Open-source fans mixed on Microsoft move

Open-source fans had a mixed reaction to Microsoft's move on Thursday to share details of its technology with open-source programmers, says News.com.

The move could make it easier for many projects to work well with Microsoft products and potentially replace them, for example the Thunderbird e-mail software could communicate better with Microsoft Exchange servers and also displace Microsoft Outlook on PCs.

Microsoft also made it clear that a pledge not to sue open-source programmers only applied in "non-commercial" contexts, so open-source fans didn't get everything they want.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is making its performance library available as open-source code, which should help developers build multithreaded applications for x86 machines, reports Computerworld.

The three-year-old library contains more than 3 200 software routines that focus on specific functions, such as handling audio and video data, according to Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions at AMD. This is the first time that AMD has released a proprietary library set and released it as open source.

"This is one of our ways to help developers write software that runs really well, [and] taking a little bit of the headache out of it for them," Lewis told Computerworld. "A developer can write these functions himself, or use these to save time. We've spent a lot of time tuning [these routines] so the code runs faster and the developer doesn't have to write the routine and then optimise it.

It has become a commonplace perception that the UK is rather unenlightened when it comes to open-source software, says ZDNet.

But some UK companies provide evidence that tells a different side of the story, and one of these is Specsavers Optical Group with its recent deployment of the open-source tools OpenLDAP, Samba and Gosa to handle directory services for its worldwide chain of optician stores.

According to Alfresco's Open Source Barometer, Britain is behind the US, France, Germany, Spain and Italy when it comes to adopting community-developed software, and, whatever its procurement rhetoric, central government seems content to continue entering into IT framework agreements with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.