Microsoft funds Apache

news analysis Microsoft has begun funding the Apache Software Foundation, one of open source software's biggest supporters.

"Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation [ASF]. This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software," said Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move on Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. Ramji also noted Microsoft's support of Apache on the software company's Port 25 blog.

Some within Microsoft have, for years, been making various encouraging sounds about open source software, even though others have been far more disparaging. The company has no apparent desire to let the programming world have its way with Windows, as it can with Linux, but Microsoft has been making some efforts in certain circles.

Getting along with open source
For example, Microsoft has released its own open source licenses and put some technology under its Open Specification Promise, which lets open source programmers use that technology. Also on Friday, Ramji said the policy makes it clear the promise applies to commercial uses of the technology too.

Another example is that Microsoft has been working closely with Zend for Windows support of PHP, an open source project that lets servers create Web pages on the fly.

PHP is often used in conjunction with other open source components: Linux, the Apache Web server software that is used to dish up Web pages, and the MySQL database that is used to store the data used to build Web pages elements such as online catalog pages or online forum postings. In fact, the four are used often enough to have earned an acronym: Lamp.

But there is also the idea of Wisp, which substitutes many of Microsoft's own components: Windows, Internet Information Services for a Web server, and SQL Server for the database. On Friday, Microsoft released a patch to ADOdb, a package PHP uses to access databases. The patch lets PHP use SQL Server.

In other words, some parts of Microsoft are learning how to get along with some parts of the open source world.

Apache's liberal license
The Apache License governs the foundation's projects. Many of Microsoft's attacks on open source software have been aimed at the General Public License (GPL), which has a reciprocity provision: if you make a change to a GPL project, then distribute software employing that change, you must share the change under the GPL.

The Apache License, however, lets programmers take software and combine it with proprietary software in any way, with no obligation to share. That is how IBM, for example, uses the Apache Web server software in its proprietary WebSphere product.

For Microsoft, that means Apache's projects can be used within Microsoft, and there are some projects that could be of interest to the software maker.

Apache's useful projects
When it began, Apache did not have too many projects under its umbrella besides the HTTP web server that has surpassed Microsoft's competing products in market share since at least 1995, according to Netcraft's Web-server survey.

Now Apache has dozens of projects.

Microsoft, given its so-far fruitless efforts to catch up to Google in search, might find Hadoop useful: an open source version of Google's MapReduce algorithm that is instrumental in processing huge data sets. Yahoo contributes to Hadoop and uses it in its own operations.

There is nothing stopping Microsoft from using Hadoop or any other Apache project without funding Apache, but sponsorship makes some sense for political and practical reasons.

This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.