Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Bill Hilf

Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft

billhilf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:47:00 GMT

It's been a while since I made an appearance on Port25. I felt it was important to provide some thoughts to the Port25 community on Sam Ramji's impending departure from Microsoft.

After many years helping to carry the open source software banner for the company, Sam is leaving Microsoft at the end of this month. You may have also heard that he has accepted the position of interim President of the CodePlex Foundation as well as a leadership position at a startup in California. (I'll let Sam and his new company share more details there.)

Sam joined my team three years ago to drive open source technical strategy. I have eagerly supported him as he passionately articulated a vision that Microsoft could coexist - and even thrive - in a heterogeneous IT world.

The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft's open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab' on campus - now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source - development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities - and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.

And, because we recognize the importance of having that strong internal advocate for open source, we are actively seeking someone to fill Sam's shoes at Microsoft.

We will not waver in our commitment to open source.

To my friend Sam: Best of luck to you and your family as you move on to your next great adventure, and THANK YOU for all of your efforts and passion.

See Change

billhilf — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

I have always been a fan of Tim O’Reilly’s phrase the “architecture of participation” to describe “systems designed for user contribution.” I liked it so much that at last year’s OSCON I made this concept the focal point of a discussion about how Microsoft’s products, programs, and partnerships have evolved over time to further this idea of ‘participatory systems’. (The slide I used at OSCON in Portland on July 26, 2007 is shown below).

(Presented July 26, 2007, OSON, Portland, Oregon)

I also like the metaphor of an ascending curve that reminds me of a strand of DNA. To me it is a visual representation of the fact that as the number of examples of architecting for participation have increased, the mindset and the behaviors involved in doing so have increasingly become a part of the company’s core culture and software design and development practices.

Today we are making a set of broad-reaching changes that go above and beyond any prior incremental changes in Microsoft’s DNA, that opens the door on new horizons for what architecting for participation might mean in the future. I want to talk about what this means—and why an open source interoperability initiative is an important part of it.

To understand why Microsoft is making broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices that will drive greater interoperability, it’s important to step back and look broadly at the way the emergence services oriented architectures, web services, and the growing importance of software plus services are transforming the world of technology.

Ray Ozzie described this sea-change well this morning:

…as we put more and more of our data into [technology] products, a new set of issues emerge. Whether it’s our health records, or our customer databases, we’ve progressively learned that our documents and data have a lifetime that potentially spans well beyond the lifetime of any specific application that might’ve been used to create it. For our records and our documents, issues such as preservation and portability have become vital concerns…Furthermore, as a byproduct of the internet’s ubiquity, virtually every system and product nowadays has become interconnected. From the mobile phone in your pocket, to your PC, to the heterogeneous systems within our enterprises, everything’s being interconnected – and connected to the Web as our “universal hub” for information sharing.

At MIX ’07 Ray put the sweeping implications of this overarching vision in the context of history, starting with what he called the “dawn of the PC revolution” in the 1980s. There is an important connection to bear in mind between some of the key inflection points in the technology landscape (like the availability of low cost PCs, and cheaper, faster connectivity) with changes in how aspects of openness and developer opportunity have evolved together. This resonates with me when reading today’s announcement (available here):

Historically, as lower cost hardware became widely available, documented APIs and free SDKs enabled developers to more quickly develop applications

As the number of applications exploded, and network connectivity became the norm, protocols enabled exchange of information between programs and over the wire.

And as many types of computing devices have proliferated and connectivity has become ubiquitous, data portability and standards have become key tools in the toolbox for a loosely-coupled, services-based world.

Long-term success for Microsoft depends on our ability to deliver a platform that is open, flexible, and provides customers and developers with choice. These choices include Microsoft and open source technologies working together, and this will continue to be the case in the future. By increasing the openness of high volume products across APIs, protocols, and standards, we can continue to provide the platform that offers developers and businesses, including those based on open-source technologies, the broadest range of opportunities to innovate, deliver value, and create seamless experiences for end users.

By building on and expanding existing facilities, events, and resources supporting interoperability, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development, the open source interoperability initiative will ensure this fundamental change in how we run our business and share information is broadly inclusive of open source technologies. As Microsoft takes this significant step forward into the interconnected world of the future, we aspire to doing so with members of the open source community by our side now and for the long haul.

Today is an important day, full of change. A wise inventor once said: “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress” and although I’m sure today’s news will bring critics aplenty, it is with time and commitment that this change will manifest. I’m extraordinarily proud to be part of Microsoft and to be part of this change.

FAQs, updates and news about the initiative will be posted on www.microsoft.com/opensource/interop .

hack value

billhilf — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to blog. It is usually on airplane time that I do any blogging, and since I haven’t flown in a while, I guess that will be my excuse. I’m on my way to Asia, currently over eastern Russian airspace, which means I’m hours from anywhere, so I’ve opened my ‘blog ideas’ folder and there is literally a books worth of stuff in here so I’m going to cherry pick a few ideas that I think are worth connecting.

Over the past year, I’ve had this ‘six degrees of separation’ phenomenon stuck in my head (I think this idea originated in Milgram’s ‘small world experiments’). You’ve all heard about the ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, and it’s always fun to mind bend weird connections with movie trivia buffs. There’s a web site that does this now with IMDB data called the Oracle of Bacon. It’s been on my mind because of personal ‘degree connections’ in my personal and professional life – meeting a stranger at a wedding in California who sings in the choir with my cousin in a small town in Massachusetts; interviewing a guy for a job at Microsoft who, by random coincidence, had worked on some of my (horrid) code ten years ago and remembered my name from a joke I left in the comments above one particularly nasty function. The latter example only ‘clicked’ for this interview candidate after I told them *the same joke* in the interview: “I actually read that joke before in some old crap C code.” I told him that was my code. He blinked. We had about 30 seconds of weird vibe right after that.

We hear it again and again: ‘It’s a small world.’ – But when a series of these connections happen, you start to wonder and do some probability math*. I’ll save my own experiments for later, but it did get me thinking on how communities grow, shrink, expand, contract and (sometimes inexplicably) persist. It’s the latter part that I’ve been focusing on a lot: what keeps the degrees connected and why are some communities stickier than others?

I think a simple answer is enough ‘matter’ to create a gravity that keeps activity in some type of steady orbit. If there’s enough matter and gravity, not only does the community start to find critical mass to persist, it also creates the environment for further creation - in other words, hacking and incrementing the original theme. This is fundamental to the Architecture of Participation, as well.

If you can suspend disbelief just enough to agree that this ‘six degrees’ concept does happen on certain occasions, and that it can be intentionally fostered (ala MySpace, Facebook, etc.) - then I think that also suggests that one can create an environment designed for powerful connections and collaboration. It’s certainly not the only way to innovate ideas, but it is a proven method realized through online connectivity to other people.

Here’s an example. I play World of Warcraft (WoW), which is a massively multiplayer online role playing game; a sizeable community of about 8.5 million players. To say that it’s a popular video game is an understatement. In fact, ‘world of warcraft’ outpaces ‘open source’ in raw search volume if that’s any indicator ;) (see below)

	open source
	world of warcraft

As it turns out, a bunch of other Microsoft employees play this game too. And we communicate about the game on an internal email alias. Some play on the same servers together, but most of the discussion is idea sharing, questions on items or skills, or general chat about the next patch. It’s a good list. Not surprisingly, a lot of these people are developers or testers or marketers or IT folks - so you get a range of experience outside of the game subjects, with a blending and morphing of ideas about the subject (the game) influenced and shaped by their domain of experience.

As you can imagine, I add little value here other than waxing about my mad skills as a warlock. But a few guys in the Visual Studio team wanted to use their product to make writing World of Warcraft Add-ons a lot easier (essentially, personally created UI extensions that can enhance the game experience). So they did and created a very cool Visual Studio shell for WoW. AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is a free tool designed to bring a Visual Studio-like experience to building World of Warcraft Addons. The tool itself is based on the Visual Studio Shell, and it’s now an open source project hosted on CodePlex – licensed under the Microsoft Public License. It will make writing Add-ons for WoW significantly easier (and likely more enjoyable). Some key features include:

Custom AddOn Project System – Including support for the Ace2 AddOn framework, TGA texture support, and MP3 files
Visual Designer – A visual drag-and-drop designer for designing AddOn Frames including a Toolbox, Property Window, Snap lines and more
XML Editor – For those who want to manually editing XML Frames, AddOn Studio includes the ability to map the Warcraft schema file
Lua Code Editor – The Lua code editor includes automatic event handling, IntelliSense for Lua and built-in support World of Warcraft functions, Code Snippets for common Lua functions, code colorization, code outlining, and more.
Auto Table of Contents – AddOn Studio will automatically build the Table of Contents (TOC file) for your AddOn based on the project files you include and the project properties settings (aka no manual XML).

Here’s a bit on news about it and below is what it looks like

How is this related? It shows how ‘matter’ (in this case a game) created gravity (a gaming community) inside another community (Microsoft employees). As it turned out, there were some WoW players who develop Add-ons who were part of this community*. Some of these folks were in the Visual Studio group and wanted to use Visual Studio to enhance the add-on development experience. So they did. Then they shared this on the email list, for ideas and suggestions (the bug bash happened this last weekend). This ‘chain lightning’ effect will now continue through the broader OSS community. And this is for a video game -- think about the same framework for healthcare, where a community of machine learning experts working on anti-spam related algorithms saw the connection to HIV vaccine research and similarly are creating ‘matter’ with a community (codeplex) in an effort to continue the innovation. Hacking anti-spam algorithms for vaccine research and sowing it in a broader community.

Mark Granovetter's observed that it is "the strength of weak ties" that holds together a social network – and if this is true (which has been demonstrated in network modeling), then the combination of structured, formal communities with ad-hoc or weakly connected communities can be amazingly powerful. We often focus on one or the other (particularly in technical community discussions) and not the intersection, which is where I feel the magic can be created.

It’s particularly interesting to view this beyond the individual, to do this with a team, an organization, or an entire company. Not simply obvious ‘partnerships’ mind you, these are fairly formulaic (important, but well understood), but the intersection of non-obvious connections. In my experience, this is the real magic of community and open source, and I can think of many projects that evolved this way. However, it’s the right community that makes the difference – we often get locked up on other things and forget that the right people and the right forum make all the difference.

>>Picking up this blog again and I am returning from Asia, I sit down to settle in for a long haul flight, turn to my left and meet the stranger seated next to me – turns out he knows my wife’s cousin’s husband, they were childhood friends. I blink. Then (as a test) I tell him the joke I mentioned above – thankfully he’d never heard it before.

Until next time, game on.

-Bill

* Kleinfield has an interesting paper that questions the ‘six degrees’/small world theories here. I love her term ‘intellectual furniture’

* Some of these folks have written more than 7 or 8 add-ons in their personal time, and there’s a load of other projects on Codeplex, from all sorts of people, which further mod, extend, and enhance playing WoW .

Open Source at Microsoft

billhilf — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:15:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft took another step in its relationship with the open source software community. We did this by bringing up a new web property that clearly outlines Microsoft’s position on OSS by providing specific information about Microsoft, the OSS community and the interaction between the two. The new site also details information about getting started with OSS and Microsoft technologies. We'll keep the site updated with new content featuring Microsoft’s engagements with the OSS community - be that events like OSCON, partnerships, offers or just interesting articles highlighting different work we're doing across the company. Port 25 will continue to be the source for technical analysis and community with the Open Source Software Lab.

Visit the site, read the articles, send feedback. Thanks for participating.

Random bits...

billhilf — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:14:00 GMT

Things I’ve been collecting, with no rhyme or reason connecting them…

I stumbled upon this very interesting project from Microsoft Research India – SMS Toolkit. This project, and the work being done here with mobile phones and SMS servers as a PC replacement in rural areas is fascinating – here is a deeper look.

This matters because SMS is an amazingly simple but radically growing technology

The growth and usage of SMS on mobiles worldwide is phenomenal; over 40% of the world’s people have an SMS capable phone. Almost a trillion SMS messages were sent in 2006 and the expected revenue from SMS in 2012 is $67 billion. Interestingly, even among the 85% of Indian users who are prepaid – with average monthly mobile bills of only $3 (151R) – users on average sent 21 SMSs per month. (source: Portio Research, TRAI Report through Sept 2006).
If you travel internationally and think “We sure don’t SMS text in the U.S. as much as they do in <insert country name>” take a good look at the business and pricing models in the U.S. cellular industry versus <insert country name>.
Speaking of travel and long flights, I refuse to live by airplane time. I recommend that you ‘live’ on the plane based on the time of your destination. Don’t eat at their scheduled food-serve time. Sleep when everyone else is awake. Then go swimming wherever you can when you arrive. This is my jetlag remedy.
One more travel bit: every country I have ever visited has donuts. Every single one.
Holy cow look at this 80 core beast from Intel. The teraflop research chip. Watching the video and the power consumption (watch the wattage when they double the frequency) makes me wonder about the future of power in data centers. Related, I’ve used 80plus power units before, they’re worth checking out – I also like the research they are doing in this area.
I’m seeing more and more small companies who are OSS integrators: taking various OSS projects and doing often significant customization for specific customers. Most of them also work heavily with Microsoft technologies and OSS together. This is happening globally.
If you are a World of Warcraft or MMORPG player, this NYT article on gold farming is an interesting read. Trading virtual goods, such as virtual gold, in online games is a $1.8 billion market. Amazing.
Speaking of, there is an interesting Virtual Goods Summit this month focusing on the market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. I experienced an interesting virtual economy in the Philippines recently where I learned about mobile phone ‘loading’: buying, and often trading, pre-paid cell phone service. Many people send prepaid credit from overseas to their family and friends mobile accounts in the Philippines. You can also load your phone at any corner market, even a ‘micro load’, a peso or two of load to send a single SMS message.
I dig what our Visual Studio marketing team did with Defy All Challenges. Nice work. If you can watch the machinima videos and not laugh then you have no sense of humor.
Related to developers, my friend Miguel has been busy with moonlight. If you have ever had the opportunity to talk to Miguel or hear him speak (and I recommend it), you know he talks pretty fast. His moonlight work shows that he can code fairly quickly too.
Photosynth is one of the coolest and impactful community-oriented technologies I’ve seen in a long time – I’ve mentioned Photosynth before but it’s worth watching this video to see it in action.
Great idea. U.K. firm Jade Integration has unveiled a computer so small, it fits into a wall socket and is powered via Ethernet. The Jack PC, a rival to the smallest PC in the world, can hook up to a standard monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it runs Windows CE. It comes with up to 64 MB of flash memory and 128 MB of RAM.

All for now.

-Bill

Core

billhilf — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 18:24:00 GMT

We recently announced the addition of IIS7 to the Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 (formerly known as Longhorn Server). Server Core is an important evolution of our server product and will include a variety of roles, such as print server, media services, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and now IIS7 for Web serving. All of these will be able to run in a lightweight, low footprint modes – a server core installation requires about 1GB of physical disk space to install and approximately 2 GB for operations post-install. This means it’s Windows Server but with just the bits you need to run a specific type of server role – which means less disk, less memory, lower attack surface, less stuff to manage, patch, etc. There are also a variety of optional features you can add to server core, such as the subsystem for Unix applications, Bitlocker drive encryption, failover cluster, and others. Of course, Windows Server 2008 can still run as a full featured general purpose server operating system as well. Sam and Hank did an interview with Iain McDonald about Server Core last September, you can see that interview here.

I’ve built and run many Web server farms over that past years and having the ability to roll out small footprint, role-based server configurations is something I found to be an important architectural advantage. In the past, I used Apache on Linux/BSDs to build customized servers. Certainly you can still do this today. What I think is exciting about this announcement of IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 Server Core is that it shows the full spectrum of the Windows Server 2008 capabilities, from very modular, low footprint Web serving to the all-singing all-dancing full featured server.

Additionally, as you may have read here before, we’ve been working hard with the Zend on making PHP run great on Windows Server. With the new FastCGI support (which is now integrated with IIS7 in beta 3), PHP runs extremely well on Server Core. So if you need a tier of streamlined front-end PHP Web servers that require minimal system resources and just the needed bits for doing the job? Now you will be able do this with Windows Server 2008. And those systems can be managed, secured, updated, authenticated, etc. just like any other Windows server machine.

I think this all brings more choice to developers and system administrators. And you can expect this will be something we continue to evolve, adding more customization scenarios and support of other technologies, including .NET. Check out Bill Staple’s blog on this as well – his team is doing all the IIS work. You test drive Windows Server 2008 here or download the latest beta here. The FastCGI Technology Preview can be found here.

Unrelated and Personal (non-work related) tidbit:

Talking about server core and IIS7 reminded me of this quote: “The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday” from Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book Rant. I think it’s his best so far -I just finished this on my last trip. If you like Chuck, watch this lecture – the ‘little software story’ advice at the end is priceless and motivational for aspiring writers.

Business as Usual

billhilf — Fri, 18 May 2007 23:22:00 GMT

It’s been an interesting week, with people offering a range of opinions about what they think is happening in Redmond. Despite a lot of pontification, our strategy regarding intellectual property and open source has not changed – and it is not frivolous litigation or fear.

IDG did an article – it’s a far more accurate reflection of Microsoft’s IP strategy than the Fortune article from earlier this week. Andy Updegrove also has a thoughtful article on his site, and Gartner’s lead open source analysts have been clear to customers: “don’t panic.”

Our strategy remains the same:

Our IP bridge makes lawsuits unnecessary.
We will continue to offer this licensing bridge to commercial software distribution companies.
This IP bridge enables Open Source developers to develop software free from concerns about patents.
We will continue to grow Open Source applications and technologies on the Microsoft platform.

Microsoft was created by developers, for developers and is only successful through developers and customers. Developers who write Open Source software are participating in a worldwide community of practice and a spirit of collaboration. These are noble characteristics and Microsoft both applauds and supports this work.

We continue to champion projects like JBoss, Zend (PHP), and SugarCRM, as well as Firefox, openwsman, Bandit and thousands of others. We are building relationships and a track record here and we ask that you judge us on these actions. We will work with commercial and non-commercial developers to increase the availability and quality of open source on Windows and interoperability with Windows.

Our IP strategy has not changed. Where we have unique and valuable intellectual property (as indicated by our high scores on the science strength of our patents) we will seek to license it to commercial entities (such as Samsung and Fuji Xerox).

It’s not us versus the free world. It’s about commercial companies working together around IP issues – it’s business as usual.

- Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji

Clarifications

billhilf — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:49:00 GMT

I have strong opinions. Those of you who know me personally know that I am not one to "follow the herd" and that I speak up. However, I need to comment on a recent story where I was quoted.

A few folks have emailed or called me about statements I said in the Bangkok Post about the ‘end of Linux’ and ‘there is no free software movement.’ My statements were shaped in a sensationalist way, not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time the press has used shock value to get headlines. It then hit Slashdot and the blogosphere where a couple hundred people have called me every name under the sun. I have a tough skin – need to in this job. But days like this suck, to be honest.

I get asked Linux related questions from the press, most of which are probably obvious to you. One of the questions I often get asked is about the development of Linux by free software developers. I answer this by saying that most customers who use Linux, use a distribution like Red Hat or Ubuntu or SuSE and that although there are certainly a lot of developers who work for free, most of the people who do the daily work on the Linux kernel are paid to do so. Typically they are paid by IT companies who have a commercial interest in Linux. This isn’t FUD, it’s reality (Corbet from LWN did a great analysis of this here citing “at least 65% of the code which went into 2.6.20 was created by people working for companies”). And I answer this question because I get asked about it in press interviews.

But I’m rethinking that last part. Mostly because I don’t think it matters. If the software is open, it’s open, that does not change based on who developed it or why. In this article it sounds like I say ‘because they are paid, then free software is extinct!’ which, of course, is silly. I know this and I think it’s a combination of me not being clear and this particular article shaping it in a certain direction. But I’ll take the blame: I shoved my foot in my mouth and it came across as idiotic.

I will also use this blog entry to clarify our work in the Open Source Software Lab. Here’s exactly what I tell my team, and the rest of Microsoft, on our strategy related to Linux and open source software:

-We compete with Linux and Unix servers with Windows server
-Many customers run a mix of servers in the same environment, so we’ll need to interoperate
-We want to grow the software ecosystem, including open source software, as it relates to Microsoft software

I believe that we can continue to compete with Red Hat or SuSE or Solaris for server business while we also work on interoperating and growing the software ecosystem. I believe there is a lot we can do to grow an Open Source on Microsoft environment, realizing that sometimes we will simultaneously compete and collaborate. It’s not schizophrenic, we work this way today with many other types of software, it’s the nature of being in a platform business and believing in choice.

I’m sure there’s also a lot of questions about the Fortune story on ‘Microsoft versus the Free world’ – more wonderful sensationalism – and I will write on that soon.

-Bill

Layers

billhilf — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:56:00 GMT

When I started programming, it helped me a lot to think about the OSI model (Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model). On the right is a simple example of a five layer OSI model. This type of model can help when coding or administering a system so you can effectively debug at the right ‘layer’. I’ve found that I use this same logic now in all sorts of other areas, as it helps me parse out the details of an issue. I also was reminded of this while reading one of Cory Doctorow’s new short stories, ‘When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth’ in ‘Overclocked’.

I’ve recently been looking at broadband statistics and, as usual, working on various business model issues. So let me parlay the OSI framework concept into a topic around mixed models and the Web. I often hear others try to simplify open source by comparing it to the Web or the Internet. This description is often used disingenuously but it did get me thinking about the relationship and it’s a fun thought experiment so let’s break the totality of the Web down for a minute to prove the point – and let’s use an OSI-like model from the bottom up (including, but not limited to, protocols).

Physical, Data, and Network Layers

For the Internet this would be not only Ethernet standards but also electrical specifications, bridges, switches, host adapters, and signals operating over copper and fiber. ATM, Frame Relay, IPv4/v6, IPSec, RIP, X.25, and other protocols also live at these layers. But the Internet isn’t just protocols. Companies such as AT&T, Quest and Level 3 have laid hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable at the physical layer and infrastructure providers such as Foundry, Juniper Networks and Cisco build technologies that allow Internet exchange points and ISPs to interconnect.

Transport+Session, Presentation and Application Layers

Here we have the layers that move the data between end users and programs. Fundamental to the Internet are TCP/IP of course (and UDP for you gamers). TCP/IP is over 25 years old and being an open standard was critical for its dissemination and success. Other important protocols and services at this layer are POP3, SMTP, SSH, HTTP, DNS, instant messaging protocols (and many more). These protocols have been implemented in both open source and non-open source software, the key was having standard protocols for communication. Also at this layer are other infrastructure-like providers such as Akamai, VitalStream, BitTorrent, Amazon’s S3 and other caching and content delivery networks.

It is important to note that at all of these layers above were other once-relevant technologies that have since faded or altogether expired. When I worked for IBM I use to carry a Token ring adapter for my ThinkPad as many IBM offices didn’t have Ethernet, but only Token ring (this was true just four years ago). Anyone use much Token ring today? Or RUDP? Or FDDI? Or even telnet? These each have diminished or disappeared, IMHO, because either 1) something better came along and/or 2) lack of relevance or value to consumers, users and/or businesses. These are positive market forces: we want better, higher value, more relevant technologies and standards to replace lesser, lower value, irrelevant versions of the same.

There is an important, non-OSI layer above all of this and that’s the content that is driving the growth of the Web and broadband (global number of broadband connections rose 33% last year). My highly subjective distillation of ‘content’ is the YouTube, MySpaces, Yahoo, MSN, Google conglomeration of data that pumps across those layers above every day in all their data hungry glory. Oh, and all that advertising too. Certainly, there is a supply-demand correlation between the infrastructures at all levels of the stack and the content users are demanding (and supplying back). These are also positive market forces. Companies such as Level 3 (which was almost itself leveled in late-90s) are seeing growth in traffic on their fiber lines and also in their revenue – and they are buying more. Comcast has signed up over 12 million homes for cable-based broadband connectivity. Western Europe broadband penetration is growing faster than the U.S., and Japan now has 7.9 million fibre-to-the-home subscribers. The home media and phone technologies will also be tapping into these bigger pipes, from the TiVo to iPhone to Windows Mobile devices. And all sorts of amazing applications are sprouting up to take advantage of this broadband growth – for a test, think back to how many videos you watched online just three years ago compared to today.

So what is the relationship between all of this? Certainly, without useful and relevant standards like TCP/IP and HTTP we wouldn’t be very far. But we also wouldn’t have today’s Web without the physical fiber and backbone providers, IXPs/ISPs, and router manufacturers that provide the infrastructure. And without software such as Apache, IIS, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc., we wouldn’t be using the Internet like we do today. And last but not least, without something to do on the Web, from reading news on Yahoo to auctions on eBay to Skype phone calls to videos on YouTube or social networking such as MySpace or doing business online, the Internet would have just been a neat technology experiment (or, minimally, as one of my favorite BBC columnists Bill Thompson points out, a tool for ‘computer scientists to find ways to share time on expensive mainframe computers’). Open source, proprietary, infrastructure, protocols and standards… and lots of hard work and innovation. It’s all in there – that’s the Web we have today. Just like there is a mix of content that makes up the Web, mixed software, hardware, infrastructure, and a community are all necessary parts of the body Internet.

If someone needs proof that open source and commercial models/software/hardware/etc. can be and are compatible, just look at the Web. Not only are they compatible, they have proven to be an amazing powerful combination. The challenge for the OSS pundits is to dig deep, don’t be superficial. I like how Stephen Walli challenges a lot of ‘stack’ thinking by explaining how the application is a network, and the network isn’t simple. It’s a good analogy, and although the OSI layer-thinking helps draw some lines, the network model is more realistic – which is why I am using the Web as subject matter here.

When I was a kid, my oldest brother used to sell me gravity insurance for $1 (for the record, I only bought one policy when I was six). It was his lesson that I shouldn’t forget about reality. He tried to sell me another policy again when I finished graduate school – likely worried I was getting lost in theoretical thinking. In reality, there are powerful combinations of mixed models in software design/development, licensing, and businesses. We can bury our heads in the sand, or in the clouds, and believe there are only two camps, two separate and foreign tribes – open source and commercial. It might even make us feel better to believe this. Or we can see that, in the real world, there is no spoon.

-Bill

Gapingvoid on Software Business Strategy...

billhilf — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:55:00 GMT

I found this through James titled “How well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo's?” It’s interesting to read through both post and comments. I spend a lot of my day on these types of issues, related to software business models and technology trends, and the main point of Hugh’s post (and certainly the comments) is about the ecosystem and partners. I’m a big believer in this - shared growth works. Thanks for keeping it interesting Hugh…

One Year

billhilf — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:09:00 GMT

When we started Port25 a year ago we certainly had no idea how it would turn out. The process of creating, launching, and evolving Port25, I believe, has many similarities to an OSS project: small group of motivated individuals, loosely coupled development model, organic growth, and meritocratic guidance and leadership. These things helped us quite a bit as we broke some new ground for Microsoft and I’m proud of where we are at one year in.

Our goals list growing an online community, but let me tell you a little secret, Port25 was just as important for inside Microsoft as it was outside. Giving Microsoft employees like Sara Ford, Steve Marx, Bruce Payette, Mike Hines (and others) a forum to talk about how their work relates to the community is part of the internal goal. Showing other Microsoft employees how we can have open and real conversations and even debates with technologists in the OSS community is part of the internal goal. Providing a place for critical analysis and learning of software built in different development models is part of the internal goal. And, one that I that I haven’t shared with anyone until now, showing people at Microsoft and in the OSS community that we have to keep all this damn stuff in perspective: it’s important, but it is just software after all.

I’ve spent a long time in open source and commercial software development and businesses. Over these years I have seen positive evolution across the board. Port25 is part of a journey for Microsoft, and we are learning with each and every step. Thank you for listening, participating and creating.

-Bill

Microsoft Penguin Adoption 2007

billhilf — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 05:01:00 GMT

Today, in a surprising move, Microsoft is highlighting the key role that community and economic support play in boosting the thriving worldwide penguin ecosystem. During a keynote that is yet to be scheduled, Bill Hilf, General Manager of Platform Strategy, will cite a potentially growing list of alliances that will deliver the benefits of community and economic growth to penguins everywhere. Most notably, Hilf will discuss the announcement of a new community program, Microsoft Penguin Adoption 2007.

The Penguin Adoption program is critical to demonstrating this commitment. “A year ago, nobody would have expected Microsoft to have a penguin program in place. But my innovative and envelope-pushing work is changing all that,” adds an animated Hilf.

Community is a Key Driver to the Success of Penguins

The support of an aquatic and flightless species like the penguin - be it Emperor, Gentoo or Humboldt - requires the support of an active community. That’s why a key component to the new Penguin program will be the 2007 adoption of Seattle, WA-based Woodland Park Zoo’s Penguin Exhibit. With it, Microsoft will become an official 2007-2008 ‘ZooParent’ to the local Humbolt penguin exhibit.

The adoption, made possible by Woodland Park Zoo, will help provide support and care for the penguins, as well as fund wildlife conservation efforts. By working with local and benevolent penguin leaders who are the experts in their respective communities, such as zoo maintainers, Penguin Adoption 2007 will provide the necessary tools to help foster penguin growth.

Hilf, unable to contain his exhilaration for the program, adds, “It’s a win-win. Did I mention that we get an official certificate to hang in the Open Source Software Lab? I’m betting Sam will do somersaults – he is nimble. Like a penguin. ”

Sam Ramji, Director of the Open Source Software Lab, simply commented, “Well, you’re either hard-core, or you’re not.” (Timestamp, 4:50)

Corporate Investment is a Key Driver to Community

Emerging as a key component to community success is a sustained level of corporate investment. “That’s why this is a no brainer,” says Hilf. “Plus, I love penguins. They are curious and crafty creatures, with beautiful eyes I can stare into.”

Microsoft is not the first company to support penguin-centric community programs, and in fact, joins a long list of other technology vendors in the effort to sustain and grow the developing penguin population.

And now, through Penguin Adoption 2007’s annual sponsorship, Microsoft is enabling children and adults everywhere to enjoy the grace and curiosity that is the Humboldt Penguin. For those unable to visit Woodland Park Zoo, a recorded video is available here.

The adoption of the Woodland Park Zoo Humboldt Penguin exhibit began in March 2007, and will continue through March 2008.

About the Woodland Park Zoo
Among its distinctions, Woodland Park Zoo is one of the oldest zoos on the West Coast. Woodland Park Zoo encompasses 92 acres and features more than 1,090 individual animals representing nearly 300 species. The grounds are divided into what are known as bioclimatic zones, the unique habitats around the world, from tropical rain forests to the frigid climes of the Far North. More information can be found here.

On A Serious Note
The effort to save endangered Humboldt penguins requires cooperation and support at the international, national, regional and individual levels. You can help in this cause. Join and become active in Woodland Park Zoo. You can learn more here. If you are a Microsoft employee, donations to qualifying non-profits can also be matched.

Invisotext:

Happy April Fool's Day!

Tales from the road, Vegas, and the Microsoft Technology Summit…

billhilf — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 05:45:00 GMT

I recently spent time in South East Asia. As always these trips are enlightening, but as I wrote before one of the most important missions of these visits is to understand the health, growth and diversity of the local software economy. And it’s not just the Microsoft related software economies, but how all software is growing in a country. Indonesia is a particularly interesting example, with thousands of islands, over 250M people, and broadband and PC penetration in very low single digits, the potential for a powerful and unique software ecosystem is very real. While I was there I had a chance to talk with computer science students at BINUS International in Jakarta which was personally very motivating. The Philippines has extraordinary characteristics related to SMS or ‘texting’ (in 2005, over 250M text messages a day) and the use of mobile devices and technologies. With 6% GDP growth and the rapid growth and utilization of technology such as mobile devices (and also some very exciting online gaming businesses such as LevelUp!), I expect the Philippines to boom in the software world.

In Thailand I visited Software Park and discussed local software growth with one of the premier software incubation agencies in Bangkok. Take a look at their Software Gallery (photo on right), creatively showing off all the published software from the companies incubated at the park. Software Park was a very cool place to visit, certainly a vibrant and passionate development environment but they also have amazing elevators, no buttons inside the elevator car, you tell the security guard what floor you need to go to, and they key it in. At first I thought it was just for security, but it is also a much more efficient system as the sequence is always point-to-point, no randomization or mistakes.

I also spent time with members of the Thai software community, where we originally planned about an hour, but ended up going on for about two and a half once we got into questions. The discussion was great and I want to thank everyone who attended for spending the time and all the questions.

One fascinating trend in each of these emerging markets is technology generation skipping. With the fast growth and size of population, it’s not uncommon for the market to jump over an entire generation of technology. Indonesia is a good example, with such low broadband usage (and infrastructure) many users are simply going direct to 3G wireless versus moving from dial-up to broadband. I’ve seen this in other countries as well – it’s exciting because this type of exponential growth is fertile ground for big and surprising innovation. It’s an awesome time to be a software developer in environments like this.

Next trip couldn’t be more different, Las Vegas for Mix 07 – where Sam and I will be attendees only (first time actually ‘attending’ a conference for me in years, which I’m excited about). There will be some very cool stuff at Mix07 – such as WPF/E, opening up Windows Live data, Open Source applications using the .NET platform (with my friend Andi Gutmans from Zend on the panel), and a panel discussion called “Can’t ASP.NET and PHP Get Along?” (all session info here). I think it will really be a great event, in addition keynoting will be Ray Ozzie and Robbie Bach and Scott Guthrie (if you want to see a rock star demo don’t miss Scott’s talk). Here are a few preview ‘buzzcasts’ to give you an idea of what’s in store. Vegas baby!

I’m looking forward to being back in Redmond this week, Monday I talked with folks at the Microsoft Technology Summit. I enjoyed the conversation; hope the attendees did as well (some blog coverage here).

-Bill

Basketball Blogging and other thoughts...

billhilf — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:48:00 GMT

Four random bits…

1. Multicore. I think we as an industry over complicate the value of multicore and programming in this environment (although I enjoy Clay’s blog about this subject). I think this presentation by Bruce Dawson and Chuck Walbourn from Microsoft Games Technologies Group explains how two popular Xbox 360 games take advantage of the three cores in the 360. Makes it a little easier to translate how developers can (and will) take advantage of the multicore servers and desktops in the future:

Now imagine the gaming on an 80-core chip ;)

And since we’re on games, I’m *very* excited about DirectX 10, now in Windows Vista. You need this nvidia card to really exploit it right now, but others will be out soon and some great games will be out soon which will make DirectX 10 really shine, such as Crysis. Read this interview to go deep with the people behind DirectX 10.

2. Our Windows Home Server guys, by using drive extender technology, claim the ‘death of the drive letter’. Yeah yeah it sounds like RAID but having seen this first hand, it will make drive swapping extremely easy. I will certainly use it.

3. I always get a kick out of reading Mark Cuban’s blog. If you don’t know Mark Cuban, he owns the Dallas Mavericks and is, in general, a very outspoken entrepreneur. I don’t always agree with him, particularly on many tech issues, but I love when he gets passionate about his own team. Read his defense of one of his star players, Dirk Nowitzki, here. What I think is great about this blog is just how absolutely honest and real Mark’s voice is when he blogs. You may not be a basketball fan, but I doubt you’ll need to be to get the point of this blog – no holds barred. Pretty rare in today’s blog-on-anything world - and certainly rare for major league sports team owners. Recently, Hank just brought a similar game to Port25. Kudos.

4. Lastly, I get asked sometimes about ‘hey Bill, so what’s new in Vista?’ I would recommend two things – first, high level key features are all here; second, is a great technical overview of the new things in the Vista kernel by Marc Russinovich, which I think is one of the best walk-throughs I’ve seen online (Part I, Part II, and Part III coming). Note, this is just the kernel, not all things in Vista of course.

On the road in March, maybe blogs of substance forthcoming.

-Bill

Interesting Finds

billhilf — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:50:00 GMT

This morning I’ve been catching up on the status of Perl 6. Years ago, Perl was something I used a lot for all sorts of tasks, including a lot of backend data wrangling for a couple of the startups I worked at. One of the benefits and banes of Perl is its tremendous flexibility. It is powerful, but given enough rope…. When I came across one of Damian Conway’s contributions to Perl 6, ‘junctions’*, I was excited but simultaneously jealous that it didn’t exist in the early 90s when I really needed it. Junctions are single scalar ‘overlay’ values that can represent multiple values at once. So if you have a long list of things (like SKU numbers, passwords, customer IDs, etc.) you can superimpose them down into a single value to do a single test against the junction to see if it equals any of them. Junctions are interesting because you can parallelize this type of test against the single value (junctions are unordered which lets the compiler evaluate the tests in parallel). At first I thought it sounded like a fancy pointer or a tied hash/tied array trick common in Perl, but junctions allow you to write in simple English things like:

if $customerid eq any(@possible_ids)

…and get a single true or false from the test in this conditional statement. Of course, there are other, more complicated ways to do this in many languages, but junctions makes it much easier to program with data in Perl and something I’m looking forward to experimenting with more as Perl 6 comes to life.

Two other interesting finds:

Some clever folks have used XNA to create a ZX Spectrum 48K emulator for Xbox 360. I’m a classic computer collector and avid gamer so this goes on my list of things to experiment with. It is a community project up on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/zx360
This is a hard one to explain, it’s a video montage about Web 2.0, done by the Digital Ethnography folks at Kansas State University. Check it out, worth the watch: The Machine is Us/ing Us

Till next time,

-Bill

* Those of you who are Perl geeks may remember Damian’s Quantum::Superpositions module in Perl 5, which was an initial cut at this idea. In classic Conway style the concept is drawn from the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment in quantum physics.