According to Bill Hilf, the company’s general manager of platform strategy who made the license announcement, it has not been an easy journey. I get a lot of feedback from many people that we often take two steps forward and three steps back, and I’ll tell you some things we do are mistakes, he told the audience at the OSCON event.
One of the things Hilf would count as a mistake is the way the company announced in May via an interview with Fortune magazine that it believed the Linux operating system and other open source software projects between them violate 235 of its patents.
When we are trying to grow an open source ecosystem related to Microsoft and all of a sudden you get a headline in a magazine that reads ‘Microsoft versus the free world’, that doesn’t help, said Hilf.
The report prompted accusations that Microsoft was attempting to run a protection racket as it attempted to enter into patent licensing deals with open source software vendors, while declining to discuss openly the details of its claims.
That article hit, and the way that article landed and the message that it brought out was extremely aggressive, said Hilf. It made us look like a draconian… racketeering… predator. It did, he said, admitting to the last adjective, which was suggested by Nat Torkington, OSCON chair.
While the tone of the article did not help, Hilf also admitted that Microsoft had made an error of judgment. We made mistakes in the way we tried to communicate what we were doing, and if I look back at things I would change, that’s probably one of them, that’s probably a big one, he admitted.
Hilf insisted that the company had learnt from the experience, however. We learnt from that and actually we made some significant changes, he said. We have to learn from our mistakes as well. Our greatest learning comes from those mistakes actually, and a lot of change happens from those mistakes.
Having joined Microsoft in January 2004 to help set up its Linux and open source technology group, Hilf has steered the company towards change via partnerships with open source vendors such as SugarCRM and Red Hat’s JBoss.
While it is easy to doubt Microsoft’s intentions toward open source software given its patent claims and other announcements, Hilf insisted that the company is continuing to steer in the right direction.
If you think about the breadth of products that we make, and really where we’re going in the future with a lot of our software and services, the opportunity for Microsoft in open source, I think, is tremendous, he said. Although we have made some slippage, we have made some progress at various points in the year. I think we’re on the right path to get there. The challenge we’ve had though is we’ve been a bit schizophrenic at times.
Hilf insisted that the company does not have a split personality, although admitted that it does take time for attitudes within the company to change. The challenge is we learn and change based on experiences, he said. There’s not some switch that Bill Gates has in the basement that flips the whole company left or right, it doesn’t work like that.
As well as forging partnerships with open source vendors, Hilf has also been instrumental in Microsoft releasing code under open source licenses and its own shared source licenses. As previously reported, the submission of the latter to the Open Source Initiative for approval is an indication that the company is now prepared to play by the established open source rules.
One of the main questions I’ve heard in the last three years I’ve been doing this is ‘why don’t you have these as part of an OSI-approved license’, said Hilf. And so I’m very happy to say today we are. Today we are submitting them; we are working with the OSI right now to get them in to the approval process. It’s an important step for us.
Whether Microsoft has changed or not is a matter of perception, but Hilf maintained that the company should be judged by its actions, rather than its words, once again insisting that the Fortune article relating to patent claims does not represent the company.
What that article represents is not the path that we are on. Now people can believe it or not, what I focus on is spending less time trying to explain it and more time inside Redmond trying to do things, he said.
