A Microsoft product manager ZDNet's veteran Microsoft reporter Mary-Jo Foley that Microsoft by bundling a set of extremely popular open-source apps into its release, Microsoft hopes that site developers will simply install Microsoft Web Platform, rather than hunting down and installing each of the other software packages separately.
Microsoft's Web Platform site currently lists included with the 2.0. Most notable are these:
* PHP - A scripting language for dynamic Web pages, with recently improved support on Windows.
* WordPress - A Web publishing platform that claims to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world.
* Drupal - The social website platform I use at The Industry Standard, with over 2,000 open-source modules for customization and enhancement.
* Gallery - A Web-based photo gallery application geared toward social sites, with built-in support for private and group access to photos.
There's another compelling reason for Microsoft to include some of its perceived competitors into its package: To dispel the notion that Microsoft is trying to block PHP in favor of its own ASP.NET. It's a stigma Microsoft has lived with, justifiably, since 1997, when the company added support for Sun's Java language that required Java programmers to write applications that were with operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.