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.

Here's some big news

billhilf — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:30:00 GMT

Today we announced a very important partnership with Novell that represents a milestone for our industry. The partnership has technical, business and legal significance for Microsoft, Novell, our customers and the open source community. I want to break it down into reasonably sized chunks of information to help explain what it is and how we arrived here.

There is often a big ‘elephant in the room’ when discussing Microsoft and Open Source, and that issue is related to intellectual property. Our business at Microsoft is built on intellectual property, as are many businesses: Apple, Sony, BMW, Amazon, Nike, and the list goes on. What does this mean? It’s relatively simple – each day thousands of people come to work at Microsoft to build new technologies that (ideally) make it easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable to use a computer. We pay these people to do this and then we sell their work through our products. We then use that money to continue to pay these people to keep innovating and building new things that meet the above goal and the cycle goes on and on. Like the other companies I listed above, we protect the intellectual property from these innovations through patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets (the four parts of intellectual property). Use an iPod? The menu structure driven by that little wheel is protected by patents that Apple owns. Wear Nike shoes? The layering of those soles and their contents are protected by patents and the Nike ‘swoosh is a protected trademark of Nike. Used Red Hat’s update service? That is also protected by a patent application. Even that soda you got at McDonald’s was likely delivered through this interesting invention. This is the world of intellectual property and apart from opinions on the governance of this system, this is how it works today.

Microsoft’s intellectual property is almost entirely in software innovations (no surprise) so it was very important for us to have a model where our intellectual property continues to be valued and respected by all constituencies, including the commercial open source world. Again, our business (as many are) is rooted in intellectual property so this is a non-trivial issue. Our agreement with Novell provides a way for Microsoft and Novell to keep square on one another’s patents and it provides a way for us to pass on the benefits to customers who want to know these complex issues have been sorted out. At the same time, we’ve got to do all this in a way that works for those open source developers who contribute code for the love of technology, not for the paycheck. Microsoft is stepping up and saying we won’t assert patents against individual, non-compensated developers for the code they write. What does all this mean? It means that we have a way to work through (or bridge) the open source and Microsoft issues around intellectual property by defining a line between commercial and non-commercial use of our intellectual property. Additionally Novell’s customers can feel confident that they are clear and compliant (at minimum with Microsoft) of the open source products they buy and deploy from Novell.

Figuring out this model unlocked a variety of new areas that we can collaborate on together, such as the work we’ll be doing around Virtualization, Office file formats and management technologies. Here are some of the highlights:

Patent coverage

The concern over potential patent infringements makes some people nervous about the deployment of open source technologies.
From the start, a design principle of the agreement was to be compatible with the GPL.
To do this, Novell and Microsoft are providing covenants to each other’s customers, therefore releasing each company from the other’s patent portfolio. This may sounds odd vs. a traditional patent cross-license agreement but it is one of the things that makes this deal so unique.
What it really means is that customers deploying technologies from Novell and Microsoft no longer have to fear about possible lawsuits or potential patent infringement from either company.

Development: Virtualization

Microsoft and Novell will collaborate in enhancing and developing the functionality required to efficiently virtualize Windows on Linux and Linux on Windows.
Both will now be first class citizens in data centers, addressing the needs of mixed environments. They will both enjoy optimized, supported and tuned device drivers to maximize their potential.

Development: Virtualization Management

As a plus, the companies will work together to implement the necessary standards to manage data centers that run mixed environments (WS-Management).
Novell will develop tools to manage virtualized Windows machines, and Microsoft will develop tools to manage virtualized Linux systems.

Office Open XML

Novell engineers have been working for the last year together with Microsoft engineers through the ECMA TC45 working group in producing a complete specification that would allow for interoperability across office suites.
Novell will develop the code necessary to bring support for Office Open XML into OpenOffice, and will contribute that support back to the OpenOffice.org organization. Novell will also distribute the Office Open XML plug-in in their own edition of OpenOffice. In addition, Novell will participate in the Open XML Translator open source project.

Mono, OpenOffice and Samba

Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice as well as .NET and Windows Server.-All of these technologies will be improved upon during the 5 years of the agreement and there are some limits on the coverage that would be provided for future technologies added to these offerings.
The collaboration framework we have put in place allows us to work on complex subjects such as this where intellectual property and innovation are important parts of the conversation.

We’re also building a joint research facility where Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions, and will work with customers and the community to build and support these technologies (read: cool big new lab with all sorts of gear and tinkering going on).

I’ve been in the open source world for over twelve years and I have worked with thousands of customers worldwide who use commercial and open source software. I have been part of the large deal team working on this partnership for a long time now. In my opinion, this is the most important bridge ever developed between Microsoft and open source and *significantly* helps customers and hobbyist developers have the peace of mind that they need and have asked for. As Steve Ballmer said today, “They said it couldn’t be done” but we did and I’m personally very proud to have been part of this bridge building.

It’s been a long and exciting day so now a few of us from Microsoft and Novell are going to go get some sleep

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

Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft

Here's some big news