Friday, July 25, 2008

Microsoft sponsors The Apache Software Foundation

At OSCON today, Microsoft announced that they are becoming a Platinum level sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation, joining the existing sponsors at that level, Google and Yahoo!

It's great to see Apache's no-nonsense, technology focused approach to open source being clearly recognized as a place where everyone can collaborate as equals.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

A gift from me to you...

Earlier this year (and at the end of last year) the good folk of the Apache Harmony project did some work to improve the performance of a self-balancing tree data structure in Java called "TreeMap".

TreeMap is one of the data structures used in the SPEC performance benchmarks, so improvements there help to improve the overall benchmark score. This has been noticed by the good folk at Sun, and their latest performance build now includes a modified version of the Harmony TreeMap implementation.

It's good to see such reuse, and the commitment to "making the necessary steps to give back [the] code changes to Apache Harmony".