Email from Microsoft

Howdy,

My name is Garrett Serack, I'm the Community Program Manager for the
Open Source Software Labs at Microsoft.

I'm reaching out to Open Source PHP projects with an interesting offer,
which could improve adoption of Geeklog.

With the availability of the FastCGI component, and the upcoming native
SQL Server driver for PHP, we're diligently working to make PHP a fully
supported option on the Windows platform.

We are working very hard behind the scenes to get some policies changed
regarding our ability to contribute to Open Source projects, and while
that is going on, we're spinning up a project to start doing what we can
to assist Open Source PHP projects in getting the support they need to
ensure that their PHP software runs as well on Windows as it does elsewhere.

So, while we're in a holding pattern on releasing source code, we can
help out in a variety of ways:

    Testing
            The Open Source Software Lab has a rather large number of servers
            that we are dedicating to testing PHP software on Windows, along
            with SQL Server.  We are profiling applications, seeing where
            improvements can be made and contacting the appropriate groups.
             
            Along with this, when a project has a build that uses the new
            SQL Server driver, we're able to do large-scale testing to ensure
            that the driver, the database and the application are all
            performing optimally.
             
    Coordination
            We are in constant coordination with the internal product groups
            here at Microsoft, as well as continually working with Zend to
            improve the performance of the free version of PHP.
           
            We can act as the go between to find out needs to be fixed,
            and who can get the changes made.
   
    Assistance
            Because free software tends to have less access to our products, and
            is often built by folks for little or no remuneration, we are
            granting free MSDN subscriptions to active developers on the PHP
            projects we are engaging with, to ensure they have access to all the
            versions of Windows, SQL Server, and development tools that we have.
           
            On top of that, we've prepared some Virtual PC and VMware images
            that have Windows preloaded with the PHP stack, SQL Server and the
            native driver for PHP that we'll be providing along with the MSDN
            subscriptions, for a ready-made test environment.
           
    Cooperation
            We've begun to work with hosters and vendors as well to ensure that
            they have access to the components and technical support they need
            to offer the PHP applications they support on Windows as well as
            other platforms.

What We'd like:

    Ideally we're hoping that with our assistance, we can help PHP projects
    support SQL Server as a database option, running on top of Windows.   We're
    hoping to get the permission to contribute code to do that ourselves, but
    in the meantime, we can help out in other ways.

    If the undertaking to add SQL Server support is too large, we have
    considered funding a developer to write and contribute the code to the
    project.

    We're also open to suggestions on other ideas on how we can contribute
    assistance.

If you are interested in working together, I think we can expand
Geeklog's reach into places and platforms that have been previously
unfeasible.

Garrett Serack

Last Updated Friday, February 01 2008 @ 11:31 CST; 663 Hits