Microsoft Working with Eclipse on Vista, ID Links

Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the
Eclipse Foundation Wednesday did not include joining the open-source
tools foundation. But the two organizations are working together to
enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Windows
Vista. Also, Microsoft and Eclipse are collaborating on identity
management via linking Eclipse's Higgins Project with Microsoft's
CardSpace technology. Microsoft's efforts were detailed by Sam Ramji,
Microsoft director of platform technology strategy, at the EclipseCon
2008 conference in Santa Clara, California. Ramji guided the audience
through a list of efforts Microsoft has made in the open-source world,
such as accommodations for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), JBoss, and
Novell's Xen hypervisor. Ramji also said Microsoft itself has 200 projects
hosted on its CodePlex open-source hosting site. Microsoft traditionally
has been viewed as the anti-open-source company, but Ramji spared no
detail looking to refute this notion, listing a myriad of projects
undertaken over the years: "Today, we're architecting our participation
in the open-source world." The Java enablement effort for Vista involves
collaboration on an SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) to work with Microsoft's
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) technology for graphical presentation.
This will enable Java to be used an authoring language to write
WPF-enabled applications. Ramji wrote in his blog: "... the CardSpace
team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project
to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the
web -- an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the
inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with
the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed
to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with
CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the
OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment
to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use
identity layer for the Internet..."