Matusow revealed the move in his corporate blog, adding that Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s director of platform technology strategy, and head of the company’s Linux and Open Source Software Lab will take up responsibility for the shared source business.
Microsoft’s shared source initiative was launched in May 2001 as a way to offer customers access to its code in response to the growth of the open source software model. While the company initially maintained an adversarial attitude toward open source, Matusow led a softening of that attitude.
With Matusow at the shared source helm, Microsoft has even released code under open source licenses, including the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolkit, the Windows Template Library (WTL), and its C Sharp-based FlexWiki, for creating web sites using ASP.NET.
Matusow was also instrumental in the company consolidating the number of licenses through which it will release software code and introducing two new licenses that have been deemed compatible with the free software definition.
It remains to be seen how Hilf will manage the ongoing evolution of the shared source initiative, but with more than 10-years experience with open source software, the former senior director of engineering for eToys and member of IBM’s Linux technical strategic team has a good understanding of the open source development model.
At the time Microsoft was trying to understand open source from the outside looking in, Hilf recently told ComputerWire of his appointment in January 2004. To understand the open source phenomenon they needed a native, someone who understood not just the software, but how the process works.
I was hired with the intent of doing that, he added. The first role was to establish a center of competency for open source within Microsoft. That Linux and Open Source Software Lab has been at the center of Microsoft’s changing attitude to open source, and was the catalyst for Microsoft’s recent interoperability agreement with JBoss Inc.
The Lab’s work on interoperability testing has also seen it submit patches to a number of open source software projects, Hilf said. A recent example occurred with the Samba file and print services project that provides interoperability between Unix and Linux servers and Windows clients.
I’m in fairly active conversation with them, said Hilf of Samba leaders Andrew Tridgell and Jeremy Allison. I’m sort of a bridge to a lot of the main open source competitors. Recently, the Microsoft Linux Lab team noticed via postings on the Samba mailing list problems some people were having with Samba working with Microsoft compiled code.
We helped them identify a problem that was bothering a lot of people, said Hilf, adding that when the company sees the opportunity to sort out a problem that affects one of its customers it will step in even if it means potentially improving an open source alternative. If it’s breaking a customer that’s using Microsoft software I’m going to care a lot about it.
Perhaps the biggest impact the Linux Lab has had, according to Hilf, has been to change the thinking inside Microsoft, increasing the understanding of the importance of interoperability with open source technologies, and the open source movement in general.
I work with almost every product group to a certain degree, he said. I’ll sit down with the product teams and have conversations about tools and products, particularly with an emphasis on how the community-side works, the characteristics of open source development and understanding how the open source model works.
Hilf added that this extension of understanding of the open source model throughout Microsoft represents the ultimate long-term strategy for the Linux and Open Source Software Lab, to the extent that it may ultimately replace the need for the Linux Lab to exist in its current centralized form.
Our goal is not to be hundreds of people but to teach a lot of people how to fish, he said. The ultimate goal, although it may not actually happen, is to that the lab is factored in to the product groups.
