A New Zealand company claims to hold the first ever official certification from Microsoft for an open source web application for the Windows platform. SilverStripe, which produces an BSD licensed CMS product, announced yesterday that had achieved the “Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2” from Microsoft. SilverStripe claims its product is the first truly open source, by Open Source Initiative‘s definition of the term, to have achieved this level of certification. It also claims this is also the first application written in PHP, rather than .NET, to achieve said certification.
To achieve the certification, SilverStripe had to reach several technical requirements, including: support for Windows, IIS, and SQL Server 2008. According to the company’s announcement, “SilverStripe was also one of ten initial products able to be installed at the launch of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and the Web Application Gallery.”
I have two questions for readers:
1) Have you been through the Microsoft certification process with any of your products? If so, was it a difficult process?
2) Do you think this represents a turning point in the way Microsoft deals with open source? Microsoft has, after all, been very good about supporting languages other than .NET on Azure.
