The company has hired Tom Hanrahan, who was previously director of engineering at the Linux Foundation where he managed the former Open Source Development Lab’s engineering and testing following its merger with the Free Standards Group.
Hanrahan is joining a team that already includes Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft’s open source technology lab, and Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy, in advancing Microsoft attitude to, and interoperability with, open source software.
Our View
It is easy to be skeptical about Microsoft’s intentions with regard to open source, but appointments such as this suggest that the company is serious about trying to interact with the open source community on its level, with developers and engineers, rather than marketers.
However, we could not help noticing that it is over seven months since Microsoft and Novell announced their technical and business collaboration, and Microsoft has only just hired someone to oversee their interoperability lab. For its part, Novell appointed Susan Heytsee to oversee both the business and technical cooperation last December.
