symbian OS, the BlackBerry OS, the iPhone OS, and Android getting top billing, Windows Mobile is seriously teetering. As GigaOm suggests, Android may very well kill Microsoft's mobile operating system. Mototorola has a huge bet on Android in the works, and appears to have little interest in Windows Mobile, and Microsoft's own top executives are acknowledging mobile missteps. Check out the details here.

In response to my post Does Chrome OS Have a Fighting Chance?, where I discussed various things that will and won't work in Google's favor as it delivers an open source operating system targeted at netbooks, a reader, in the comments, served up this pithy but thought-provoking conclusion: It stands little chance unless Google finds a way to natively run familiar Windows apps. ?

In my post, I pointed out that users won't just adopt cloud-based applications in droves, abandoning desktop applications, and I said, application usage doesn't shift entirely overnight. Still, the reader comment focuses specifically on Windows applications, and is one of many thoughts appearing online concerning Google's precise stance toward Microsoft. What is that exact stance?

One thing that both Google and Apple share is that almost the instant that they announce a new product, the public loves it. That's partly because they tend to deliver winning products, but they don't always do so. Google has shuttered a number of projects from its labs, and its productivity applications are popular, but haven't come close to toppling Microsoft Office. And remember the Apple Newton? I barely do either.

For these reasons, and because an operating system is a complex thing to build and gather support for, it makes sense to scrutinize Google's actual chances of delivering a hit with it's newly announced Chrome OS. Here are some things that will work in Google's favor, and some that will not.

PC makers to support Chrome OS. Google plans to announce within the next day or so the names of PC makers in Taiwan and China that have already signed on to work with its new Chrome operating system.

Chrome OS to emphasize security. Google claims that it will be completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS, reports ArsTechnica, including process isolation.

Codeplex the measure of Microsoft open source street cred. The company is trumpeting the success of its three year old CodePlex open source site, noting it now has over 10,000 projects.

Stop piling on Mono. Microsoft says it won't go after developers using the C# programming language and infrastructure used in the Mono implementation of .NET. So why are people ripping on Mono?

SUSE 11 takes off faster than 10. Novell delivered its SUSE Linux 11 release at the end of March, so it's now time to ask how it's doing. The answer: better than SUSE Linux 10.

Secret EU open source migration study leaked. A hush-hush study from the EU Council has made it into the wild.

8 cool tricks to make the most of Google Chrome. Coax it to use less memory and become a wizard with tabs.

Microsoft debuts open source PHP for Azure, IE8. The company has a new Software Developer Kit (SDK) for PHP on Microsoft's cloud services platform Windows Azure.

Can the enterprise open source strategy work? In associating with Red Hat, Ingres grabs a lifeline into the larger enterprise customer space.

aTunes is an unsung cross-platform audio player and manager. It makes it easy to organize music, rip audio CDs, and more.