Microsoft includes open source component on new Windows

The Microsoft is including, for the first time in its history, open-source technology in one of its operational systems, the Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, that should be launched in the first semester of 2006.

The company already implements Message Passing Interface (MPI) - a library specification for message passing proposed as a standard by a broad-based committee of vendors in the 1990s - in the operational system for servers, which arrived at the first public tests phase this week.

"Actually, we are probably the first team at Microsoft that will actually ship an open-source component inside of our solution, but we haven't made a lot of noise around this yet", said Microsoft's director for High Performance Computing Kyril Faenov to the site eWEEK.

The MPI technology “is a complex piece of software that would take years to develop", said. Faenov also declared that the Microsoft will contribute with the open-source community therefore, as the MPI is licensed under the BSD all the corrections will be provided to the community again.

“We'll probably give the changes back as well", promised the director. Click here to read more.