On behalf of my team and everyone at Microsoft, we thank each and every one of you for your contributions. Your response and enthusiasm blew us away, with participants ranging from long-time Microsoft community members to people completely new to our ecosystem (over 70% participants were first-time Microsoft project contributors!).

I was particularly excited by the breadth of community member participation from documentation to samples and core code, and across large-scale projects like .NET Core, Xamarin, Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Service Fabric, Draft, and dozens of smaller projects we sponsor and maintain. Thanks for bringing your unique expertise and perspective to improve the community.

I also want to recognize our friends, DigitalOcean, GitHub, and twilio, for running Hacktoberfest and demonstrating their leadership in growing and celebrating open source around the world.

We're currently in the process of reviewing all submissions, and everyone who completed our Hacktoberfest challenge will receive a limited edition T-shirt, designed Ashley McNamara, Cloud Developer Advocate and graphic designer.

Participants who met all the requirements will receive an email in the next 2-3 weeks with a redemption code, information from our fulfillment partner's website, and shipping instructions. We appreciate your patience they're coming soon!

Open source lives and breathes community, and it's thriving thanks to the all the individual developers like you who contribute code, documentation, and much more to millions of projects every single day. We hope you continue to participate in the communities and projects that sparked your interest in October.

Anything you'd like to see Hacktoberfest next year? Let us know in the comments.

More on Microsoft + Open Source projects here.

The post #Hacktoberfest 2018: Thank you! appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

Why is this important? For starters, increasing clarity around a project makes it easier to build a community and gain contributors. It also increases consumer’s confidence in open source. Overall, it serves as an important piece of the end-to-end ecosystem that has developed around the production and consumption of open source.

ClearlyDefined fills a "data gap" in the open source management ecosystem today. There are many great efforts around tools, formats, and processes for open source, but few directly address how to get or manage the data to put in the tools, formats or processes. ClearlyDefined's sole purpose is to harvest, curate and provide essential data such as the license, copyright holders, source location, and security vulnerabilities for individual open source components. That data is then available to developers as they select components to use, to legal and security teams as they assess what they have, and compliance teams as they ensure they are respecting the wishes of the projects.

This data is also a boon to open source projects as they are often consumers of other open source work. Making it easy for producers to understand the nature of components they consume makes it easy for them to know what they are bringing into their community.

The team in Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office has been contributing to this project and is a part of the community growing around the technology, curation, and upstream work. We are very excited to help develop ClearlyDefined along with many other organizations, companies, and individuals who are producing and/or consuming open source. Every day we are engaging with more and more open source teams. ClearlyDefined is crucial to understanding the nature of their code. We love the mindset and the project fits seamlessly into our engaged approach to open source.

ClearlyDefined provides infrastructure and processes that enable crowd-source curation of mechanically harvested data. Like any open source project, community contributors untangle ambiguities, fill gaps, or verify discovered information. Each contribution is reviewed and discussed in the open, and if accepted, ultimately merged and made available upstream to the original open source project.

It is telling that some of the initial participants include the Eclipse Foundation, well known for understanding the importance of this kind of information to building confidence in a community. By being part of the OSI, ClearlyDefined augments the OSI's mission of educating, advocating, and stewarding open source discovering, curating and contributing the data is a logical extension.

The project is only just starting, but it strikes a chord with folks who encounter it. Even with its initial focus on licensing related info, security will come later, there is a ton of work to do. Everything from building connections with upstream communities to understand how they work, promote adoption, and acceptance of upstreamed changes, to defining a curation process and building a curation community, to implementing and running the website and tools that power the system.

What chord does it strike for you? Want to get involved? Check out https://docs.clearlydefined.io/get-involved.

More about this project from our partners:

https://opensource.org/clearlydefined
https://360.here.com/here-clearlydefined-foss

The post Join OSI and Microsoft in the new ClearlyDefined project appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

The post Microsoft joins the Open Source Initiative appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.

OSPO + Node.js

OSPO was met with a rich and growing internal community of Node.js users and, as a big “customer” themselves, used this internal forum to provide feedback to the product groups and leverage the best tooling and product experiences available.
OSPO started with Node 4.x and as the application matured, they recently moved to Node 6.x LTS. Like most Node apps, OSPO integrates many packages available in NPM for this application. The team has also released several modules like redie, painless-config and ghrequestor, with plans to contributing more in the area of Table Encryption and Key Vault integration. Another big effort from the team is GHCrawler, a system that collects data from GitHub to help teams gather insights and metrics about open source interactions.

Platform

Microsoft’s vision for Node.js in the cloud focuses on production operations, developer productivity, as well as flexible and powerful cloud deployments.
OSPO uses many elements of the Azure platform, including App Service, Logic Apps, Linux VMs and Web Jobs for compute resources, Azure Storage, Redis Cache, Service Bus and DocumentDB for persistence and messaging, and Azure Active Directory and Application Insights. On the analytics side, OSPO is making use of Azure Data Lake and PowerBI to visualize and interpret data.

In addition to the ability to grow and adapt the application as needs evolve, this enables OSPO to define rich workflows. For example, their App Service deployment is fully integrated with GitHub, includes Grunt tasks for testing and linting, hook-based notifications with Logic Apps and more. Those services have helped OSPO to reduce their cloud costs by 75% compared with their original architecture.

Tools

OSPO team members, like many Microsoft employees, get a choice of PC or Mac for their workstations and most of the team uses Visual Studio Code on macOS and Windows. This establishes a feedback loop with Microsoft IT and the internal open source community that shares libraries and mechanisms to improve support, in addition to the feedback loop that OSPO has with many product groups like the Azure Active Directory team.
Another technology used by OSPO that has strong Node.js affinity is MongoDB. And here’s where Azure’s open and flexible approach pays off, since it allowed OSPO to move from in house managed MongoDB infrastructure for data pipeline processing to a fully managed DocumentDB instance with MongoDB protocol support, helping them to grow and giving the product group valuable experimentation data.

These Node services are in addition to OSPO’s rich existing portfolio that includes the Open Source Portal. The portal was originally used in the Azure team but has since expanded its reach to cover 10,000+ engineers across all of Microsoft’s it is used by every Microsoft engineer to manage their GitHub engagement.
How are you using Node on Azure? Let us know in the comments.
Want to get started? Check out the Azure Node.js Developer Center to learn more.

The post Node.js and Azure is a winning combination for Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office appeared first on Microsoft Open Source Blog.