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March 24, 2009
In a bold and totally unexpected move, Microsoft has launched an open source server application store.
The software behemoth has launched a whole slew of tools that enables software developers of server applications
to freely distribute their work in a simple manner to users of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 releases.
Called the 'Web App Gallery' developers can get various server applications in the new store.
Users of Windows who utilize the newly released Microsoft Web Platform can then install the server applications
easily, with the Web Platform taking care of installing and configuring the necessary dependencies such as IIS
(Internet Information Server) as well as setting up the system properly.
Microsoft's new Web App Gallery is currently populated by ten open source server tools, which may seem strange
for a company the size of Microsoft, but Lauren Cooney, group product manager for Web Platform and Standards at
Microsoft says things are changing at the Redmond software giant.
Interestingly, the tag line of her group is "Make Web not war"...
Cooney added "essentially, what we have launched with Windows Web Application Gallery is a marketing and distribution
pipeline for the open source community.
"So if a developer has a great server application he or she wants to include in the Web Application Gallery, we will
market that worldwide, so the server app will have a reach it could never had had before," said Cooney.
This is in fact a very bold move and represents a totally new direction for Microsoft, and is a further sign
that slowly but surely, the company is learning to work with open source and Linux, instead of against it.
It will be interesting to see how long the project works, and to what extent Microsoft's people will
participate in the program. The initiative is still a great one, nevertheless.
Source: Microsoft.
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