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 February 01, 2008|913 Hits 
