A Microsoft senior director says that Microsoft’s heart is deep inside Open Source. Cue jokes about whether Microsoft has a heart in the first place.

This lovely bit of news comes from, among other sites, The Register.  Microsoft platform strategy Sam Ramji spoke about Microsoft’s connection with Open Source in a podcast recorded at the at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

"I feel like we’ve got a beating heart that is the core of what we are going to be doing for the next couple of years," Ramji said. Among other things, Microsoft has recruited open source personnel and placed them within its own Open Source Software Lab. In the long term, Microsoft will have the experience and commitment to support Linux as well as other open source applications. Noted recruits into the Microsoft fold include the former IBM Linux kernel engineering manager and Linux Foundation and Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) engineering director Tom Hanrahan.

Ramji also made separate comments to The Register at OSCON. He said that he has been telling Microsoft’s sales and marketing people how the software company can work with open source. The argument? That open source applications can be made to run well on “infrastructure software” like Windows and SQL Server, with some interoperability with Linux. This allows room for Microsoft to still make money. "We need to engage with Windows administrators – this stuff runs on Windows," Ramji said.

In other words, the beating heart of Microsoft is in realizing that open source can make it money after all. This is quite a turnaround from days when Microsoft would hand out thick color brochures about how Linux and open source were bad for business, including detailed case studies of failed open source projects.

As far as the sincerity of these measures go, there will be sceptics. But if perhaps Microsoft realizes that it’s just not worth fighting the Open Source wave, we’ll see more openness in its own processes.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 10:33 pm under Linux, Microsoft.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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