Microsoft Sponsors Apache Software Foundation

gbjbaanb writes "Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is to sponsor the Apache Foundation to the tune of $100k. From the article: 'I asked him if this could possibly be the beginning of a broader initiative by Microsoft to increase Apache compatibility with .NET web development technologies, but he says it's still too early to guess Microsoft's future plans for Apache participation. ... He doesn't anticipate a confrontational response from the developers working on individual Apache projects ... The response of the broader open source software community, however, is harder to predict.' (In related news, MS also intends to participate in the RubySpec project.)"

Re:Microsoft Support of OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I know for a fact that's not the case. The IIS team is actually expanding internally and we're preparing another release soon. We're actually interviewing for more people right now.

Re:A better sponsorship

[dedazo]

I sure as hell hope not, I cannot begin to list all the advantages of running IIS+.NET on Server 2003 over [insert language] and mod_whatever on Apache. Having to muck around with httpd.conf and chmod wouldn't exactly be an improvement over their current stack, especially for intra-corp applications.

(I realize the above paragraph might hurt some fanboys - sorry. You can have your platform, I recognize its strengths. Just leave mine alone)

This is probably part of Microsoft's push to make things like PHP and Ruby work better on Windows. After all, they'd rather you run WAMP than LAMP. They've been engaged with Zend on the FastGCI implementation for IIS that makes PHP so much better on Windows. I don't think they see IIS as some sacred cow to be protected. Again, as long as you're running everything on Windows Server =)

You could point to it instead.

[twitter]

See this warning about divide and conquer [boycottnovell.com]. M$ has not brought much to the table. In return their marketing department is going to pretend there is community support for OOXML and other proprietary formats.

The broader M$ goal is to have people pay M$ if they want to use free software. They want you to use Windoze and taxed versions of GNU/Linux. Until they shut up about patents it is best to have nothing to do with them.

Re:A better sponsorship

[godefroi]

Anders Hejlsberg wrote MFC? While working at Borland in 1992? Huh, I never knew that...

Re:A better sponsorship

[Richard_at_work]

You know, you might want to do some research and rethink your view on the security aspect of IIS and Apache - since version 5, IIS has been impressively secure.

Re:A better sponsorship

[Hairy Heron]

Except a comparison between IIS and Apache is actually analogous while comparing an OS versus a Windowing system is far from analogous.

Re:A better sponsorship

[man_of_mr_e]

Uhh.. no, that's not true at all. Since IIS6 was released in 2003, there hasn't been a single critical security vulnerability in IIS. Not one.

The same can't be said for Apache.

Re:A better sponsorship

[cbiltcliffe]

While I agree IIS security has improve dramatically, you might want to do your own research when you claim that there are no critical security vulnerabilities.

http://secunia.com/product/1438/?task=advisories [secunia.com]

There are two remote system compromise vulnerabilities listed there.