This is my first real conference, and yet it isn't a regular conference by any means. For one thing there are only about 25 developers here (and a handful of Microsoft evangelists. Of the developers, most seem pretty much like rockstars, which makes my involvement seem perhaps a little dubious.
We started with a dinner and open bar last night. I did my best to be charming and do a bit of Gallery evangelism -- not "you should use Gallery" (because quite a few attendees already do) but rather "you should contribute to Gallery" because most of them don't.
First off, let me introduce the blogs of attendees. These are the people whose blogs got posted before the event, so there may be some people whom I am missing.
Sitting across the aisle from me is Dave Fetterman of facebook. He wrote the facebook development platform. That's right, all of those terrible "a zombie just bit you" notifications are his fault. Then again, so are things like the flickr and last.fm apps.
The first speaker is Sam Ramji. He is attempting to not only talk about Microsoft's "commitment to open source," but also ask us how Microsoft can support our needs as open source developers. He's definitely selling the idea, but I don't know how the other attendees are buying it. I'd say that two thirds of attendees have Apple laptops sitting in front of them, and there's already been a pointed question about Microsoft's use of the term "open source." Sam answered by explaining some differences between "open source" and "free software," and went on to show a handful of slides reviewing things like Microsoft's relatively new open source licenses: Ms-pl Ms-rl.
Now he is explaining why Vista didn't intentionally burn Mozilla by shutting out Windows Media Player by deleting the old Media Player dlls. Apparently they helped build a new plugin that updated Mozilla to use the new Vista dlls. That seems like a no brainer, but at a company like Microsoft it takes a certain amount of approval and momentum to support something that directly competes with their product.
Microsoft's shiny open source page
Finally, he's talking about how Microsoft makes money from open source. Basically, his expectation is that open source projects would tie into salable products like MSSQL or Active Directory.
0 Responses to Microsoft Web Development Summit
Leave a Reply