Microsoft used last week’s ApacheCon as a platform to reach out to the open source community in a public way.

In his keynote last Friday, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy, told the Apache faithful that Microsoft is serious about partnering with the open source community to create open standards and interoperability. Collaboration on the fundamentals will promote healthy growth, competition and a new round of innovation and will enable customers to allocate IT dollars for constructive uses instead of overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks.

The most recent example of Microsoft’s collaboration with its open source counterparts was its recent decision to join the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group for improving message interoperability at the application level, which is currently very difficult without expensive proprietary solutions. But Microsoft is also boosting interoperability with open source in Web services, security, databases and network monitoring, Ramji said. This past spring, Microsoft reached an interoperability “milestone” between Soap and Apache’s Axis Web services protocols, he added.

“I’m an eternal optimist. I’d have to be after three years of leading open source at Microsoft,” Ramji said. “There’s been a big shift in a short period of time,” involving hundreds of steps in a company with 93,000 employees, he said.

Ramji’s embrace of open source was echoed, if somewhat less strongly, in a speech last Friday in Australia by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and reported in a CNET blog by Matt Asay. In response to a question about its Internet Explorer browser, Ballmer said Microsoft is unlikely to make Explorer open source because of its proprietary extensions, but he didn’t reject the suggestion out of hand. The measured tone of Ballmer’s response, Asay wrote, “could well be the most rational, pragmatic, open-source-related comment from Ballmer that I’ve ever read.”

Ballmer’s comment suggests that Microsoft has finally recognized that open source can be a useful component of its overall software strategy, Asay concluded.

In other words, Microsoft may finally have decided to stop fighting open source and instead begin to find areas where the two communities can help each other. And that’s a good thing.

Since when has Microsoft been in favor of choice? Like the choice of eat or be eaten. . . .

This blog post was written by Matt McDonough, assistant editor.

If the enthusiasm of Fedora Project leader Paul Frields and Red Hat software engineer Jesse Keating is any indication, Fedora 9 LiveUSB Creator will likely be the most popular new feature in the next release. As they discussed LiveUSB at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit in Boston last week, Frields and Keating almost glowed about the prospects for the new offering and provided some hints on new features for Fedora as well.

And the capabilities aren’t shoddy. A user, for example, can load Fedora 9 onto a USB drive in the form of a live image, enabling duplication of an entire OS as a live image, complete with an entire hard disk’s worth of files and applications. That’s impressive, because you can shrink down a complex infrastructure and place it on a USB drive as small as 2 GB. Of course, the more memory you have on your USB drive, the more operating systems you can carry around in your pocket or on your key chain. Another benefit of creating a live image of an OS is that a user can download and integrate software updates, applications and files whenever they are needed.

The best feature by far of LiveUSB is the ability to take the USB drive, plug it into any machine, and then boot that machine off of the USB drive so that users have their entire OS in front of them no matter where they are. As you can see in the video below, the USB key with the live image can boot on any machine with no difference in functionality.

Not surprisingly, this technology has received a lot of attention at Red Hat. “All of the things we’ve talked about today we’re looking to capitalize on in our next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),” Keating said. “I can’t tell you exactly what will be in the next version because it’s not my responsibility to know, … but I can say there is a lot of interest in using this technology.”

While it’s questionable how useful the technology will be for enterprise-level IT professionals in its current form, Fedora 9 and LiveUSB could have broad capabilities if modified for enterprise purposes. IT professionals could transfer broad interfaces to a physical or virtual server with just a USB stick. But for IT novices, it’s a cool program that to take your home OS almost anywhere without lugging a tower around with you.

For more on LiveUSB and Fedora 9, check out the Fedora Project homepage. as well as this video, where Frields discusses Fedora 9 in greater depth and where Red Hat plans to take it.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/AyOGwgV4xyU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

“We got everyone tickets for Game 7,” Whitehurst joked. “I wish we could get the Celtics red hats to wear in the parade.”

Whitehurst said that open source really is a business model where everyone wins by sharing innovation, which spreads the benefits of innovation and spares originators the cost of maintaining proprietary technology. He cited several examples where companies contributed innovations to the open source community that have led to major improvements. For example, a Canadian insurance company contributed what became JBoss’ Enterprise Service Bus and the U.S. government shared the development of what is now known as SELinux, he said. In addition, an innovative messaging protocol developed by JPMorgan is being tested now as part of Red Hat’s MRG [Messaging Real-time Grid] product, he said.

Contributions of innovations is a win-win proposition; the whole open source community benefits by incorporating and building on the improvements. But the contributors benefit too from lower support costs, he said.

The problem is that these are only a few examples; the vast majority of private development enterprise software is wasted, Whitehurst said, in urging attendees to promote open source and participating in community development.

Red Hat will launch more new products than ever this year, ensuring that its software and support will be better than ever, Whitehurst added.

“We are the leader in open source,” he said. “It’s who we are and what we do.”

However, leadership involves not just good software but also behind-the-scenes work to improve open source interoperability, like a recent lawsuit settlement that Red Hat negotiated to protect not only Red Hat but past and future users from litigation.

In his travels around the globe, Whitehurst said the most frequent customer complaint is that Red Hat isn’t always easy to work with when it comes to communications and recordkeeping. And Red Hat will be addressing that issue in the weeks and months ahead, he said.

So after a perfect Boston day of sunny skies and refreshingly cool temperatures, Red Hat attendees will be celebrating their adoption of open source software at a party in Fenway Park. Go Sox!

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

You’ve got to hand it to Vyatta Inc. The Belmont, Calif-based startup daring to take on Cisco Systems Inc. with free, downloadable open source router software is a hands-down winner when it comes to chutzpah.

As those in the news biz are painfully aware, the standard company description at the end of every press release (known as “boilerplate,” and rightly so) is typically jammed with as much meaningless jargon as a commuter-packed, rush-hour subway. But not Vyatta’s.

Vyatta starts by saying its “networking solutions (An empty word that should be exiled) provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors.” Zap No. 1. But that’s just the warmup.

Then it continues: “Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.” Zap. No. 2. Wow. This is getting personal. Way personal.

Finally, it compliments its customers as “thought leaders.” Attitude can go a long way in helping a David challenge a Goliath.

(A disclaimer: The boilerplate from Cisco, the market share networking leader, is brief and to the point. Much better than most. But it’s a lot less entertaining.)

As a closing note, I’m a native New Englander, so I didn’t have to read Vyatta’s company backgrounder to know that the startup was based in California. No kidding. Its boilerplate has California hip written all over it. Back to my long, impatient wait through gray skies and snowy driveways for our all-too-short New England summers.

It was a cool and completely foreboding premise: in the not so distant future documents of all kinds will be unreadable because the software that created them was proprietary, locked, and access expired with its creator. Basically, anyway; Simon put it much more eloquently than that (he has an accent).

Work has progressed since then thanks to the efforts of the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance, for short), and today a milestone of sorts was reached. The ODF Alliance is an organization of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF.

“During September and October, there were more than a dozen announcements of new or improved application support for ODF,” said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. “These recent announcements are a clear reflection of the strong and growing demand for ODF in the marketplace.”

In total, there are now more than two dozen ODF-supporting text, spreadsheet, and presentation applications announced in the past three months, including some big name ones listed below:

• IBM’s Lotus Symphony includes an ODF-supporting word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool. (http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa)
• Apple’s Text Edit, new release with the Leopard OS, provides reading and writing support for ODF. (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#textedit)
• Corel WordPerfect Office Beta allows users to open, view, and edit ODF. (Corel web page)
• Adobe’s Buzzword, an online word processor recently acquired from Virtual Ubiquity, will add support for ODF. (http://www.adobe.com/special/buzzword/faq.html)
• Sun ODF Plug-in 1.1 for Microsoft Office adds more languages and improves the import and export of ODF files into Microsoft Office, increasing the interoperability of the plug-in. (http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/)
• Mozilla’s Firefox lets you view ODF and other OpenOffice.org formats in your browser. (http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/09/openofficeorg-documents-within-firefox/)
• OpenOffice.org version 2.3 is an update of its open source office suite that provides native support for ODF and offers security, performance, and database improvements. (http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.3.0.html)

The struggle against Microsoft — and, really, that’s what this is — continues…

Today, it seems, I can’t go a minute without reading a blog post or news article about the OOXML ISO approval process. Marino Marcich, the managing director of the OpenDocument Alliance, wrote me this morning with an update:

While we await official confirmation of the ballot results, it appears that Microsoft’s Office Open XML failed to secure the necessary 2/3 vote among so-called P members of ISO. The large number of reported “no” votes (15) and “abstentions” (9) demonstrates the depth of concern around the world over OOXML’s interoperability and openness. The “no’s” included some of the fastest growing economies in the world and major industrialized countries, in stark contrast to ODF, which was approved unanimously (31-0) by ISO in 2006. ODF remains the document format of choice for governments, as it is now being considered for use by countries in every major region of the globe. Microsoft has every right to seek the ISO label for OOXML, but, as the ballot results show, it has a long way to go before it earns it and can be considered a truly open, interoperable document format.

Other vendors, like Sun Microsystems, support the ODF standard and cite a “Digital Dark Age” will form in the future if open standards are not adopted for our documents. What they argue, in layman’s terms, is that documents created under closed formats, like Word, will be unreadable in the future. Currently, documents are created by public sector agencies using different applications that may not be compatible with one another. The aim of the bodies like the ODF alliance is to use an open standard file format like OpenDocument that enables governments and their constituents to use, access and store documents, records and information both today and in the future.

It would appear that the ODF Alliance is please with this result today. That bodes well for ODF as a standard, even if it’s not enjoying those same successes here in the States. With that unanimous vote by ISO in 2006, however, it makes me wonder why this is the case.

EDIT: This is not an outright rejection. Instead, the ISO rejected “fast track” approval status for OOXML.