Microsoft Sponsors Apache Project

      by Wyatt Walter

The open source community was shocked today at the announcement that Microsoft has agreed to sponsor the Apache project. The sponsorship was announced at OSCON, an open source conference sponsored by O’Reilly. The move was a surprise since Apache has long been considered the most widely-used web server, a direct competitor to Microsoft’s IIS web server. Microsoft has agreed to donate $100,000 per year to the Apache Software Foundation. Reaction from the community is sure to be mixed. Sam Ramji, leader of the seemingly contradictory Microsoft Open Source Labs quoted Jim Jagielski, the chairman of the Apache Foundation in a blog saying:

“We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top level projects in use and development within the ASF,” said ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski. “The ASF Sponsorship program is an excellent way for companies and organizations to show their commitment and enthusiasm towards the ASF and The Apache Way, and helps to ensure that highly innovative, freely-available and community-based/consensus-developed software can continue to flourish and thrive within one of the most successful and respected communities in Open Source. Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft ‘gets it’ regarding the ASF.”

Microsoft also recently added support for PHP, a competitor to its ASP and ASP.NET programming environment into IIS. Perhaps we’ll start to see an ASP.NET module for Apache soon?

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 29th, 2008