A Company That’s At Its Best When Freaking Out
But the road was a long one. In 2006, when Hilf hired Sam Ramji to take over Microsoft’s open source efforts, the company’s relationship to free software was still uneasy. A year later, Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez would make those apparent threats to the Linux community in the pages of Fortune. And when Ramji was hired to run open source at Microsoft, as he acknowledged years later, he was a little skeptical of the role — and a little scared.
There were ups, and there were downs. But Ramji’s meeting with Gates meant that the big changes would eventually happen. Not long after the meeting, Microsoft purchased a company called Powerset, a semantic search startup that was among the first companies to run a web service atop Hadoop. After a short hiatus, Microsoft allowed Powerset’s engineers to continue contributing code to the open source project. And for a while, the service continued to run on Hadoop, a means of crunching data across a sea of servers. At some point, the project abandoned the technology and moved the service to Microsoft software, and at least one of the main open source contributors left the company. But Powerset was at least a step in the right direction.
The following year, Ramji and his team prototyped an Amazon-like cloud service using nothing but open source software such as Zend and OpenNebula and Eucalyptus and OpenScale and Hadoop. “We were like the beta squadron,” Ramji remembers. “We were the attack squadron that would come test everybody. We would say: ‘You think you’re ahead? Let us show you what can be done with open source and two weeks of time and some smart Linux guys.”
According to Ramji, the project caused “deep discomfort” among the Microsoft braintrust. The company was already building Azure — then code-named Red Dog — using proprietary technologies. But for Ramji, deep discomfort is a good thing. “Microsoft is at its best when it’s freaking out,” he says. “That’s just it’s mentality. It’s a crisis-oriented company.”
Photo: Anindito Mukherjee/Corbis
The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software.
It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one. Seven years earlier, CEO Steve Ballmer had referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer,” and as recently as the previous summer, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez had told Fortune Magazine that Linux violated 235 of its patents, implying that it would soon demand royalties from any big business using the open source OS.
But at the same time, Microsoft realized how powerful the free software movement could be, and the company was exploring ways it could make nice with the ever-growing community of developers who used open source. For two years, Sam Ramji had served as head of open source strategy at Microsoft, and every three months, he met with Bill Gates and other execs to show off various open source technologies put together by a small team of Microsoft engineers.
But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.
Then Bill Gates stood up. Leer más “Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software”
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