Microsoft's open source strategist is leaving

IT MAY COME AS A SURPRISE to learn that Microsoft has any kind of open sauce software strategy aside from stomping on any bunch of commie hippies daring to offer free alternatives to its market-monopolising software, but it seems that one respected member of the Redmond braintrust has been working tirelessly for the last three years in an effort to make the software behemoth play nice with the other slightly grubby children in the playground.

Sam Ramji, who is currently the vocal spokesvole for all things open sourcery at Microsoft, is moving on to pastures new at the end of this month and he leaves behind an interesting legacy. More importantly his departure will leave a gap that might prove difficult to fill.

Sam's official brief was to create a strategy that enabled Micrososft to 'co-exist and thrive in a heterogeneous IT world' but his legacy goes way beyond that. The company originally had a single department that dealt with free open source (FOSS) software but, according to one Microsoft insider, it is now an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company.

Ramji's job was never going to be easy. The biggest software company on the planet had a nasty reputation for making life difficult for any upstart that tried to muscle in on its turf. There was never any real evidence that Microsoft would use strong-arm tactics to undermine fledgling companies, but when you have unlimited access to some of the world's most tenacious and ruthless lawyers and a bottomless pit of cash to throw at patent disputes, someone is gonna cry 'bully' sooner or later.

The very fact that, in the beginning, open sauce software was developed by unlinked and untraceable, loosely-bonded groups of underground-dwelling geeks is probably the only reason many of them have survived until today. Open Source development became something akin to guerilla warfare with major players disappearing quicker than angry software suppliers could issue writs.

But the open sauce train gathered so much steam in the late nineties and early noughties that many large software companies adopted an 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' policy. These policies have lead to many unlikely partnerships such as IBM's support for Linux development and that which exists between the developers of Open Office and Sun Microsystems.

Ramji was also aware of the turning tide: "I was certain that open source was an industry wave that Microsoft would not be able to ignore," he said in his blog, "and that it was getting closer to an inflection point. I had spent over a year at the company in the Silicon Valley-based venture capital team and I could see that the company's approach to disruptive market dynamics was starting to change."

This all may seem like a simple case of delusional utopian anarchists fighting a battle against cynical corporate breadheads, but the IT world moves on. The hippies are all wearing shoes and going to board meetings, and the execs are all driving hemp-powered hybrid cars and drinking wheatgrass juice smoothies. Convergence, as with all things IT it seems, is the order of the day.

Interoperability, on the other hand, is the order of tomorrow. Major software providers know that open source is here to stay and that anyone who ignores the growing tide of free software is doomed to fail.

Sam Ramji was well aware of this and tried to build bridges between Redmond and the rest of the world. Even his Linkedin profile is an open invite to the great unwashed to join the Microsoft party. "Open Source Software projects and ISVs should contact me to initiate a relationship with Microsoft," it reads. "I am focused on narrowing the gap between the Open Source community and Microsoft through research, collaboration, interoperability, and community engagement."

To most ears Ramji's open arms approach to open sauce seemed altruistic, but there are many who still saw Microsoft's tactics as underhanded. In 2006 the company sent jaws a-dropping when it announced that it had signed an agreement with Novell to make Windows more compatible with Novell's SuSE Linux. The deal would make incompatibilities with virtualisation, Web services and those between Microsoft Office and Open Office a thing of the past. At least that was how it appeared on the surface.

Open sauce separatists insisted, however, that Microsoft was attempting to undermine the flow of free software by getting a foot in the door, a position from which it could work to co-opt the co-op, as it were.

The relationship between Big Software and the freebooting community of open sauce developers will always be an uneasy alliance, but Sam Ramji's efforts to make Microsoft seem just a bit more cuddly actually seem to have made quite a difference.

He's heading back to California at the end of the month to work with a new cloud computing startup and spend some quality time with his family. We wish him well. µ