Sitting down in the wake of Joomla! USA West 2010 I've had a bit of a chance to digest what is going on. The event, held at eBay's own campus, was the biggest JoomlaDay's in the USA. However I now come to the realisation that now both Microsoft and eBay share something unique and awesome. What does Microsoft and eBay have in common?

Both have signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement or the JCA. The JCA is the agreement put in place before code is contributed to the project and two of the largest companies in the technology sphere have now signed the JCA. To be honest when you sit down and think about it this is absolutely awesome and a confirmation of what we're doing with the Joomla! project.

I announced that Microsoft signed the JCA back in April and their contribution to the core was support for the cache support Microsoft provide on Windows. This code, now in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk, will hook into the Wincache extension for PHP and provide a speed boost for running Joomla! on Windows. Since then we've kept the Joomla! Web Platform installer project up to the latest version of Joomla! and it is in my mind the easiest way of getting Joomla! up and running on Windows.

Over the weekend we had the announcement that eBay has signed the JCA as well. eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and is internally using Joomla! to build their portal to help enable the organisation to be data driven through analytics. At the JoomlaDay Oliver Ratzesberger, senior director of analytics platform at eBay, demonstrated their platform utilising not only the core Joomla! product but also third party extensions such as social networking platform JomSocial, forum tool Kunena and Mosets Tree.

It is amazing to be in a world where Joomla!, a GPL project, is being contributed to by Microsoft with not only code in the Joomla! core but with members of the company providing support on the forum and are starting to write documentation on our wiki. eBay have only just come into the fold but they've been working on some very exciting stuff that I look forward to seeing in the near future. I am also excited that both Microsoft and now eBay have been supporting Joomla! events with eBay hosting and sponsoring JoomlaDay USA West in addition to Microsoft hosting the upcoming JoomlaDay New York and JoomlaDay Washington, DC events as well as sponsoring JoomlaDay's around the world such as JoomlaDay Bangkok.

At the end of the day it is great that the project that I and many others have been working on for the last half a decade is now being adopted and supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. I think that's just awesome and let's bring on Joomla! 1.6