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Microsoft Joins Open Source Census Group

6/17/2008

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Microsoft has joined the Open Source Census as a sponsor, according to an announcement issued by OpenLogic, which founded the group. The Open Source Census project tracks the use of open source software by the business community. Survey results are updated on an ongoing basis at the group's Web site.

The group yesterday reported that "more than 220,000 open source package/project installations" are being used by Open Source Census survey participants. In addition, about half of the Linux users surveyed chose the Ubuntu distribution. The top five open source packages were "Firefox, Xerces, Zlib, Xalan and Prototype," respectively.

Joining the group at the "Friends" level are "ActiveState, EnterpriseDB and OSAlt.com." A new sponsor, in addition to Microsoft, is the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.

The Microsoft name stands out as a new sponsor mainly because the company has been involved with open source for only a few years, and hasn't always been friendly to it. Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy cites a history extending back just four years, when Microsoft first established its Linux Lab.

More recently, in February of this year, Microsoft announced a broad program, backed by Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, that would support developers working with Microsoft's software, including open source developers. Back then, the company announced that it would provide open application programming interfaces to its core software products, and publish software protocol documentation.

Some of that documentation, about 14,000 pages, was released a few months ago. The documentation describes protocols used in Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Still, skeptics such as the Software Freedom Law Center had declared back in March that Microsoft's interoperability principles were essentially contrary to GNU General Public Licensing, an agreement that permits code sharing and future software improvements without triggering patent violations.



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