Microsoft expands its contribution track record
This week in San Jose, CA, Microsoft will participate in the 11th annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), where we will announce several open source strategy milestones that highlight the company’s growing contribution to open source projects. Today, Sam Ramji, senior director, Platform Strategy, will announce the contribution of 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel community. The code contribution, a Linux device driver, will be published on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site, and will be immediately available to the Linux Community and customers alike, enabling any distribution of the Linux operating system to be virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
This news marks significant milestones for Microsoft. First, the Hyper-V Linux device drivers we are releasing are designed so Linux can run in enlightened mode, giving it the same optimized synthetic devices as a Windows virtual machine running on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. Second, this milestone marks the first time Microsoft is directly contributing code to the Linux kernel. Microsoft has made the long term commitment to update and maintain this code over time as the next versions of the Linux kernel are released.
For more information, please check out the following:
· Channel 9 video link, https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/NicFill/Microsoft-Contributes-Code-to-the-Linux-Kernel/
· Virtualization Team Blog: Microsoft and Red Hat Cooperative Technical Support, https://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/02/15/Microsoft-and-Red-Hat-Joint-Technical-Support.aspx
· Microsoft Open Source, https://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
· White paper, “Participation in a World of Choice,” https://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
· White paper, “Microsoft, PHP and Open Source: A Pragmatic Alliance,” https://www.microsoft.com/opensource/