What was Microsoft Doing @ OSCON?

Well, they partnered with WSO2, to bridge Microsoft products and open source technologies.

The booth attracted very interesting people. There were very interesting questions. Some asked on why WSO2 should be partnering with the software giant. Some were keen on the technologies that we were offering. Some were just curios on the intentions of Microsoft. And some even thought that we were marketing a stock trader application that runs on Windows platform. Some even asked, SOA - what is that?

Some were very skeptical, and Sanjiva has answered them already.

The best part was the story we had and there were quite a number of people who were looking for just such a story. The seamless interoperability between .Net, Java and the scripting space, demonstrated by the stock trader application was a dream come true. We had PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl on one end, Java on another and .NET on another. The three layers of the sample app, one client layer and two service layers, could be mixed and matched, irrespective of the implementation. And the business models of the two organizations involved in this effort was drastically different, yet the application did not care and worked perfectly. Closed source and open source and live together, work together, and make the enterprises thrive and prosper.