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

Sam Ramji is leaving Microsoft

billhilf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:47:00 GMT

It's been a while since I made an appearance on Port25. I felt it was important to provide some thoughts to the Port25 community on Sam Ramji's impending departure from Microsoft.

After many years helping to carry the open source software banner for the company, Sam is leaving Microsoft at the end of this month. You may have also heard that he has accepted the position of interim President of the CodePlex Foundation as well as a leadership position at a startup in California. (I'll let Sam and his new company share more details there.)

Sam joined my team three years ago to drive open source technical strategy. I have eagerly supported him as he passionately articulated a vision that Microsoft could coexist - and even thrive - in a heterogeneous IT world.

The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft's open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab' on campus - now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source - development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities - and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.

And, because we recognize the importance of having that strong internal advocate for open source, we are actively seeking someone to fill Sam's shoes at Microsoft.

We will not waver in our commitment to open source.

To my friend Sam: Best of luck to you and your family as you move on to your next great adventure, and THANK YOU for all of your efforts and passion.

See Change

billhilf — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

I have always been a fan of Tim O’Reilly’s phrase the “architecture of participation” to describe “systems designed for user contribution.” I liked it so much that at last year’s OSCON I made this concept the focal point of a discussion about how Microsoft’s products, programs, and partnerships have evolved over time to further this idea of ‘participatory systems’. (The slide I used at OSCON in Portland on July 26, 2007 is shown below).

(Presented July 26, 2007, OSON, Portland, Oregon)

I also like the metaphor of an ascending curve that reminds me of a strand of DNA. To me it is a visual representation of the fact that as the number of examples of architecting for participation have increased, the mindset and the behaviors involved in doing so have increasingly become a part of the company’s core culture and software design and development practices.

Today we are making a set of broad-reaching changes that go above and beyond any prior incremental changes in Microsoft’s DNA, that opens the door on new horizons for what architecting for participation might mean in the future. I want to talk about what this means—and why an open source interoperability initiative is an important part of it.

To understand why Microsoft is making broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices that will drive greater interoperability, it’s important to step back and look broadly at the way the emergence services oriented architectures, web services, and the growing importance of software plus services are transforming the world of technology.

Ray Ozzie described this sea-change well this morning:

…as we put more and more of our data into [technology] products, a new set of issues emerge. Whether it’s our health records, or our customer databases, we’ve progressively learned that our documents and data have a lifetime that potentially spans well beyond the lifetime of any specific application that might’ve been used to create it. For our records and our documents, issues such as preservation and portability have become vital concerns…Furthermore, as a byproduct of the internet’s ubiquity, virtually every system and product nowadays has become interconnected. From the mobile phone in your pocket, to your PC, to the heterogeneous systems within our enterprises, everything’s being interconnected – and connected to the Web as our “universal hub” for information sharing.

At MIX ’07 Ray put the sweeping implications of this overarching vision in the context of history, starting with what he called the “dawn of the PC revolution” in the 1980s. There is an important connection to bear in mind between some of the key inflection points in the technology landscape (like the availability of low cost PCs, and cheaper, faster connectivity) with changes in how aspects of openness and developer opportunity have evolved together. This resonates with me when reading today’s announcement (available here):

Historically, as lower cost hardware became widely available, documented APIs and free SDKs enabled developers to more quickly develop applications

As the number of applications exploded, and network connectivity became the norm, protocols enabled exchange of information between programs and over the wire.

And as many types of computing devices have proliferated and connectivity has become ubiquitous, data portability and standards have become key tools in the toolbox for a loosely-coupled, services-based world.

Long-term success for Microsoft depends on our ability to deliver a platform that is open, flexible, and provides customers and developers with choice. These choices include Microsoft and open source technologies working together, and this will continue to be the case in the future. By increasing the openness of high volume products across APIs, protocols, and standards, we can continue to provide the platform that offers developers and businesses, including those based on open-source technologies, the broadest range of opportunities to innovate, deliver value, and create seamless experiences for end users.

By building on and expanding existing facilities, events, and resources supporting interoperability, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development, the open source interoperability initiative will ensure this fundamental change in how we run our business and share information is broadly inclusive of open source technologies. As Microsoft takes this significant step forward into the interconnected world of the future, we aspire to doing so with members of the open source community by our side now and for the long haul.

Today is an important day, full of change. A wise inventor once said: “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress” and although I’m sure today’s news will bring critics aplenty, it is with time and commitment that this change will manifest. I’m extraordinarily proud to be part of Microsoft and to be part of this change.

FAQs, updates and news about the initiative will be posted on www.microsoft.com/opensource/interop .

hack value

billhilf — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to blog. It is usually on airplane time that I do any blogging, and since I haven’t flown in a while, I guess that will be my excuse. I’m on my way to Asia, currently over eastern Russian airspace, which means I’m hours from anywhere, so I’ve opened my ‘blog ideas’ folder and there is literally a books worth of stuff in here so I’m going to cherry pick a few ideas that I think are worth connecting.

Over the past year, I’ve had this ‘six degrees of separation’ phenomenon stuck in my head (I think this idea originated in Milgram’s ‘small world experiments’). You’ve all heard about the ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, and it’s always fun to mind bend weird connections with movie trivia buffs. There’s a web site that does this now with IMDB data called the Oracle of Bacon. It’s been on my mind because of personal ‘degree connections’ in my personal and professional life – meeting a stranger at a wedding in California who sings in the choir with my cousin in a small town in Massachusetts; interviewing a guy for a job at Microsoft who, by random coincidence, had worked on some of my (horrid) code ten years ago and remembered my name from a joke I left in the comments above one particularly nasty function. The latter example only ‘clicked’ for this interview candidate after I told them *the same joke* in the interview: “I actually read that joke before in some old crap C code.” I told him that was my code. He blinked. We had about 30 seconds of weird vibe right after that.

We hear it again and again: ‘It’s a small world.’ – But when a series of these connections happen, you start to wonder and do some probability math*. I’ll save my own experiments for later, but it did get me thinking on how communities grow, shrink, expand, contract and (sometimes inexplicably) persist. It’s the latter part that I’ve been focusing on a lot: what keeps the degrees connected and why are some communities stickier than others?

I think a simple answer is enough ‘matter’ to create a gravity that keeps activity in some type of steady orbit. If there’s enough matter and gravity, not only does the community start to find critical mass to persist, it also creates the environment for further creation - in other words, hacking and incrementing the original theme. This is fundamental to the Architecture of Participation, as well.

If you can suspend disbelief just enough to agree that this ‘six degrees’ concept does happen on certain occasions, and that it can be intentionally fostered (ala MySpace, Facebook, etc.) - then I think that also suggests that one can create an environment designed for powerful connections and collaboration. It’s certainly not the only way to innovate ideas, but it is a proven method realized through online connectivity to other people.

Here’s an example. I play World of Warcraft (WoW), which is a massively multiplayer online role playing game; a sizeable community of about 8.5 million players. To say that it’s a popular video game is an understatement. In fact, ‘world of warcraft’ outpaces ‘open source’ in raw search volume if that’s any indicator ;) (see below)

	open source
	world of warcraft

As it turns out, a bunch of other Microsoft employees play this game too. And we communicate about the game on an internal email alias. Some play on the same servers together, but most of the discussion is idea sharing, questions on items or skills, or general chat about the next patch. It’s a good list. Not surprisingly, a lot of these people are developers or testers or marketers or IT folks - so you get a range of experience outside of the game subjects, with a blending and morphing of ideas about the subject (the game) influenced and shaped by their domain of experience.

As you can imagine, I add little value here other than waxing about my mad skills as a warlock. But a few guys in the Visual Studio team wanted to use their product to make writing World of Warcraft Add-ons a lot easier (essentially, personally created UI extensions that can enhance the game experience). So they did and created a very cool Visual Studio shell for WoW. AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is a free tool designed to bring a Visual Studio-like experience to building World of Warcraft Addons. The tool itself is based on the Visual Studio Shell, and it’s now an open source project hosted on CodePlex – licensed under the Microsoft Public License. It will make writing Add-ons for WoW significantly easier (and likely more enjoyable). Some key features include:

Custom AddOn Project System – Including support for the Ace2 AddOn framework, TGA texture support, and MP3 files
Visual Designer – A visual drag-and-drop designer for designing AddOn Frames including a Toolbox, Property Window, Snap lines and more
XML Editor – For those who want to manually editing XML Frames, AddOn Studio includes the ability to map the Warcraft schema file
Lua Code Editor – The Lua code editor includes automatic event handling, IntelliSense for Lua and built-in support World of Warcraft functions, Code Snippets for common Lua functions, code colorization, code outlining, and more.
Auto Table of Contents – AddOn Studio will automatically build the Table of Contents (TOC file) for your AddOn based on the project files you include and the project properties settings (aka no manual XML).

Here’s a bit on news about it and below is what it looks like

How is this related? It shows how ‘matter’ (in this case a game) created gravity (a gaming community) inside another community (Microsoft employees). As it turned out, there were some WoW players who develop Add-ons who were part of this community*. Some of these folks were in the Visual Studio group and wanted to use Visual Studio to enhance the add-on development experience. So they did. Then they shared this on the email list, for ideas and suggestions (the bug bash happened this last weekend). This ‘chain lightning’ effect will now continue through the broader OSS community. And this is for a video game -- think about the same framework for healthcare, where a community of machine learning experts working on anti-spam related algorithms saw the connection to HIV vaccine research and similarly are creating ‘matter’ with a community (codeplex) in an effort to continue the innovation. Hacking anti-spam algorithms for vaccine research and sowing it in a broader community.

Mark Granovetter's observed that it is "the strength of weak ties" that holds together a social network – and if this is true (which has been demonstrated in network modeling), then the combination of structured, formal communities with ad-hoc or weakly connected communities can be amazingly powerful. We often focus on one or the other (particularly in technical community discussions) and not the intersection, which is where I feel the magic can be created.

It’s particularly interesting to view this beyond the individual, to do this with a team, an organization, or an entire company. Not simply obvious ‘partnerships’ mind you, these are fairly formulaic (important, but well understood), but the intersection of non-obvious connections. In my experience, this is the real magic of community and open source, and I can think of many projects that evolved this way. However, it’s the right community that makes the difference – we often get locked up on other things and forget that the right people and the right forum make all the difference.

>>Picking up this blog again and I am returning from Asia, I sit down to settle in for a long haul flight, turn to my left and meet the stranger seated next to me – turns out he knows my wife’s cousin’s husband, they were childhood friends. I blink. Then (as a test) I tell him the joke I mentioned above – thankfully he’d never heard it before.

Until next time, game on.

-Bill

* Kleinfield has an interesting paper that questions the ‘six degrees’/small world theories here. I love her term ‘intellectual furniture’

* Some of these folks have written more than 7 or 8 add-ons in their personal time, and there’s a load of other projects on Codeplex, from all sorts of people, which further mod, extend, and enhance playing WoW .

Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

MichaelF — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:33:00 GMT

Matt Asay, formerly of Novell, now VP of Business Development at Alfresco and co-founder of OSCON took some time out of his busy conference schedule to sit down with Bill for an interview. Matt, author of the AC/OS Blog (Matt Asay on OS) is a vocal supporter of Open Source Software and has some interesting insights on where commercial Open Source Software is headed.

In this interview Matt and Bill discuss Open Source business models, monetization opportunties for open business apps, and thoughts on the first days of OSCON.

Here is a link to a recent blog post by Matt that further explains some of the concepts he mentions around Open Source business models.

Big Thanks to Matt for taking the time to join us on Port 25!

Video: Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay at OSCON 2006

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Tim O'Reilly sits down with Bill Hilf at OSCON2006

MichaelF — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 03:09:00 GMT

While we were at OSCON this week we were fortunate enough to get some time to sit down with Tim O'Reilly. I dare say Tim, author of the O'Reilly Radar, needs no introduction but just in case: Tim is an Open Source Software advocate as well as the Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. He is also one half of the duo that founded OSCON along with Matt Asay. While this is his first time on Port 25, Tim also joined Bill Gates at Mix 06 for a conversation and Q&A session.

In this interview Bill and Tim discuss the redefinition of "Open Source", Web 2.0, and some other topics that arose in the first two days of the conference.

Stay tuned: Monday we will post another interview from the conference between Bill and Matt Asay wherein they discuss mixed environments and commercial OSS trends. If you haven't already, sign up for our RSS feed and we'll notify you when this interview is published.

Video: Tim O'Reilly sits down at OSCON 2006

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