It’s been buzzing around all day. Microsoft has joined the Apache Foundation, giving them $100,000 anually for their platinum membership.
I spoke with Apache Software Foundation (ASF) president Justin Erenkrantz, who views Microsoft’s sponsorship of Apache as a step forward for interoperability. He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards. In particular, he points out an ASF project called Apache POI which offers native Java libraries for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats.
They have submitted LGPL licensed patches for PHP. Yes, that’s right. Microsoft used an FSF license.