Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Bryan Kirschner, Open Source

Time to Say Goodbye

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:37:00 GMT

The first time I went to a LinuxWorld conference as a Microsoft employee, a guy passing by me saw "Microsoft" on my name badge and stopped. "Microsoft? What are you guys doing here?" he said. "I loved Microsoft. You put my kids through college."

As it turns out, he owned a small IT business during the late ‘80s and early 90s, which thrived building applications during the headiest days of the "PC revolution."

The last time I went to an OSBC as a Microsoft employee, I MC'd the third annual Open Source ISV "Day 0" event hosted by Microsoft. I told that story in my opening remarks. At the reception at the end of the day, one of the attendees came up to me and said: "You know, I'm one of those guys who's been doing technology for 30 years. And today's event felt like Microsoft in the early 90s. It's the first time I've gotten that from Microsoft in a long time."

It seemed a very fitting way to bracket one of the most challenging but also rewarding periods of my career: one that had its roots and the fertile soil for its success in my friends and former bosses Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji. They created space for me, the latitude to go out and figure out a way forward for Microsoft and open source, by first listening to customers, developers, and sys admins face-to-face.

That opportunity culminated in my becoming the first person in the company (but not the last!) to hold the title "Director of Open Source Strategy" and shipping the first company-wide statement of policy and position on open source.

But, by this time, you've probably figured out something's changed. I've moved on become Vice President for Corporate Strategies at Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner Research.

There are a few things I have always gotten excited about: technology is one. Politics is another. Learning new things is a third. These add to a strong desire to spend all of my time playing MMORPGs. But since that isn't economically viable, they fortunately also add to up a consistent interest in understanding interesting, often controversial, convoluted, and conflict-ridden-situations and figuring new ways forward.

I did this in the public sector, working on community policing, where I sprinkled in some work on political positioning, messaging, and communications. And then I brought that background to Microsoft ten years ago.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner connects all the dots in a new and exciting way. The founder, Stan Greenberg, is widely known for being the pollster and strategist for Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela. GQRR has a big political consulting practice, and a smaller (but expanding) corporate consulting practice. Continuing and accelerating the growth of the latter is my new job.

I've been around Port 25 since its very beginning. Pre-beginning, actually. I owe a huge debt to everyone inside Microsoft but, even more importantly, outside Microsoft who helped make it what it is today.

My new boss, Jeremy Rosner, was the subject of a movie called "Our Brand is Crisis." Port25 will always be with me as a powerful and tangible part of a big shift from "Microsoft and open source" looking more like a "brand" that equals "crisis" to one that looks more like...well, like Port25. Which is what it should be.

So...thanks. I certainly still expect to be engaged on issues of openness and technology.You can now find me at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Berkman Lunch: Open Source at Microsoft - Opportunity or Threat?

Bryan Kirschner — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:47:00 GMT

I was recently at Harvard for two events. The first, which I'll talk about in this blog, was part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard lunch series.

Mario Madden and I were invited to speak at a session called "Microsoft and Open Source: Opportunity or Threat?" You can watch the whole thing online at the link - and David Weinberger liveblogged as well.

The focus of the whole thing was, to quote Karim Lakhani, our host, a "vigorous discussion." So we had about 15 minutes to give an up-front presentation about our thoughts on the "opportunity or threat" issue.

The rest of the time was open discussion. So I do recommend checking out the webcast-it's tough to do the discussion justice second hand. I will call out a couple things that won't show up in the recording.

First, Harvard really is an important source of expertise on open source. There's a whole bunch of research that's certainly been valuable to me (on developer and corporate motivations, for example). There are also people like Margo Seltzer (the former CTO of Sleepycat) who I got to meet at the second event, which I'll talk about in my next blog.

Second, the whole OSS Lab at Microsoft community has emphasized the importance of dialogue for as long as we've been around. This event drove that home once again. Some folks followed up verbally or in mail to semi-apologize for it being a bit of a challenging environment for us.

But I didn't think it was challenging: if a question is difficult to answer because someone is working hard at making it difficult for me to answer, I'm not too keen on that. But if a question is difficult to answer because the answer is something we haven't thought about (and maybe should) or it's just a tough problem...if the questioner is willing to help me be smarter about figuring out a good answer, well, bring it on, as they say.

David Weinberger actually raised a point like this when we talked about Microsoft-released projects and contributions(from his blog):

Q: [David] Are 500 contributions a lot? Compared to the number of patents? Products?
A: [Bryan] We'll measure success when every product group considers open source.
Q: [Karim] IBM says they have 1,000 developers working on Linux, etc. Do you have any number you can point to that's similar?
A: No.

I added we don't have a KLOC or person hours target...should we?

Third, just for the record, here, I said think open source and Microsoft represents a mutual opportunity (...check out the podcast for all the reasons why.) But that brings me to the one thing that most sticks in my mind. A CS professor who attended told us she waited until the recording was finished because she didn't want to be rude-but that to her, we were talking about our open source strategy as if it was something new and innovative.

But from her perspective, she said she's been doing software development a long time, and this sounds just like what Microsoft did in the late 1980's, when being open to developers is what made early Microsoft products interesting to her as a developer. So (to paraphrase): not to be rude, but why do you think this is cool?

This was funny because (as I replied) I absolutely agree with her. Our open source strategy took a lot of learning about how open source has changed the landscape, and what it has brought that's new and different, but the fundamental principle remains the same: openness to third-party developers is a powerful and enduring principle.

And it is part of Microsoft's DNA, as we sometimes say ("...the engineering relationship is getting back to the way it used to be in 1994-1997, which is a great relief to us," [Jeremy] Allison, said recently about Samba and Microsoft).

At one time, Microsoft was perceived to be a leader in openness through free SDKs and extensive APIs, active developer communities, published object models (wow, now you can call the Excel object model from the Powershell scripting language...) , and more.

For a number of (in my opinion) remediable reasons, from the time open source started to capture the popular imagination till today, Microsoft has not been perceived as a leader. But I don't see any reason why we can't reach the point where the best things Microsoft has brought to users and developers and the best things open source has brought to users and developers will be decidedly better together. I think there are some arguable examples already (XNA is high on my list: traditional coding contests plus easy paths to write and sell games, plus a growing open source community).

The other event at Harvard was a business focused Open Source CEO Summit...which I'll talk about in my next blog.

Open Government Collaboratives

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:33:00 GMT

The city of Matsue, Japan is using Ruby to promote regional economic development. One of the unexpected highlights of the recent GOSCON, was a gentleman from Matsue coming up to me after I had given my talk about open source and Microsoft and saying "I am using IronRuby. I love it."

It was a nice moment because - even in the best of times - public sector IT typically has resource constraints that make it tough for them to think aspirationally about technology. And right now isn't the best of times.

But if you step out of the current challenges for a moment, it was a reminder that whether you're a developer at Microsoft or at the Census Bureau, you have the potential to contribute to something people would love. (Why do people at the north end of my zip code take 5 minutes longer to get work? On a percentage of the mean basis, that's huge. Does the disruption of the grid by the lake have that much of an impact? Yes, I am a long-time GIS nerd. Ironically, there is a nerd GIS - although, sadly, it is an acronym and not a density plot of nerds per square mile...).

On a more practical level, "open government collaboratives" was a theme of the conference. This is a consortium-based approach to development -f or example, multiple cities cooperating to develop a web toolkit for libraries. (Brian Prentice and Andrea Di Maio at Gartner call this "community source.") The good news is that both open source and Microsoft can play useful - and complementary - roles in this.

Open source has demonstrated a set of practices, and open source communities have developed a pool of technologies - Plone, for example, was a popular CMS that government collaboratives customized.

I wound up speaking to a couple folks about things like enabling single-sign on with Active Directory into their Plone-based systems. This is exactly what Sam Ramji describes (in graphic detail) as our open source strategy: as the application ecosystem (including open source applications) on Windows grows, products like Active Directory become more relevant. (In the case of Active Directory, and System Center, those applications don't need to be on Windows.)

I started my talk with two simple declarative statements: open source is neither a fad, nor a magic bullet. Microsoft products are neither a fad, nor a magic bullet (mildly interesting diff for a slow day: live google).

More importantly, over and over again, this was the right starting point for a face-to-face conversation with the IT managers attending GOSCON. For most, this is where they are as well - considering all the tools in the toolbox, trying to determine the "best tool for the job." That can be challenging, but it's a bilateral, constructive challenge we can work together on-to find a solution set that developers and users will love.

GOSCON 2008

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:35:00 GMT

Last year, we sponsored GOSON 2007, the Government Open Source Conference, and we're sponsoring it again this year. I will also be presenting a keynote address on how Microsoft participates in a world of choice.

I'm personally also excited that Brian Behlendorf (one of the co-founders of Apache) will be on a panel-and, like Sam, I have profound respect for The Apache Way.

What's also gratifying is the fact that two other colleagues from Microsoft will also be participating. Stuart McKee, the National Technology Office for the U.S., will be on the Government Open Collaboratives Panel with Brian, and Kathleen Connor from Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, will be speaking.

As I've said many times before in my blog posts, success for our team is not about controlling all things open source at Microsoft. Rather, it's about encouraging, enabling, and advising (if they need it) others across Microsoft on how to constructively engage with open source (like this...I need this. You need this. I'm not sure why, but I am confident we all do. This started as the work of one super creative guy, and kudos for the team for releasing it under the MS-PL).

I love this intro to Paul Taylor's GOSCON keynote, where he says governments have a "second chance" at realizing the "promise of e-government"-and that "some of what comes next will be home grown, some will be off the shelf, some will be community built and some will come from where we least expect it."

The least expected is what we're all about.

Participating Actively

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:39:00 GMT

Now that we’ve had our first “participate” event in conjunction with OSCON here in Portland, I wanted to share a few thoughts. This was a great experience and a great event—or, really, two consecutive events, the morning case study discussion and the afternoon panel.

First I’ll talk about the case study and then build on comments from some folks who’ve “beaten me to the blog.” In the morning Karim Lakhani from Harvard led the group through a case study about a fast-growing company (Threadless t-shirts) built on community contribution and distributed innovation. This was basically like being in a Harvard Business School class with a bunch of super achievers, complete with questions and counter questions (John Wilbanks from Science Commons blogs about it here). Stepping back and taking a look at a whole bunch of concepts and practices that underlie open source in the software domain in another context (t-shirt design), IMO, really opened the floodgates on discussion—a discussion Karim (with regret) had to close as the buzz in the room kept right on going well over time and into lunch…

In the afternoon I was part of a panel discussion and Q and A that started back in the software domain specifically. The one thing I would definitely do differently is to couple the morning case study and the later panel discussion more tightly. Not everyone who could be part of one was part of the other this year, and the real “ah ha’s” for me came from being a part of both. Here’s what I took away overall.

I introduced the morning session by noting that we’re at the ten-year mark since the folks who founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) rallied around the term “open source.” At last year’s OSCON, Bill Hilf announced we had launched http://Microsoft.com/opensource , our first public, official, company-wide statement of policy and strategy on OSS. So (I said): “If you look at that span of time from 1998 to 2007, no one can accuse us of being precipitous, and no one can flatter us for being first adopters.”
But there’s a benefit to being slow: other people don’t stand still stuff. That includes folks like Karim and another professor on our panel, Siobhan O’Mahony, doing research. I can’t emphasize enough the contributions their work and that of many others of their peers made to our first step in informing and building acceptance of that step into participation in 2007. We read it all.

And this is where I’ll offer a different perspective than Zack—in his blog he said he felt the afternoon session (on which I really appreciated his participation and contributions) he felt a bit like “it was outside looking in” on open source and “academic.” With regard to the first point, one of my goals for next year is definitely to figure out how we integrate the “inside look out” (at another domain) like we did in the morning. With regard to the latter, here’s the interesting thing to me: “academic” can be pejorative when it means “divorced from any substantive decision-making”—that is, you’re just studying for the sake of studying. And I can where Zack is coming from: MySQL is one of the oldest OSS-based businesses. Zack was quite clear he knows how they manage their dev process and a bunch of other things. Unlike the folks at Threadless and perhaps many younger OSS-based companies, Zack and MySQL’s leadership team don’t even have to wonder about what to do if they are offered a big contract or billion-dollar buy out from a big established vendor…they’ve been there, done that. I respect that.

But if like Zack (and Matt Asay, who couldn’t be at partcipate08…Matt, I’ve read your blogs for years, you’re a thoughtful guy, I would bet money you couldn’t help but love the morning session…save a date for 09!) you are encouraging Microsoft to make more code (or whole products) open source: on the Microsoft side “academic” insights are highly relevant and actionable. Siobhan almost literally wrote the book on how established companies work with foundations and communities. Karim’s understanding of distributed innovation spans from the early days of OSS’ popularity through Wikipedia and beyond (we learned on Monday that there is a vibrant online user innovation community around custom granola recipes…).

Their research and practitioners like Allison (and others) abstracting out how what-worked-in-her-experience might apply to another technology or audience are directly relevant to diverse Microsoft teams figuring out how to “go open” in ways that are sustainable because they engage a community and make business sense—there are some great examples (here and here and here). But if there’s one qualification for being the first person in the history of the universe with the title of “Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft” (…thanks Bill and Sam…) it is this: the humility to understand it would be foolish to try to figure out how to expand this list company-wide on our own, without learning from everyone who has gone before.

So here is the real a-ha for me: John Wilbanks’ job is a lot harder than mine. He is approaching the Science Commons domain with a far less robust body of knowledge and shared understanding across communities than we have in OSS. Some of that may be ten years of “open source” versus a shorter timeframe for applying these concepts to science—but what I tried to articulate at the end of the panel was this: I believe “open source” has achieved a fascinating and valuable thing. It has achieved a balance as an construct which is not just a reductive, narrow focus on source code licensing (which is a component) nor a vague, fuzzy, wishy-washy platitude or marketing slogan (which is a risk and something I know the OSI worries about). It has enough cohesion, flexibility, and surface tension to be something you can study scientifically and discuss with a shared understanding of how it relates to software or t-shirts or science, and have an intuitive “know-good-practices-when-you-see-them” dimension.

I think the OSI and other leaders in open source contributed to this by striving to maintain fidelity to a core set of values while being flexible rather than doctrinaire. And here at OSCON this strikes me: last year at OSCON 2007 Bill Hilf also announced we were submitting two Microsoft Shared Source licenses to the OSI for approval. This was a milestone I see as not just instrumentally useful to provide clarity to users of these licenses; I see it as fitting as a matter of respect and recognition. And this year we took another step forward with participate08 here at Tim O’Reilly and Allison Randal’s OSCON 2008. I see this as fitting not just instrumentally as a matter of convenience (--lots of the right people happen to be here--) but as a matter of respect and recognition. I hope to be back for participate09.

I am going to close this blog entry on that thought but for one picture that really is worth a thousand words. Once we get the notes and the whiteboard photos assembled I’ll share more about the discussion, but this image will stick with me a theme for why so many folks did come to think hard and contribute as a part of participate08—and why I am grateful they did:

(photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)

Participate08

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:09:00 GMT

On July 21 I will have the honor and pleasure of being the sponsor, host, and an active participant in participate08. participate08 is a one-day summit held in coordination with the O'Reilly Open Source Conference(OSCON). It is designed to facilitate dialogue about open source and other collaborative communities and help explore opportunities for greater participation in the design, development, and deployment of software in the modern IT environment.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (...that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

Sometimes we have to focus on what I’ll call day-to-day issues: like what if a Microsoft team releases an application under an open source license (the Ms-PL) without making the source code available? (The answer is: the team, whose disconnect with our policy was 100% accidental and unintended—stepped up to strongly affirm their commitment to OSS best practices and voluntarily released it with source code, to their great credit.) These are important. Most of the time (as in this case) things turn out positively. But participate08 is focused on the big picture, or macro level issues—the future of distributed innovation in software and beyond; being a part of that sort of discussion with folks like our panelists is just mind-blowingly cool.

In the morning, we’ll be holding a small group, facilitated “executive session”—in the afternoon, the panel will star in an open session where we hope to have a great dialogue among the panel—and with the audience. If you will be at OSCON I hope you’ll join us in E145 at 1:30 PM!

Open Source Day + 30 …

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:12:00 GMT

The same week that Brad Smith (Microsoft’s General Counsel) keynoted at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), we held our first Microsoft-wide Open Source Day (which Jamie and Mario both blogged about). We all noticed folks expressed interest in what was presented and discussed at Open Source Day, so we’re going to try to share what we said and what we learned with the Port25 community.

I was one of the presenters and facilitators for Q&A and panel discussions. The thrust of my presentation was ensuring everyone understands why Microsoft cares about open source, how Microsoft engages with open source communities, and what this means to you as a Microsoft employee (see the succinct, if not terribly exciting, slide below…).

If you read Port25, and you know about Codeplex, and Microsoft.com/opensource, and you’ve seen the cool stuff the open source heroes are doing, you probably have a good idea about the former two items. It’s the “you” part for which Open Source Day represents a major milestone, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.

Here’s why Open Source Day—kicking off a continuing dialogue with hundreds of Microsoft employees, and, by extension, the people they work for, who work with them, who they have lunch with etc, etc—is a transformative event. There have been pioneers working on open source and Microsoft “growing together.” At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll put them into two groups: people like me, Sam Ramji, and Bill Hilf, and other members of the Port25 team, for example, whose full-time job is thinking about open source in one way or another. With no disrespect to what is one heck of an open source all star team (there are many I could highlight, but we’ve got some nice videos for Tom and Hank…), it’s still a relatively small number of people relative to 80,000 plus employees around the world.

The next group is larger and its people who just did smart things: I’m oversimplifying, but open source wasn’t necessarily their one-and-only-job, or even specifically in their job description. There’s the Shared Source team, the Codeplex team, and bunches of people across the company (once again I’ll stick to the latest videos…Jim, John…shoot, it’s killing me to leave people out…Rob, Sara…). One of the best parts of being in “Group 1” is just discovering what “Group 2” is doing…far more often than not, just because it made sense for their product or team…and for open source partners or communities.

But we’re still not fully tapping “Group 3.”…. until now. From KDE to BSD, Office to MSR, there are a lot of people at Microsoft who came in to the company with experience and passion for some form of participation in open source. And there are lots of people who, in the course of their work and lives, wonder “why can’t my team / group / product do <insert idea about growing together with open source.” I know because Open Source Day broadened out the discussion to more people than ever before—and with more clarity about what is not only possible—but encouraged by the company. Open Source Day is a pivotal point in freeing the many, many smart passionate developers and program managers and others from any lingering concern that engagement with open source is something they need to worry about “more than” doing something else. (Yes, anything still has to make sense for customers, partners, and shareholders…like everything else--but open source engagement and strategy is a “first-class citizen.”)

These statements weren’t made specifically “for” Open Source Day. Brad’s comments are from his OSBC keynote. Ray’s are from his talk at the Microsoft MVP Summit. But they sum this up better than anything I had in my slides:

Ray Ozzie in response to a question about Microsoft and Open Source (read the whole thing here):

Well, my position toward Open Source generally is that it's a part of the environment. It's very useful for developers to be able to get the source code to certain things, to modify them. …Microsoft fundamentally as a whole has changed dramatically as a result of Open Source in terms of as people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and other systems has increased. …Open Source is a reality. We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically, depending on how you look at it, will take certain aspects of what we do, and we'll Open Source them where we believe there is a real benefit to the community and to the nature of the growth of that technology in Open Sourcing it. …e live in a world together with Open Source, and we have to make it possible for you to build solutions and for customers to build solutions that incorporate aspects of both.

Brad Smith at OSBC (read the whole thing here):

…Before I say anything else, I do want to say this: We at Microsoft respect and appreciate the important role that open source software plays in our industry. We respect and we appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open source developers make in our industry. We respect and we appreciate the important role that open source software plays for our customers, customers who almost always have heterogeneous computer networks with software and hardware and services that, as you all well know, come from multiple vendors. That is not what you have always heard from us, and I recognize that. But I did want to start by saying that…

And the beauty of Open Source Day is this: Brad Smith and Ray Ozzie are pretty darn important, but, basically, they are in “Group 2.” What they’ve really done is catalyze and energize the hundreds—thousands—of people in Group 3 to take Microsoft and open source into a new era. I just hope those of us in “Group 1” have the energy to keep up!

Talk or Walk

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:10:00 GMT

There’s been a flurry of articles and blogs about Microsoft’s open source strategy lately, spurred in part
by an interview with Bill Hilf (Zachary Rodriques Connolly …and a comment from davidmeyer on my previous post).

Collectively they make me think of a bunch of things to blog about—today I’m going to start with something that
struck me about davidmeyer’s comment (--out of unabashed favoritism for Port25 ).

The nub of the matter is that by many measures, Microsoft and open source are both growing. But what is the nature of
the relationship..is there a relationship? Are they growing: coincidentally, ships passing in the night in the same
general direction? Complementarily, in a mutually reinforcing way? Or despite one another?

My impression from reading davidmeyer’s comment (as well as others by other people I respect ) is that statements in
the press loom a lot larger in the minds of other folks than in mine as indicators or causes—or both—of the nature of
that relationship. What I mean is that once you believe open source and Microsoft are established parts of the IT
landscape, talk really becomes the “tail wagging the dog.”

Let me use a little thought experiment to share where I’m coming from: consider the relationship between Microsoft
and Oracle. Both companies are, I think, universally regarded as established parts of the IT landscape. As such, both
companies devote a lot of effort to direct, head-to-head competition--we can take some type of sustained competitive activity,
now and in the future, for granted.

At the same time, both companies devote substantial effort to complementary efforts (Here’s all kinds of stuff at the Oracle .NET
developer center – community discussion, technical resources, marketing collateral…and this is one of three including
Office and Windows sites). So there’s clearly more than one dimension to the relationship.

So if somebody asked me “what about the complementary relationship between Microsoft and Oracle?” --what would I think about
as indicators?

I’d look at the technology—like application availability, compatibility, interoperability, and performance.

I’d consider the people and the ecosystem—developers and ISVs.

And I’d want to understand the efforts underway to work together and find joint opportunities, tune and optimize, and
innovate.

Probably one of the last things I’d consider as an indicator is what’s happening in the press. And the concept that
(for example) whether Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer had anything nice to say about one another to journalists wouldn’t
be something I’d spend much time thinking about at all. This is not to discount the impact of “talk”, and not to discount
the reality that what folks read in the media can help make them more excited and confident—or suspicious and discouraged.
And Oracle and Microsoft—two discreet companies--are not a directly applicable comparison to considering Microsoft and open
source in general. But Port25 principle #3--No comment goes unread & every idea (common sense required) is openly discussed—
really jumped out at me as I was reading the items linked above (no, I don’t have the principles memorized--they are printed
out and hanging immediately to the left of my monitor…); thus, today’s post.

(And yes, I don’t think it’s even a close call that the indicators I consider important favor an excited and confident view
of the relationship between Microsoft and open source—but that’s something I’ll pick up on another blog.)

Are you inspired by Open?

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:02:00 GMT

I’ve been running silent for awhile—ironically, because I had too much to blog about. Sam Ramji and I attended (and sponsored) Olliance Group & DLA Piper’s 2007 Open Source Think Tank earlier this month. Participants were encouraged to “live blog” (under an honor code)—but I found I was booked 7 AM – Midnight and was fully engaged in what was going on. Since then I’ve been mulling over the things I took away from this really rewarding event.

What got me writing again was reading about the death of John Backus, the “Father of Fortran.” I started circulating a call for Fortran experiences internally , thinking we should put brief note of tribute up on Port25—then I realized, that this was ‘Web 1.0” thinking (h/t to Hank). I should put my thoughts out there and let folks share any adds. My little blurb was:

Fortran shares a hazy set of memories of very random experiences of computing (with PASCAL and COBOL) from when I was a kid - until only a few years ago when I was using Dataplot, a public domain statistical analysis app available from NIST written in Fortran-77. Dataplot does not claim to be ‘open source’ in so many words, but its authors do promote user enhancement of the source code. I never actually accomplished anything useful in that at all regard—but I did go so far as to pull down the source and find a Fortran compiler.

I asked myself: given my little story about Fortran, am I inspired by “open?” On the one hand, I went out of my way to take advantage of the deliberate availability of code. On the other--in contrast to when I was much younger and noodle around with all kinds of bits—I didn’t actually do anything with it. What’s important to me?

This led to conclude what struck me most at the Think Tank is the passion of the many start-ups who were there. They had intense energy inspired by the fact that they see an open source –based business model as offering new opportunity. These are folks “inspired by open” – as an economic opportunity. Conversely (as we found during the Think Tank) this community is largely uninterested in (or actively hostile to) the “what really deserves to be called open source” debate (useful round up from Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk) for understandable reasons: flexibility to do what they need to do to help their businesses succeed is important to them.

I came up with a few personal scenarios:

Curiosity & Creativity Historically this was a huge factor in my life-- what was certainly my technical peak was all about getting games to work better on my Commodore64 (6502 Assembly, baby). Today, Civilization IV—totally moddable using Python and XML and supported with n SDK—is tugging at me. So is XNA. The opportunity to do new cool stuff and participate in an organic community is definitely inspirational. (I used to be able to spend much more time chasing these motivations before I had a house, job, or spouse. I think the time trade-off explains the brevity of my modern flirtation with Fortran.)

Economic Opportunity & Problem Solving My first significant indulgence in Microsoft technology actually happened around Visual Basic 5 (--go ahead, insert joke about technical trough here). I’ve blogged before about being a big fan of Eric Von Hipple’s theories about toolkits and democratizing innovation: Office97 wasn’t a product or set of products—to me, thanks to the “openness” of the object model it was one big “toolkit” you could make do almost anything a user needed it to do—and I did, for between $35 and $60 an hour.

Status and Recognition What I enjoy most is making music. By design (necessity, really –I’m not that good) it is not my source of income. So it has always been about sharing and recognition: all of my music has always been available at no cost, one way or another—the highest praise is someone else performing my songs or positive feedback. I am a big fan of the creative commons efforts and (unsurprisingly) the concept of attribution licenses. This is an area where—like the open source start-ups at the Think Tank, I actually “get inspired” about distribution models and license mechanisms enabling new business models. (Example: Today, few artists make any money from record sales—most artist income comes from live performance. Combine a mechanism for distributing freely available music that phoned home as it was (re)distributed so geographic location and demographics register back with the artist; now you have freely peer-to-peer distributed music while independent artists can pitch (paid) performance venues with a rich, valid database of fans by geography.)

As it turns out this list of top motivations is similar to what Lakhani and Wolf found Why Hackers Do What They Do? Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects—even though exactly none of these examples fits a textbook definition of a FOSS project. But that further brings clarity to my experience at the Think Tank: if we look at the question of “inspired by open” as an empirical and human question, not a semantic or theoretical one, the diversity of perspectives and motivations among people suggests diverse communities (or sub-communities) will form along different dimensions of “inspired by open.” My brief modern flirtation with Fortran helped me think about where I might fit in. My experience at the Think Tank helped me learn a lot about the “commercial OSS” community and how they’re “inspired by open.” And that will be the next blog….

Nixon Goes to China

MichaelF — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 02:36:00 GMT

At least four academic research papers in the last 12 months have observed IT vendors appear to have made investments in open source software in order to combine open source assets with their proprietary software portfolios or other revenue drivers-- using open source to strengthen a “value chain” that might extend across other software products, hardware, and consulting services. The largest publicly stated investment in open source—by IBM—has been observed to be potentially related to its lack of a successful x86 operating system(1), failure to write successful web server(2), as an anti-Microsoft competitive tactic(3), and to position its proprietary AIX (UNIX) operating system as “the easiest and most compatible upgrade path for Linux.” (4)

Matt Asay recently blogged that “IBM has been given a lot of love for its open source support” but he seems to agree with the idea that “like any good corporate citizen” where that support starts and stops may be explained in terms of its fiduciary obligation to its shareholders. –Or, as the author of one recent study published out of Harvard Business School states, positioning open source as a “complementary” asset to existing “proprietary” assets per “the old saw of the razor/razor blade business model.”

Matt previously commented on this same Harvard study, lamenting “I am surprised at how little creativity apparently goes into thinking through complements and substitutes, and making open source bets accordingly.”

To a point, I’ll defend publicly financed corporations in general—including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Novell—since their employees do indeed have a fiduciary obligation to look out for the interests of the company’s shareholders. Thus the bounds for creativity are not wide open, and the more “unusual” some sort of “bet” appears, the harder it can be to determine whether that bet is complementary to the core assets of any company. But here’s the beauty of the fact that here at Microsoft we have a different business model from IBM or Oracle or Red Hat. It means we have different opportunities to do something that makes business sense and, in this case, supports open source community-driven development.

I won’t argue whether it means we at the OSS Lab @ MS are more creative or not, but I will trumpet that fact that we have teamed up with Paula Bach, a PhD Candidate at the Computer-Supported Collaboration and Learning Lab in the Penn State Center for Human Computer Interaction and Professor John Carroll, a giant in the human-computer interaction (HCI) field, to present a special interest group (SIG) on “Usability and Free/Libre/Open Source Software SIG: HCI Expertise and Design Rationale” at CHI 2007.

Why? Usability is perceived as a challenging areas for OSS development. Usability is tough for any type of development, but if you have capital to invest and the organizational capacity to it, there is a rich body of knowledge about a systematic research & development (R&D) process—Microsoft follows one which is, IMO, quite impressive, rigorous—and tough from a developer perspective. But if you step back from the term “open source,” you realize that any software production endeavor that is not equipped to apply those commercial best practices—like, hint, hint:

Many of Microsoft’s 700,000 plus partner businesses worldwide, many of which are small businesses that build packaged or customized software applications
Tens of millions of end-user developers who collaborate in a very open-sourcey way in places like the Excel Programming Newsgroup
Hundreds (and more every day) of community-driven open source projects on Codeplex…

By now you may see a pattern: increasing the ability of small groups of people to collaborate to produce better applications using platform technologies like Windows, Office, and .NET—whether they consider themselves “open source” or not (like end-user programmers trying to solve a problem or a half-dozen folks trying to run a traditional software business) is, I would argue, uniquely consistent with Microsoft’s business model. Paula will be joining us as a lab intern and we hope her learnings about HCI in community-driven development will lead to enhacements for Codeplex (and maybe elsewhere as well).

There’s a saying: “Only Nixon could go to China.” It refers to the idea that only a politician perceived as a hardliner could take on tough issues (--Nixon was regarded as a staunch anti-Communist) that would expose someone with a less extreme reputation to politically crippling accusations of “selling out.” It was also re-purposed in Star Trek VI to explain why Captain Kirk was chosen as a key player in the Klingon-Federation peace process, which is the primary reason I had it on my mind. (I am not sure whether I should be impressed, feel validated, or be frightened that a Wikipedia entry actually documents all this.)

If any company is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as = Nixon to OSS = China or =Kirk to OSS=Klingons, as of today it would seem it is Microsoft. I’m not going China but I am going to CHI. And I think this type of “mission” will be one step toward a uniquely mutually valuable relationship between community-driven development projects (of all types, including open source projects) and Microsoft.

I think the community is getting creative about this opportunity (including people who deeply study OSS development like Paula and Jack, without whom this wouldn’t have happened)—but get ready, so are we.

Warp six, Mr. Sulu.

(The four papers I referenced, most of which are available online, are:
(1)    Samuelson, IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source
(2)    Mann, The Commercialization of Open Source Software: Do Property Rights Still Matter?
(3)    Fitzgerald, The Transformation of Open Source Software
(4)    Iansiti, The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community, )