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

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.

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.

How Did It Start For You?

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:11:00 GMT

My participation in technology was transformed by the Commodore 64. That's why I--like others here at Port25 and over at Slashdot--still love it after 25 years. Natales posts: "I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502..." Neither can I. I was 10, and needed to learn assembly to make a game I was writing run faster. I still remember there was a free 4k block of memory up at register C000 (49152) you could use to stick your assembly code in.

"Participation" is a theme you've probably picked up on here at Port25.

That's not just because most of us here share some sort of experience that enabled us to participate in technology in new and rewarding ways. It's also because it's an important element in enabling Microsoft and open source to "grow together."

I am confident about Microsoft and open source growing together. With that said, it's a fair point to make that the best of open source is not-- yet! --established as a universal part of "Microsoft DNA." But a tradition of growing opportunities to participate in the opportunities offered by technology is.

It's easy to forget today that providing free SDK's for developers was at one time a significant departure from common industry practice -- a business model innovation. Business and technical approaches that enabled third parties to develop on top of a "platform" are a part of Microsoft's heritage. The importance of growing the number of people able to participate in that ecosystem as creators or entrepreneurs is widely understood as simply smart business.

Following Tim O'Reilly's insight, we think broadly about the "architecture of participation" as "systems that are designed for user contribution." One thing we do is work day by day to learn how open source concepts and approaches offer new or enhanced ways to grow participation. And then we work to understand what's already being done across Microsoft--and what could be done that's new or different.

After a talking with folks here (Bill Hilf is an-ex C64 hacker and Sam Ramji got started on a PET) I realized that understanding the people and projects and perspectives of our open source community inside Microsoft isn't possible without more transparency about this idea of "participation." So this blog is an introduction for further blogs--and some new bloggers--on the ways in which we're working on and thinking about growing participation now and in the future, whether by effecting change at Microsoft, sharing information more broadly about opportunities that already exist, or working with leaders in the technical and academic communities on new ideas.

(And if the Commodore 64 changed your life too, by all means chime in--or share what other technology made a big difference for you!)

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.)

The Imperative of Participation

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:42:00 GMT

I blogged awhile back about “Microsoft and open source growing together”—more in the sense of concurrency rather than causality. Today I’m blogging about the latter.

I’ve found the graphic below to be one of the most powerful visual representations of a basic fact that is often forgotten. The surface area of the globe below represents the total number of the people working in the technology ecosystem and all the economic activity in that ecosystem. The little square in the Redmond, Washington area is shown—at scale—Microsoft’s relative size by number of employees and annual revenue. It’s 0.05% of the total ecosystem, according to a Harvard Business School study.

The point this drives home for me, in a very intuitive way, is that any smart technology company would be foolish not to think about participating in that larger ecosystem with business partners, developers, and user-innovators. There’s simply a vast amount of passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit outside the boundaries of any one firm.

I was reminded of this profound point when I watched Sam’s interview of Allison Randal (IMHO, one of those people in that broader ecosystem whose passion and intelligence anyone would be a fool to ignore). There was a phrase used in that interview describing her perspective on the open source community: “the principle that everyone deserves to participate.”

Today Microsoft and Novell announced something that couldn’t be a better example of companies thinking hard—and being willing to take some risks—to participate in that broader ecosystem, guided by the principle that everyone deserves to participate.

The size of that little block in Redmond may be small relative to the total ecosystem, but—no bones about it—Microsoft is a successful company, and as a result Microsoft invests a lot ($7B a year!) in R&D. Among the results of those investments are accessibility technologies: User Interface Automation (UIA) is which is an accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products.

What Microsoft and Novell announced today is about working together to bring UIA to a broader developer and user community, enabling creation of accessible products across both Windows and Linux platforms.

On the Microsoft side, Microsoft will make available its User Interface Automation (UIA) specification, which is an advanced accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products for people with one or more disabilities, for implementation regardless of platform, in the open source and proprietary software communities.

On the Novell side, Novell will develop and deliver an adapter that allows the UIA framework to work well with existing Linux accessibility projects--Novell’s work will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform while enabling UIA to interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), which ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise, and Ubuntu Linux.

On a strictly emotional basis, it feels pretty good to come to work on a day when the big news is about create a cross-platform solution that will provide people with disabilities greater access to computer technology.

But since I cited Harvard Business School to explain why participating in the broader community was a business imperative, let me take a little more of a hardcore business approach: Any technology company that wants to stay in business needs to think about reaching beyond the boundaries of their little “box” in the graphic above.

Any technology company that really wants to succeed, in ways nobody—whether their shareholders or their competitors—could have predicted needs to think about both reaching beyond the boundaries of their box and making that big globe even bigger. If you can figure out how to grow participation in that larger ecosystem—well, there’s that much more passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit out there to engage with.

Today, Microsoft and Novell just took a step toward making that big world even bigger by working together across the boundaries of each firm, and across the traditional lines between proprietary and open source software development.

It feels really good to come to work today because of this single event—it feels even better to me because I am very confident this is an example of Microsoft and open source growing together—causality, not concurrence. This is the shape of things to come--remember you read it here on Port25 first.

OSCON and Everything After

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:09:00 GMT

When I describe my job as “helping Microsoft and open source to grow together,” I get a broad range of reactions from people outside and inside of Microsoft. These reactions have included sentiments along the lines of “that must be tough,” or “you must be a glutton for punishment” on occasion.

After wrapping up a fairly momentous year* culminating in OSCON (see this and this), I thought the time was right to put some big-picture context around how I feel about my job.

The year 1995 was when we saw the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache server, and MySQL AB was founded.

The world was two years shy of the Debian Software Guidelines and three years away from the articulation of the Open Source Definition (OSD) they inspired.

The Open Source Technology Group (OSTG)—by virtue of operating both Sourceforge and Freshmeat today’s largest hoster of public open source project--was about to be founded.

We were at the very beginning of the growth of open source into a significant, enduring part of the IT environment.

So what’s this graph below showing over the course of (roughly) 1995 through 2007?

It’s showing Microsoft’s reported fiscal year revenue, which grew to $51.122B USD in 2007 from $6.075B in 1995 (you can reproduce it with data from here.)

During most of this time, we didn’t have Codeplex.
We didn’t have licenses submitted to the OSI.
We didn’t have Port 25.
We didn’t have Bill Hilf, or Sam Ramji, or the rest of the OSS lab.
And we didn’t have http://microsoft.com/opensource.

And Microsoft and open source did grow, together—coincidentally. In retrospect, this is not surprising. Microsoft technologies supported an ecosystem of passionate developers and an entrepreneurial individuals and companies and tens of millions of end-user programmers and end-users providing peer-to-peer assistance sharing knowledge—and code—with each other.

And we had many people at Microsoft working on (to highlight some of my current favorites) the research and development and product management path to technologies like Silverlight and XNA and Photosynth.

Now we have all those things—plus the opportunity to think every day about the “growing together” that has happened coincidentally from (say) 1995 until July 2007—and how we might work together with others to make it that much more (--food for thought: MySQL’s Community VP Kaj Arno blogged about the WAMP stack just after OSCON here).

There are reasons why my job can be challenging sometimes—but the slightest concern that Microsoft and open source don’t have opportunities to “grow together” by design faster and farther than they have (largely)** “by accident” over the last 10 plus years isn’t among them.

The “official” t-shirt of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft says “Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft: Reports of Snowballs Seen in Hell.” This year was another step forward to replacing that slogan with “Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft: Of Course.” Then I’ll get the answer I give back to people when I describe my job: not tough. Cool.

*I have internalized a July-to-June fiscal year calendar. I attribute this to the fact that my wife works in education, so summer forms an annual breakpoint for her, as well as to the fact I worked in Finance during a point in my life when I think I mistook a love of math for an affinity for pain.

**There’s more than enough material for, and reason to do, a separate post about some of the individual “pioneers” at Microsoft, without whom we would not have the resources we have in place today here at Microsoft.

OSBC and What It’s All About

Bryan Kirschner — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:28:00 GMT

OSBC made me think. There were some simple highlights (like introducing myself and being recognzied as “a Port 25 blogger”…my 1.5 minutes of fame). And certainly a lowlight was the concern many people expressed around whether Microsoft’s open source strategy has changed (no, it hasn’t, another reason why going to OSBC and having those conversations is important).

But what really started me thinking was the experience of being at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum held the day before. Simply and accurately described as an event specifically tailored to open source companies on “How to be profitable on the Microsoft platform,” it was attended by—I don’t have the exact count handy—folks from give or take 50 companies. They represented an incredibly diverse set of approaches to building a business (and cultivating a community) around open source. Fast forward later during OSBC to a long presentation Eben Moglen gave called “Copyleft Business Models: Why it’s Good Not to Be Your Competitor’s Free Lunch.”

These two things drew a broad connection: many different parties, each, in their own ways, “trying to balance being a good community citizen with getting paid” (appropriately enough, a quote from OSBC’s founder Matt Asay)—whether your pay is a financial transaction or non-financial contribution.

The companies who came to the Forum literally did get a free lunch—but there’s a more important point. Microsoft’s business strategy, overall, not specific to open source, is to be generative: with 750,000 partners (including ISVs, OEMs, systems integrators and consultants and so on), 96% of Microsoft’s revenue is indirect (meaning somebody among those 750,000 partners gets paid before Microsoft does).

Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain described the concept I am borrowing-- Zittrain describes “generative” this way (emphasis added):

The much-touted differences between free and proprietary PC Oss may not capture what is most important to the Internet’s future. Proprietary systems can remain “open,” as many do, by permitting unaffiliated third parties to write superseding programs and permitting PC owners to install these programs without requiring any gatekeeping by the OS provider. In this sense, debates about the future of our PC experience should focus less on such common battles as Linux versus Microsoft Windows, as both are “open” under this definition, and more on generative versus nongenerative: understanding which platforms will remain open to third-party innovation and which will not.

Sometimes this means what you can see (free as in open code - simple example WIX), sometimes what you can do (free as in beer SDKs). But this commitment (or, you could even say, dependency on) generativity means there is a risk of serving a competitor more than a literal free lunch: partner programs like the one offered at the Forum are set up so any ISV who meets the requirements can get business and technical assistance from Microsoft. Whether or not your business is built around software that competes with Microsoft products isn’t a criterion: from Oracle to SugarCRM ISVs that partner with Microsoft to build applications on Windows also compete with other Microsoft products. Nor is what type of development, business model, or licensing approach you have chosen. You really can’t have the benefits of being “generative” without accepting these conditions. Conversely, you obviously can be generative while competing to some degree with those same partners, whether with SQL Server or Dynamics.

This is really a point I wish I could go back to every person from an open-source based company I talked to about “Microsoft’s open source strategy” and re-reemphasize. From an ISV or partner you’re an “equal citizen” as a potential partner. That commitment (or dependency on) generativity is one that predates the popularity of open source in the broad market and remains a core component of Microsoft’s business success.

That’s “business as usual” as well.

(I would be remiss if I did not mention the Forum without thanking our speakers: Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk; Andrew Aitken from Olliance; John Roberts from Sugar CRM; and Marc Lind from Aras. In addition, the awesome VC Panel members were informative & thought provoking : Larry Augustin, Peter Sonsini, Philippe Cases, Nicolas Kardas, Kim Polese. Thanks all for a great day.)

What We Do Every Day

Bryan Kirschner — Sun, 20 May 2007 21:53:00 GMT

I just read Bill and Sam’s “Business as Usual” post. It made me think about the fact Port 25 was established in part to apply the idea that “transparency increases trust” to the work we do with the lab. So I’m sitting down to do a blog entry that’s a bit longer than usual, but will provide transparency about why “business as usual” for me.

I previously blogged about a project we were starting to look at usability, human-computer interaction (HCI) and design rationale in open source development. I want to share how that came about and what I work on every day, over a period of about 12 months.

Part 1: Andrew Ko at Carnegie-Mellon (hi, Andrew) and folks from Microsoft Research (you rock, HIP) have done fascinating work on “Information Needs in Collocated Development Teams:” (emphasis added):

[In] a two-month field study of software developers at Microsoft. We took a broad look, observing 17 groups across the corporation, focusing on three specific questions:
What information do software developers’ seek?
Where do developers find this information?
What inhibits the acquisition of such information?
In our observations, we found several needs. The most difficult to satisfy were design questions: for example, developers needed to know the intent behind code already written and code yet to be written.

Code itself was a poor conductor—let’s call it bad currency, for reasons that will become apparent later—for transmission of design knowledge. From the MSR paper:

code did not look like design; intent could rarely be inferred from code; programming languages only allowed a single, structural perspective on code, yet there were many other perspectives on which developers reasoned about code

As a result, “the knowledge was primarily stored in the minds of developers. Consequently, developers relied on each other for design knowledge.” A common way to do this was face-to-face contact. Another way to do this was through email.

Part 2: Flore Barcellini (hi, Flore) is a research at INRIA (France) who has done a fascinating analysis of “Thematic Coherence and Quotation Practices in OSS Design-Oriented Online Discussions.” The implication is that traversing threads may be a lot more “lossy” than one might think because the “tree” you can build following transmission of knowledge using quotes can differ (from the abstract):

We show how quotation practices can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To retrace the thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project, Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional analysis: a thread-based of the reply-to links between messages. The advantages of a quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined.

All but a few open source projects do not receive investment from vendors and do not have material revenue streams—for these “community-driven” projects, face-to-face contact would obviously be prohibitively expensive. So in reliance on code and email to transmit design knowledge, they would seem to be dependent on a lossy medium (code-as-currency) and a lossy mechanism (mail threads).

Part 3: David Nichols and Michael Twidale (hi, Michael) have done research identifying usability & HCI challenges in open source development, thoughtfully articulating some of the issues and possible ways to evolve distributed development.

Part 4: I was left with the impression this is a scenario that is really not good for community-driven OSS—and, by implication, for any resource-constrained distributed development process (something applicable to end-user developers collaborating online, and perhaps small ISVs, communities large in both number and importance to Microsoft’s business).

After reaching this conclusion I contacted the Codeplex team (meet the team) to talk about Microsoft taking a role in developing new functionality that might help this scenario. But first we needed to establish a research program to figure out whether this was a good path to go down, and what to do. That led to contact with Jack Carroll, Paula Bach, and the current project.

The first public session we held on this was a special interest group (Usability and Free / Libre / Open Source Software) at the recent CHI 2007 conference. Jack, Paula, and I moderated. I’ll let notes mostly from Paula sum up one aspect of a great discussion that gave me ideas I’d never thought of before:

About 40 people (1/3 to 1/ 2 of whom were involved in open source projects as contributors or researchers) attended the CHI Special Interest Group (SIG) on Usability and Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). The group raised many issues including the “code as currency” issue. In essence, if “code is the only currency’ can there be a “benevolent HCI dictator?” The currency problem arises when HCI people who don’t write code work on FLOSS projects, potentially preventing the common mechanism of the “benevolent dictator” who can arbitrate conflicts over coding from emerging in the design and HCI domain. An interesting benevolent HCI dictator experiment would be to have HCI people design and initiate an open source project (it could even be a rapid prototyping tool that could be used as currency between FLOSS HCI people and developers) and have developers work on the project with an HCI person as the leader. This would be interesting in terms of social dynamics and to see who prevails as the benevolent dictator: would the HCI person remain or would a developer move into the leadership position once code writing began?

This is what we do every day. I hope this provides a bit of a view over time into our daily work to be center of excellence for (1) understanding and (2) finding opportunity with open source: ways for Microsoft and open source to “grow together.”

(Speaking of growing together, if you were one of the companies invited to the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum before OSBC, I hope to see you there.)