Microsoft hired Bill Hilf, an open source industry veteran, to help chart its strategy in the choppy open source waters. Hilf, director for Microsoft’s platform technology strategy organization, led a technical session at LinuxWorld – a first for Microsoft – that focused on managing Linux in a mixed environment. Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears sat down with Hilf to hear about Microsoft’s Linux/open source plans. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Did you have an internal conflict about going to work for Microsoft, considered by many in the open source community to be the evil empire?
Sure. But a lot of people look at Microsoft from a 10,000-foot view and see a company that makes a ton of money and sells proprietary software. Microsoft is really a technical company, full of technologists and led by technologists. As a technologist, it is to me a very interesting place to work. I love IBM. It’s a great company. But it’s a sales company, run by salespeople. And as someone who has a raw instinct for technology, Microsoft was a perfect place for me.
How have your friends in the open source community responded to your move to Microsoft?
I just did an interview with Slashdot. I gave my e-mail address and said if you’re having problems, write to me. I’ve already gotten about 1,200 e-mails and I will answer every one. About 99% of the e-mails have been positive, saying thanks for being open and honest. Thank you for just having a dialogue. People were saying that it was refreshing to have someone who is from the open source community at Microsoft who understands open source issues and how to communicate with the community. I spend time with a lot of people in the open source development community all the time. I talk to a lot of the leaders in the open source community on an engineering level about what we can do to work better together. You’d be amazed at how many of those people have been receptive to the point of saying, “You know what, thank God that I have someone I can actually contact, because I’ve been working in this space for years, and I didn’t know anyone in that company called Microsoft.”
What about in Redmond? How has the reception been there?
That was really my big concern, more than about how the open source community would respond. Many of the people in that community are good friends. My bigger concern was that I would just be the loneliest guy in Redmond. But one of the biggest surprises to me was how many people, particularly engineers at Microsoft, really understand open source and the open source phenomenon.
Could you sketch out the two or three biggest areas where you see open source as a threat to Microsoft and how Microsoft is responding to that threat?
I can honestly say I spend just as much time thinking competitively as I do opportunistically, as I do from an interoperability perspective. I try really hard to make sure it isn’t just about competition. We will compete with products from the open source space, as well as products from the commercial space, just as we always have. But there is plenty of opportunity for us, plenty of ways we can interoperate with these technologies. If you ask me to total up all the things I’ve seen in the past dozen years that are radical innovations, they don’t come from open source. What open source is is a great engine of commoditization. So when we look at competitive threats, people commoditizing our technology that we make money from, sure, that’s a competitive threat just like it is for everybody.
