Ross Gardler of Microsoft Open Technologies talks about how Microsoft is contributing to open source projects. The company wants not only to ensure that open source products run well on Windows, but also that Linux-based products can run well on Windows Azure.

Ross talks about the flexibility that Azure provides through interoperability with different operating systems. He also talks about the private and public cloud capabilities of Azure, and how you can migrate processes from one to the other through the same management interface.

Finally, he talks about the the process of doing a cloud-based trial of your product in order to attract more users or open source developers. Azure offers a range of different options from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS, and he talks about the process of building and deploying images to Azure.

• Microsoft contributes to a variety of open source communities and projects. Learn more about Azure and open source software.