Port25 - Opensource software lab@Microsoft

This came a surprise to me when I read about it...really a big surprise. I was not aware of this. Microsoft and Opensource lab!! sounds like a perfect example of a oxymoron huh? but this is true, not only Microsoft has an impressive setup to study the interoperability of MS products with opensource they have also started to publish lot of stuff they do. One can catch them here.

By what they have announced, its quite impressive. Throw in close to 300 servers running any and every Linux and Unix distro you can imagine and some really smart people under one roof then nobody is surprised if they come up with kick-ass solution to few issues that exist in running open source programs on Windows environment. That's what they have set out do, provide interoperability between Microsoft products and Open source products, benchmark Microsoft products against their corresponding Open source counterparts.

I think this is a laudable effort, if this lab is able to suggest ways to iron out kinks that exist between MS and Opensource, it will be a win-win situation to the customer, who will have a broader choice and can focus more on the business issue rather than worrying about technology integration. Also the benchmarking of Microsoft products against Opensource will be one step further to better MS products.

So I will be all ears and all eyes and will keep tab on what these guys will come up with next.