microsoft
Microsoft sponsors Apache -
Microsoft has become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, custodians of the open source Apache web server. That translates into at least US$100 000 a year that Microsoft will donate to the foundation, funds the Apache team can spend on paying to run its support services. The announcement was made by Microsoft’s director of platform strategy, Sam Ramji, during a speech at the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon on Friday. Ramji also gave details of the sponsorship on Microsoft’s Port25 blog. Ramji said that while Microsoft was sponsoring the ASF this did not mean Microsoft was abandoning IIS as its web server technology. “We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8,” Ramji said. Apache is, by many metrics, the most widely-used web server on the Internet today. Over the past six months Microsoft has announced an ever increasing number of ways it plans to develop closer ties with the open source community including supporting ODF in Microsoft Office, playing a role in the future development of ODF, and improving document interoperability.
