At Oscon last week, Bill Hilf, Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, gave a keynote presentation on the Microsoft's Open Source initiatives. While the talk was only about 20 minutes, Hilf did a good job describing the context in which he operates at Microsoft and also some of the positive steps the company has taken in the last several years as they have put their toes in open source waters. Hilf, a At Oscon last week, Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s General Manager of Platform Strategy, gave a keynote presentation on the Microsoft’s Open Source initiatives. While the talk was only about 20 minutes, Hilf did a good job describing the context in which he operates at Microsoft and also some of the positive steps the company has taken in the last several years as they have put their toes in open source waters. Hilf, a former developer, has had a long history in the open source world having worked at IBM, CNet, eToys over the years. Clearly this was not his first visit to Oscon and hopefully also not his last.Hilf characterized Microsoft as going through three phases of “architecting for participation” with an Experimental period of 2001-2002, a Learning period from 2003-2006 and now an Architecting period. I’m not sure that these designations are meaningful since there will be ongoing need for experimentation and learning, but the conclusion that Microsoft is now ready to work more closely with open source is significant. I believe this has come about at the behest of customers who want Microsoft’s software to play well with open source. And presumably Microsoft has observed the rapid adoption of the LAMP stack among programmers and is trying to figure out how to make sure Windows is not locked out of the growth in running PHP and MySQL based applications. Some of Microsoft’s early efforts, including the Windows Installer Toolkit (which we use at MySQL), their support of JBoss, the optimization of PHP for Windows, cooperation on integrating MySQL with Visual Studio, and collaboration with XenSource and SugarCRM are starting to bear fruit for Microsoft in terms of more sales of Windows servers as a deployment platform. Oracle, IBM, HP and Sun figured this out a long time ago and have been reaping the rewards for several years. I believe customers will benefit greatly from having more such cooperation between open source and proprietary software. But I hope that the cooperation is more along the technical lines of what Hilf presented on his slides and less about, ah, patent licenses. Hilf also made two interesting announcements. First of all, Microsoft launched an open source web site www.microsoft.com/opensource and secondly they are going to submit their licenses to the OSI for approval. While these are not major items, they are small steps in the right direction. That is, presuming that Microsoft makes its licenses less restrictive than they are currently.You can view the video of the presentation, including Hilf’s personal comments on patents, online at the bottom of the Oscon presentations page. For some reason Microsoft’s PR firm (Waggener Edstrom) is reluctant to share the actual slides. I’m not sure why that is since there were only five slides and two were titles and one was a screenshot. Presumably the remaining two slides which had actual content were not confidential since they were shown to an audience of over a thousand people. I would think they should be more proud of what they’ve accomplished in open source… Open Source