OSCON06: What's Microsoft Doing with Open Source?

Danese Cooper interviewed Bill Hilf (general manager of platform strategy, microsoft ) on "What's Microsoft Doing with Open Source." Bill started by pointing out that microsoft does support the open source community via conferences like OSCON and Port25. Over the past three to four years microsoft has gone from fearing open source (linux) to becoming a lot smarter about it. To learn from open source microsoft has to engage it and get involved. Bill's team is composed of about 20-30 in Redmond and another 100 people worldwide, compared to about 60,000 total at microsoft. The goal is to try to influence by spending about 75% of their time with the production teams. Yet microsoft still really needs a governance model.

Cooper: Now that Martin Taylor left is that helping you in your job?
Hilf: He did help centralize the company on the same page.

Cooper: But he did fund a lot of disinformation about open source?
Hilf: We never had a disinformation campaign. The message format needed to be better (the audience laughed a lot at that answer).

Danese and Bill discussed the plug-ins being developed to store microsoft office documents in an openXML format. Cooper commented that microsoft is still not providing enough information to the project for the plug-ins to accurately convert documents between openXML and the ODE format. Bill really was not up-to-date on how well the plug-ins are working.

Cooper: What is the hardest part of your job?
Hilf: Dealing with the closed mindedness on both sides, (at microsoft and in the open source community).

Cooper: Do you thing the European Union did a better job of teaching microsoft to play fair then DOJ?
Hilf: The DOJ ruling had quite an effect on microsoft.

Some questions were taken from the audience near the end. Kartik Subbarao asked how can microsoft be trusted (in the open source community) and Bill gave the best answer possible "By consistent action over time going in the right direction."

Overall Bill Hilf did a "great" job of answering the questions, but I was kind of surprised he wasn't more knowledgeable about the state of the openXML project.

Photo courtesy of James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media.