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

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.

Powerset team resumes HBase contributions

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:57:00 GMT

It is just two months since Microsoft finalized the acquisition of Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. Powerset's goals are to "change the way humans interact with computers through language"- improving search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words.

Collaboration between the Powerset team and their new colleagues in Live Search has already resulted in some integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using the Factz engine.

The application of Powerset's technology to Live Search will enable Live Search to more quickly surface the most relevant information, resulting in improvements to the end-user experience. The Powerset acquisition is an important part of Live Search's strategy, and HBase is key to Powerset's ongoing success and will also open more opportunities for other Live Search projects as well as for the broader community to move the whole web forward.

But what's especially notable is that the Powerset team has resumed contributions to HBase, an open-source, column-oriented, distributed database written in Java. The contributions relate to infrastructural storage technology enabling large scale data processing.

HBase, which is an important component of Powerset's development, is developed as part of the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project, and runs on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System, providing BigTable-type capabilities. (HBase initially started as a contribution to Hadoop before becoming a full sub-project of Hadoop in January 2008.)

For the past year and a half, Powerset has sponsored two full-time developers to work on HBase; Michael Stack and Jim Kellerman are also on the Hadoop Project Management Committee. Through the continued work of these developers, Microsoft will help improve HBase, which receives significant lift from the active community that supports the project.

Technology companies and communities have always collaborated (see this great research overview). There are some great examples in the past of Microsoft being a creative, agile leader - one of my favorites being the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program, which had its origin in organic, outside-in cooperation:

"Way back in the dark ages, Microsoft provided a great deal of technical support on CompuServe. The CompuServe FoxPro forum was extremely busy and Calvin Hsia, then an independent developer, now Developer Lead on the Fox team, created what we called "Calvin's List." It was a listing of the number of postings by person, including info on both messages sent and received. ...As the story goes, some of the Microsoft people jumped on Calvin's List as a way to identify high contributors, and thus was born the MVP program."

But if you look at how open source in particular has changed the industry from 1998 onward, as other vendors figured out ways to interact with open source, we simply haven't been the first, the fastest, or the most creative.

That history is a fact of life. But so are the implications from studying what has happened as firms and communities find ways to work together (I have a small quibble with the choice of title but not with the main point of A man on the inside: Unlocking communities as complementary assets - a "woman on the inside" would be just as effective...).

The conclusion is unambiguous: there are mutual opportunities that come from openness to working together. We're just scratching the surface on the range of opportunities for Microsoft to participate in and contribute to open source communities in ways that are good for customers, good for communities - and good for business.

The next ten years of software will also be a time of growth and change, where both open source and Microsoft communities will grow together, so it is exciting to see contribution to HBase join contribution to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications (this was Microsoft's first code contribution to PHP projects, but not the last), and OpenPegasus, an important part of System Center's new cross-platform approach.

But it is not unexpected-and others will follow.

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!

Participation, Diversity, and Change

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:32:00 GMT

“…Our goal here is to evolve and to hopefully provide information that makes it easier for people using OSS and Microsoft software in the real world.” Bill Hilf wrote this in an April 2006 blog entitled “Who Would Have Guessed?” just one week after Port25 launched. Although in hindsight it seems obvious Port25 was a good idea, back then there was a lot of guessing and finger-crossing, because Port25 wasn’t about Bill or Sam participating in a dialogue as individuals—something they did and continue to do all the time. This was about Microsoft as a company opening up for two-way participation in a new domain.

This domain has proven to be even broader than people using open source and Microsoft software—it includes people holding varied dispositions across technical, business and legal perspectives, in both camps. There are people interested in very specific technical issues and some in broader industry trends and themes. Posts with high readership, many trackbacks, lots of comments (or some combination of the above) include, for example, some how-to and systems administration focused (Kishi on systems configuration), some about new bits you can use (Hank on Windows media player for Firefox) and some about big news (John Rosenberg on the approval of two Shared Source licensed by the OSI).

Comments on two recent posts—How Did It Start for You? and New Horizons really crystallized for me the diversity of the Port25 community—inside and outside Microsoft. The Port25 community defies reductive classification as “a Microsoft guy (or gal)” or “an open source gal (or guy)”—or as “a developer” or “an end-user.” Folks wear multiple hats and have diverse experiences and interests. So Port25 is evolving to reflect and support that diversity.

Port25 will continue to be the home of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft. And technical content will continue to make “it easier for people using OSS and Microsoft software in the real world”. But the redesign you’re looking at will make it easier to browse and search a larger and more diverse body of content efficiently: are you looking for downloads, developer-focused content, or in browsing content of general interest to the “community?”

One big reason for making these sorts of changes is the steadily increasing number and scope of people , technologies , activities , and downloads across Microsoft and around the world that are relevant to Microsoft and open source growing together (to use a phrase you’ve heard before on Port25). We want these to be readily discoverable for every member of the Port25 community who might have an interest in them—whether because you find something to be problematic (--constructive feedback is important!), inspirational, or useful. And above all, the biggest reason is something we have all experienced over the life of Port25: the vitality and two-way dialogue of Port25 continues to foster to more awareness, connections, participation and change within Microsoft and in the broader ecosystem.

Referring to one such manifestation of change, Sam titled a blog “If you’re surprised you’re not paying attention.” The evolution of Port25 will make it easier for you to pay attention to what matters to you.