Microsoft Open Source Software Lab
06. Aug, 2006 
2 Comments
I met with Sam Ramji and Hank Janssen on Thursday, and we had a really fun conversation. When John Montgomery dropped me off at Building 17, I had no idea what I was in for (in fact John didn’t even know where Building 17 was!).
I knew that Sam’s team runs port 25 and that I was going to be interviewed, but beyond that I had no idea what else we were going to be talking about.
We talked a lot about reaching out to the Ruby community to help Ruby run better
on Windows. One of traditional problems that the open source community has when
dealing with Microsoft is a way to get access to internal resources that could
really help their project. One of the things that Sam’s group is trying to do is
establish a point of contact for developers working on open source projects to
gain access to expertise within the product groups to help make things happen.
Other obvious things that they can do is arrange for MVP awards and MSDN
subscriptions so that developers can gain access to the tools that they need to
get their jobs done.
We also spent some time talking about the problem of funding open source projects. There is definitely interest in funding targeted projects. While it’s too early to say what might happen, things are looking encouraging from this end.
Sam’s very smart and very high-energy. He gave me a tour of their lab – and it’s quite impressive. There are over 600 CPUs in his lab running every variant of *nix in existence. One of their goals is to make sure that Windows interoperates with all of these other platforms since large Microsoft customers almost always have a heterogeneous environment in their data centers. I met some other members of his team – and they’re all Linux guys. Not a single Windows guy in sight. It’s hard to believe that an organization like this exists within Microsoft, but it does, and I think that they’re doing some really good things to help champion the cause of open source within Microsoft. And that’s a good thing.
Maybe you could convince them to don masks and night-vision goggles and stealthily swap out the SQL Server team’s workstations with Linux boxes in the middle of the night.
Then maybe we’d see a native driver for *nix variants.
Yeah Sam Ramji is my hero at the moment.
Check out the latest port25 videocast where he bags the windows server core team. He’s doing the right thing though as Microsoft are obviously way behind with this product. GDI code still in a server ?? woah… Hank Janssen is also there and asks some pointy questions. Watch the server team squirm as he mentions Pearl. Iain makes some dumb jokes about Ubuntu and shows himself as the “Gallah” he is.
What a classic moment in computing history as we realise where Microsoft really is.