Microsoft sends an open source message by joining the AMQP working group

UPDATE: 10/27 (from Microsoft Subnet editor Julie Bort): Microsoft has today answered my e-mail asking how MSMQ might be affected by AMQP.  According to Greg Thomas, Sr. Manager, Platform Strategy for Microsoft, "Today our customers have diverse and complex messaging needs that no single IT company alone can address. Microsoft's involvement in AMQP is being driven by our customers' desire to see greater interoperability between message-oriented middleware technologies, including MSMQ.  We are currently evaluating the options for supporting AMQP in our product set."

So that's a nicely sanitized statement that says that Microsoft is not ready to share its plans for AMQP beyond agreeing to participate in the development of the standard itself. Fair enough. Microsoft may not know its plans until it rolls up its sleeves and gets to work with the standard. Enterprise customers can at least feel encouraged that Microsoft is participating and that if nothing else, this should lead to better interoperability between Microsoft's messaging protocols and the open source AMQP. The best outcome would be that Microsoft chooses to directly support AMQP in Microsoft products, giving users a choice. But any progress toward interoperability is a step in the right direction. 

(If you get a chance, check out Greg's blog, too. He works with Sam Ramji helping to make Microsoft's product's interoperable with others). 

FROM 10/24: Microsoft today announced that it has joined the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization developing an open source messaging protocol. Microsoft is the 15th corporate member of the group that includes an impressive array of users, as well Cisco, Novell, Red Hat. Specifically, members of the AMQP Working Group are Cisco, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Boerse Systems, Envoy Technologies Inc., The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., iMatix Corporation, IONA Technologies, J.P. Morgan, Novell, Rabbit Technologies Ltd., Red Hat Inc., TWIST Process Innovations Ltd., WSO2 and 29West Inc.

The story is that Microsoft was asked to join by members of the group. We're guessing that the members that wanted Microsoft in are Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs (and not Red Hat), or so Microsoft hints in the press release. In any case, Red Hat has honorably publically welcomed Microsoft to the party, according to a blog post the company published today.

"Today, Microsoft announced that it has joined the AMQP working group. As a founding member of the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) working group, we at Red Hat are excited about this development. Just as Red Hat has been adding native AMQP support into the Linux platform and ecosystem at Fedora and through Red Hat Enterprise MRG, Microsoft is bringing AMQP support to Windows and its ecosystem. Between Linux and Windows, AMQP will become a standard messaging facility on the vast majority of operating systems and server platforms. It will offer a new level of interoperability between Linux and Windows using open standards and open source software. And, it is designed to lead to breakthroughs in everything from core infrastructure software to management tools to next-generation applications and architectures."

If this announcement had come out any other day but today, it would have been met with widespread sketicsm -- and maybe it still should. No mention has yet been made of how the work on AMQP will affect Microsoft's own messaging protocol, MSMQ. MSMQ is central to its messaging technology framework, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Will it replace it? Work alongside it as a second option? Will MSMQ messages ride on top of AMQP or be otherwise wrapped?

Microsoft's previous mode-of-operation when it came to standards work was a sort of destroy-from-within philosophy. We don't need more evidence than the OOXML debacle. For decades Microsoft has participated in standards development with the IETF and other standards bodies. But the goal has been to pass off proprietary technology as a standard. We can't be too harsh on Microsoft for that (with the exception of OOXML -- which brought the standards manipulation game to new heights). All technology companies did the same. Until the advent of open source software this was simply how business was done -- appear to particpate in standards while figuring out ways to lock in users.

But this announcement did come today. The same day that Samba's Andrew Bartlett declared Microsoft to be officially a friend to open source. He wrote:

"The Free Software community still does not have perfect interoperability with Microsoft's products - far from it - but the bottleneck is our own pace of implementation ..."

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, has been charged with making Microsoft products interoperable with open source. The best way to do that is clearly to do what the AMQP group did -- get some big customers to ask. He writes:

"We've been working with a range of open source projects in the last few years, and each one has taught us something - both what to do more of, and what to change. One of the things we've learned in listening to very specific customer needs, is that there is an emerging pattern of shared software development that will drive changes in how companies buy vs. build software."

Rather than appearing to be more of the same from Microsoft, this announcement is another in a growing list of evidence that Ramji is succeeding. Microsoft has joined the Apache Foundation, has committed support for Ruby on Rails and to a lesser extent, the Zend Framework among other examples of cooperation. Has the age of a kinder, gentler Microsoft arrived? It may not be time to uncross your fingers but the future looks good.

Visit the Microsoft Subnet home page for more news, blogs, podcasts.
More blog post from the Microsoft Subnet posts:

Also see:

12 tips for safe social networking
10 questions for Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 guy, Jason Hermitage
17 job-hunting resources for Windows pros
Under the hood of Hyper-V (master list of links).
Library of Windows management tools from A Better Windows World
Subscribe to all Microsoft Subnet bloggers.
Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)

 

• Microsoft
• AMQP
• messaging protocols
• Microsoft messaging
• Microsoft versus open source
• MSMQ
• open source
• WCF
• Windows Communication Foundation