Sam Ramji's new role is at the helm of the CodePlex Foundation.
Last week, Sam Ramji announced that he would be heading up the CodePlex Foundation, a new foundation intended to help proprietary software makers work in the brave new open source world. He will officially be leaving Microsoft to concentrate on the new foundation, named after the Microsoft site that hosts open source software for Microsoft products, CodePlex.com. Those projects are typically covered by Microsoft’s own open source licenses.
(By the way, Microsoft’s Bill Hilf says he’s looking to hire Ramji’s replacement, if you’ve got a hankering to take on the job of peacemaker.)
Ramji will end his official job at Microsoft at the end of September. However, it would take two blind eyes to see Ramji’s new role at the foundation as a truly separate job from his supposedly old role at Microsoft. Nearly the entire board of the CodePlex Foundation is made up of Microsoft employees or those with a vested interest in Microsoft’s open source efforts to date. The board does include Novell’s Miguel de Icaza, Ramji’s counterpart in Microsoft’s bid to make Novell’s Linux distribution the prevailing choice for the enterprise (over which Microsoft exerts quite a lot of influence, thanks to the cash it pays Novell). It probably isn’t completely fair to say that Icaza works for Microsoft, especially as he, like Ramji, has been so influential in getting Microsoft to realize that open source cannot be squashed and made to go away.
The only voice in the bunch that is a little independent from the Microsoft cool-aid is Mark Stone, former editor of the Journal of Linux Technology with ties to Linux/open-source loving (and often Microsoft-hating) organizations like SourceForge.net and Slashdot.org. But Stone cashed out some time ago. For the past year he’s been working for advertising agency The Mactus Group. His job is to market Windows Server.
If there’s one thing Microsoft doesn’t need, it is more people telling it what it wants to hear. To give you an idea of what Microsoft thinks of itself in relation to open source, here are Hilf’s own words from Microsoft’s Port25 blog , dedicated to open source happenings at the Redmond company:
“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.”
Here’s hoping that the CodePlex Foundation helps Microsoft to better hear what the world is saying about the company, its attitude towards open source and the future of its products and licensing. Not sure how much hope is needed because the CodePlex Foundation still smells an awful lot like Microsoft, no matter what the pay stub says.
Have you head what Sam Ramji had to say about the technology behind its Hyper-V Linux drivers? Check out the podcast with Mitchell Ashley.
Like this post? Check out these others.
- Virtualization Day: Virtual Machine Manager R2 RTM and Windows 7 XP Mode
- Windows 7: the grown-up Vista
- 5 Reasons To Use SharePoint Instead Of Emailing Excel Files
- Microsoft’s unified modeling platform, Oslo, faces another overhaul
- Sam Ramji: ‘Open source as an unstoppable phenomenon’
- The Move-Mailbox cmdlet, a Cross-Forest move, and a complex password
- Fine-Grained Password Policies, Part I
- September giveaways: Training and books
Plus, visit the Microsoft Subnet web site for more news, blogs, podcasts. Subscribe to all Microsoft Subnet bloggers. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.) Follow All Microsoft Subnet bloggers on Twitter
Follow Julie Bort on Twitter
