Ramji, who made the announcements at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Friday, promised "a lot more" PHP patches in the coming months now Microsoft had established processes he said clarified how employees can contribute to open source.
In a further move towards greater support of open source, Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project.
Microsoft's new love for FSF licensing and PHP is not exactly unselfserving. The decision to work on PHP fits with the overall strategy of improving the language's interoperability with Windows and stemming the loss of PHP application deployments to Linux. LGPL allows code to be used with proprietary programs - such as SQL Server - unlike its GPL cousin.
2 years ago
So microsoft is embracing the power of opensource....