Microsoft finally committing to open source

Microsoft is known for keeping its programming secrets to itself. But under CEO Satya Nadella, the maker of proprietary behemoths like Windows and Microsoft Office is starting to show up in the world of open-source software, whose code is public for anyone to see, borrow from and tinker with.

Late last year Microsoft finally made itself an account on Github, now the de-facto platform that software writers use for sharing and working on open-source code. “Microsoft has changed as a company and is becoming more open in the way that we collaborate with others,” the account’s description reads.

Microsoft has actually been doing open source in some capacity for a while. It releases many open-source projects on its own CodePlex platform, though this is far less popular than GitHub. It has also had a scattered presence on GitHub for some time: MS Open Tech, a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary that works with open source, has its own account, as does Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform.

But the company as a whole has never been as fully committed to it as big-tech peers like Google and Facebook. (Apple, though, is similarly reticent.) And never has the entire organization’s commitment to open source been so explicit.

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This might just be the beginning of Microsoft’s efforts. It is already starting to open-source parts of its widely used .NET software framework, seeing how greatly competitor systems like Java have benefitted from letting outsiders poke around in their code.

The open-source push suggests that Microsoft, once a behemoth, is starting to understand that it is now the underdog and can’t do everything on its own. That is even more true now that the company is cutting 18,000 jobs.

Still, opacity is so ingrained into Microsoft culture that any open-source push will take time. Take .NET, for example. “The majority of the worldwide .NET developer community is nervous about open source due to years of conditioning from Microsoft that open source is bad, dangerous, and anti-commercial,” wrote Sam Ramji, formerly head of open-source strategy at Microsoft, in a recent blog post. “We started trying to change that message seven years ago, and made a little progress, but even today there is a long, long way to go.”

Microsoft has indeed had a slow start on GitHub. It didn’t actually add any code to its account until last month, several months after the account was created. So far only one Microsoft project—its TypeScript programming language—is being shared on the platform.

Facebook introduces a new bookmarking feature "Save" to help tame your News Feed

it only happens when you’re in a hurry. You launch Facebook to quickly see what your friends are up to and see something you actually have an interest in exploring. Facebook is making it easier to save those posts with a new bookmarking feature.


Today, Facebook introduced Save for Web and mobile. The new feature acts as a bookmark for items you find interesting such as links, places, movies, TV shows and music. The saved items can be accessed later for viewing on the Web or on your mobile device. Plus, you can share any items you’ve Saved with your Facebook friends.

To access the Saved items on the Web, just click on the Saved feature on the left-hand side of your News Feed. On mobile click on the more tab. Saved items are organized by category and can be opened, shared, or archived. If you save something and forget about it, Facebook will periodically notify you that you have items you found interesting at one point.

The new feature, like almost all components of the social network is to keep you inside Facebook. Instead of saving items to Pinterest, Instapaper, Pocket, or other read-it-later services, you can use Facebook as a bookmarking service. It’s also a good way to keep track of restaurants and stores you may want to visit. With reviews already part of a business’s Facebook page, this could be bad news for Yelp.

Save will start rolling out to Android, iOS and the Web over the next few days

One Click Public Assistant

The Issue 

Modern fast life has reduced the quality time that people used to spend to monitor and safeguard the neighbours and the environment around their neighbourhood in a day-to-day manner. In a country like Sri Lanka, where multiple languages are spoken and people are not fully conversant in language other than their mother tongue, this also poses problems in clearly explaining the problem or the incident to the authorities. On the other hand service providers too, find it difficult to locate the exact location of the place where their service is needed because at many occasions compliant is also not well aware of the locations of the incidents and are unable to guide the officers to the exact location. Inability to report such incidents on time can claim many valuable lives and will seriously harm many precious natural resources of the country. 

One such consequence, which we can witness today around, is the epidemic city of Dengue fever in all districts of Sri Lanka including the capital city of Colombo, which has already claimed many valuable lives. Therefore, there needs to be an effective and efficient system is available for public to report any incidents of common benefit for the betterment of life. 

According to the Epidemiology Unit, Ministry of Health Report During the last 6 months of the year 2014, 18542 suspected dengue cases have been reported to the Epidemiology Unit from all over the island. Approximately 58.97% of dengue cases were reported from the Western province. The highest numbers of dengue cases were reported during the twenty fifth week of 2014.This situation warrants regular removal of possible mosquito breeding sites from the environment.

The Solution 

OCPA (One Click Public Assistant) is a location based reporting system integrated with a social media-based mobile application to ease and expedite the public services issues reporting and claims process.

 The main purpose of this system is expediting the public service process with accurate record and facilitates the appropriate parties who are interest on the particular problem / issue. This system helps us to report incidents in less time and the public do not need to be in the queue to complain about their incidents. Also, they can review the more focused solution taken by the authority for a particular incident. The most important thing is within a second the public can easily see what is happening around them and anyone can from the any part of the world crowd-sourcing for dengue surveillance. So, this application enables us to reduce the paper work and helps related parties to benefit. 

OCPA will allow everyone to share they experience through social networking tools including Facebook and Google Cloud message service and guard the society from epidemic diseases.

How This Solution is Possible?

•  87% people in the world and 80.95% people in Sri lanka use mobile phone

•  Volunteers are like a Gem difficult to find but there are some peoples wish to serve but they don¡¦t have a much time

• Social media's are popular because of sharing and smart phone access

• Mobile computing is now playing a big role in the world. Mobile government services are available in many counties

The Implementation 

This system proposed for the Motorola/Slasscom inter university innovation championship-2013 on march 2013 , developed for the December 2013 final and won 3rd place.

The System 

• A user reports an incident (written as per the App¡¦s current design)

• Take the phone (out) & resume

• Unlock the screen 

• Tap Applications icon

• Navigate to OCPS app

• Launch the app by tapping

• If first time Register and Login

• Tap on the main screen to bring up the buttons

• Tap on Report button

• Take photo by tapping the camera button

•  Enter description of the photo/action requested

•  Tap Send button 

Now the system will have the Report Image with the geo-location , small description and category of issue . through these information system will forward the report to the appropriate authority according to the area and category . authority want to reply for that issue within small amount of period otherwise system will display the particular issue in the wap and send to social media's as a highlighted issue in order to make public pressure and media focus on particular issue but at the same time user also can report share issue to OCPA a mean time to social media like Facebook also in order to make crowd-sourcing.

Application https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Rajjaz.OCPS