Microsoft, the company least-likely to be associated with open source software, has made good on earlier promises to contribute to open source projects.<\/p>\n
The company first started its slow move to acceptance of open source in March and April of 2008 when the company announced a series of interoperability plans. Among these were document interoperability commitments which were largely overshadowed by a vicious document format fight over OOXML and the OpenDocument Format. <\/p>\n
In July 2008 Microsoft announced it was willing to put some money behind open source software by agreeing to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation – the foundation behind the most popular, open source, web server. The annual $100 000 sponsorship is paltry in terms of Microsoft’s worth but it was a step few could find fault with.<\/p>\n
It was a year later that Microsoft made its first open source-licensed software release. In fact there were two pieces of software: 20 000 lines of Hyper-V code for the Linux kernel and a Moodle plugin – both under the GNU GPL2 licence.<\/p>\n
Now Microsoft has made good on a previous commitment to contribute code towards the popular JQuery Javascript library, a piece of software widely used to add interactive features to websites.<\/p>\n
Microsoft’s first contribution is a globalisation plugin. The plugin includes globalisation information for more than 350 cultures, Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Developer Division, said in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Using the library developers can parse and format numbers, currencies and date for a range of different cultures when using JavaScript. This would include displaying the correct currency symbol, re-formatting dates to be in line with local custom and translating dates into local languages.<\/p>\n Guthrie has also posted a number of examples of the new plugin in action on his blog.<\/p>\n It’s slow going but the company once viewed as enemy number one for open source software is slowing warming to this new world.<\/p>\n