Microsoft Donates Code To Apache's "Stonehenge" Project

dp619 writes "Several months after joining the Apache Foundation, Microsoft has made its first code contribution to an Apache project. The project, known as Stonehenge, is made up of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations."Reader Da Massive adds a link to coverage at Computer World.

Other notable contribution

[wawannem]

Although it is nice to see code donated, they made a much bigger contribution earlier allowing all apache committers access to MSDN. This is full d/l access to all of their products for testing, etc.

Numerous factual errors in article and summary

[thehossman]

"Several months after joining the Apache Foundation, Microsoft has made its first code contribution to an Apache project."

Corporations can not join the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Microsoft became a "sponsor" of the ASF last summer, but only individual people can join the ASF.

This is also not the first time Microsoft has contributed code to an Apache project, pulling one quick example out of google...

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/10/14/microsoft-s-powerset-team-resumes-hbase-contributions.aspx [technet.com]

Re:How will this turn out?

[Bogtha]

I know you are kidding, but since they restarted Internet Explorer development, Microsoft have submitted thousands of testcases to the W3C CSS Test Suite, which were welcomed and almost entirely accepted without change.

Re:I don't get it...

[shutdown -p now]

This is an open source project about web standards

Correction: this is an open source project about Web Service standards. If you see the development history of the various existing WS standards, especially the W3C ones, you'll see that Microsoft was a major driving force behind most of them, and many related standards (such as XML Schema), dating back to early 2000s. Then you may want to remember why .NET was called that in the first place (back when all MS products also got that prefix - Windows Server 2003 was originally Windows Server .NET, for example) - it was supposed to be all about web services (which were the Next Great Thing that will Revolutionize Software Development, Proactively Synergize your Paradigms, etc - the stuff which had essentially evolved into SOA today). Of course, Microsoft is still the big player on that market, and "interoperability and standards" has been the talking point for all that time, so nothing new here.

Re:This story's tags are killing me

[greg1104]

I'm surprised it's not tagged "itsatrap" yet.

Re:I don't get it...

[markdavis]

Like BhaKi says below- "a fight between two evils".

Except that Flash:

1) Has been around a lot longer
2) Works on all major browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, Seamonkey, etc)
3) Works on all the major operating systems, and natively (MS-Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris)
4) Is self-contained
5) Has development tools for most platforms

I have no great love of Flash, but at least it works and works on all the machines I need for it to work. I can't say that about Silverlight. And based on MS's history, Silverlight seems very much "isatrap".

I would feel much better about Flash if Adobe would just get over itself and open source the client- they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Time is ticking... open sourcing it NOW might be their own weapon against Silverlight.