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

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.

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

Black Helicopters

admin — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:26:00 GMT

Reading through some of the first posts to Port25, there has been some great ideas and posts. There have also been some really interesting conspiracy theories, so let me clarify some things we’ve seen in the blog posts, emails, and even other Web sites and articles:

Port25 is not an attempt to subterfuge the OSS community
Microsoft does not have people posting to Port25 trying to make the OSS community ‘look dumb’
Microsoft moderators do not remove all the controversial posts
Port25 is not a marketing or PR stunt
Port25 is not related to the legal stuff in the EU
The guys in the OSS lab are not soulless sell outs or villainous rascals
Port25 does not have a hidden agenda
It really does not hurt our feelings when people try to get personal or make unfounded and derogatory claims – this is part of the reality of our jobs
I don’t speak Russian – but I’m thinking about learning since we launched Port25

You can disagree with the above, but this is the truth. We are working hard to make Port25 more of a reciprocal community, but it requires everyone to partake in a two way conversation. I understand there is a lot we do today and need to do in the future, but it requires smart and mature people and companies to work collaboratively. I’m sure this will ruffle some feathers, but it’s the only way it will really work. And after you put down the politics and rhetoric, I think you’ll see the same – it’s no different than any other relationship. Working together can make it happen.

Welcome to Port 25

admin — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Roblimo from Slashdot warned me.

Last Fall, I did an interview on Slashdot and put my email address at the end of the interview, following the statement that if “If you'd like to contact me directly, I can be reached at billhilf at microsoft dot com” Roblimo told me that I might want to rethink including my email address, and suggested possibly a link to a Web page as a way to redirect possible spambots and general bedlam.

I didn’t get the spam (or the Microsoft Exchange spam filters are really good) but I did get some feedback. Approximately two thousand emails of feedback. The interview posted a few days before I presented at Linux World San Francisco, which meant I was getting most of the email while I was on the road and preparing to discuss Interoperability and the Open Source Software labs I run here in Redmond. Although it was somewhat of a deluge of email, the feedback was extremely valuable (thank you to all of you who wrote to me) and really helped me realize the importance of this subject.

Tim O’Reilly has talked about the importance of architectures for participation. The value of building an architecture to allow participation was never more clear than reading (and responding!) to thousands of these emails. Now you may be reading this saying “Amazing, it took this guy how long to learn about blogs?” and that’s a fair criticism, and Jason Matusow and Robert Scoble have been telling me to do this for a long while now. But hopefully by the time you finish reading through this site, you’ll understand why Port 25 is somewhat more than just a place to blog.

So why is it called Port 25? Some background on port numbers first. SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is the protocol for sending email messages between servers or from a mail client to a mail server. On a server, the port for SMTP is 25. When you open a port on a server, such as to allow for SMTP traffic, it is commonly referred to as ‘listening’ on the port. Port 25, therefore, is a metaphor for how we are opening the communication lines to for a discussion around Open Source Software and Microsoft. Cute, huh?

As someone who has many hours at the command line, debugging things such as protocol states (LISTENING?) and getting software and servers working to provide some type of service, the concept of server ports and being open is well engrained in how I and the team here in our lab think about communications – so we thought it was applicable to how we want to start the dialogue around this subject. I guess it just took a Slashdot interview and a couple thousand emails (and consistent nudging from friends) to really drive the point home that having a participative discussion around OSS and Microsoft technologies is a good thing, not –as many people may believe- something we want to ‘hide’ or shy away from.

What will you find here? This will be the place we not only blog, but also where we put analysis from our OSS labs and also where we discuss and show other parts of Microsoft that we think are just plain cool or interesting. I think what you’ll see here over time is how a bunch of open source guys inside Microsoft think, as well as people and technologies inside Redmond that we think other folks like us would find interesting as well.

So, there will be much more to discuss, debate and learn from together – but for now, port 25 is open.