Views and understanding of every topic evolve over time, one of the more “interesting” elements of working for a company as large as Microsoft is that it can take a long time for change to be recognized in the wider marketplace. While internally it is often possible to point to the exact moment when a decision is made it is frequently impossible to highlight the moment in time when the industry accepted that decision as part of the way that the company works.
One example of this is probably our relationship with the open source community. On a regular basis I end up in conversations where there is a general assumption that open source and Microsoft are head to head competitors who cannot face being in the same room together, or partnering to solve customer and industry problems.
If you look back seven or eight years that was probably a very true statement, today however it is a very different story.
In reality most open source development is good for Microsoft, and there are a number of examples of where we are fully supportive of this work. Open source development on the Windows platform brings a number of benefits to our customers, it revolves around developers who are using tools to support the Microsoft platform and in turn build a wider array of application and solution choices for everybody involved.
Open source in itself is not competitive to Microsoft, where there is a clear competitive environment is between products such as Microsoft Windows and Linux or Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.
This is especially important when looking at government technology and procurement policy. Today in Asia I seem to encounter two flavours of policy being considered in this area. The first flavour involves governments who are looking at policy to mandate the use of Linux as an operating system within agencies, the second often involves governments putting a pervasive mandate for the use of open source software across all levels of the software stack.
In my opinion neither of these options serve government employees, service providers, citizens or businesses well. Delivery of any computing system in today’s world will involve the selection of best of breed software across the board. This is important due to the differing use cases that platforms are designed against and wide array of choices made by software users both at home and abroad that governments need to interact with.
Microsoft’s commitment to working with the open source community is somewhat diverse, and is designed to deliver an environment where technology interoperability issues are resolved between vendors rather than leaving them for customers to resolve, as the industry as a whole seems to have done in previous years.
Some examples;
- Previous posts have discussed the “Windows Principles” which lay down a very high level framework that is designed to offer unprecedented levels of predictability for any vendor wanting to partner with Microsoft, or build applications on the Windows platform.
- “Interoperability by Design”. In 2003 Bill Gates wrote a public memo with this title, the goal was (and remains) to push the product groups to think hard about interoperability as they go though internal design processes, we’re starting to see the fruits of this work in products such as Office 2007, Windows Vista and the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008.
- Building community. There are a few great examples here, starting with the Interoperability Executive Council where we bring some of the top CIOs in the world to Microsoft’s corporate headquarters about twice a year to discuss the issues that they have with interoperability, some of these CIOs are customers that do a lot of work with Microsoft and some are quite the opposite. Concrete solutions come out of these meetings and again there are examples of product design changes that have resulted from these discussions.
- The second example of building community are the relationships that we’re building with companies like Novell, Linspire, Xandros etc. These partnerships involve the sharing of API information, intellectual property and sometimes code to ensure that interoperability issues get resolved in products before they ship.
- Finally, having worked for the company for almost a decade and a half now I have watched a significant shift in the way that Microsoft thinks about the world of standards. In the mid 90s most standards activity was the responsibility of individual program managers and product groups. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it really did not. Today we have a core team committed to our activity in the standards world, looking both at how we apply the expertise that we have in the existing standards community along with how we standardize some of our own technologies.
Beyond interoperability between open source and Microsoft platforms there are a number of evolving activities that look at how Microsoft builds a closer working relationship and deeper direct involvement in the open source community.
The Solutions Sharing Network (SSN) was probably one of the first examples of this, and directly relates to sharing open source applications between government customers. This was a project that started with a couple of cities in Europe in early 2002, then was officially released for general use in November of the following year. The goal at the time was to provide a safe and secure environment where customers could build communities of practice to share both business practice and solution code. Today the network is supported by a central site called SolShare, and a network of private sites that are in use by many governments around the world.
CodePlex is a more generic project designed to encourage the sharing of projects between developers, today there are almost two thousand live projects running on this shared environment, including many from Asia, a couple of which I have highlighted in previous posts.
A further piece of the jigsaw involves the work that Bill Hilf”s team have been leading in Redmond, running an interoperability lab where there is a phenomenal level of testing and learning about how Windows works alongside traditionally competitive offerings from the open source community and other vendors.
Finally, out of almost 150,000 projects on SourceForge, one of the premier open source project sites, over 52% are multi-platform and include binaries that will run on the Microsoft Windows platform. From time to time Microsoft has been directly involved with creating projects of our own on SourceForge, most recently including the translator project that is looking at conversion of documents between Open XML and ODF.
So, what is the point I am making here? It is a simple one. Solutions to any technology or technology policy issues will often involve diverse choices from a variety of vendors, and when formulating government technology or procurement policy it is important that every door is left open to allow agencies to choose the best of breed technology to build their solution and interact with their constituents.
The industry as a whole has made some great strides over the last decade to tackle complex interoperability issues, and the open source community is obviously a key component of this. An open source component of a national technology policy can bring some real value, but only alongside all of the other technology that is available in the market.
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