Microsoft gets closer to the Eclipse open source foundation

This may be the closest that Microsoft has gotten to becoming a fully paid-up member of the Eclipse open source initiative. Sam Ramji writing in Port 25, the Microsoft open source community, announced "the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation." Though the blog gives little away as to how exactly Microsoft will work with Eclipse, Ramji hints at an initiative to put Java on Windows. He writes: we discovered that Steve Northover (the Standard Widget Toolkit team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers. Ramji also notes that Microsoft, the Higgins Project, and others continue to work on interoperability between their identity management projects.

Further reading:
Microsoft's Credentica purchase helps it sprint ahead of OpenID

Is the metadirectory dead?

Why won't Microsoft commit to identity management standards?

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