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July 26, 2007
Open Source at Microsoft
Third morning keynote on Thursday at OSCON 2007 is Bill Hilf from Microsoft talking about Open Source at Microsoft.
[Nate gives a good introduction saying that we might not agree with everything we hear, but this is about learning and seeing new things.]
I think Bill is brave for being here. He says he's been called almost anything, and builds some credibility with the audience by talking about programming. He admits to being a C and Perl programmer from the early days.
[Side note: Bill Gates has a philosophy of called software darwinism that is rampant at Microsoft, it is a fight for the best software to survive.]
Bill (Hilf) talks about all of the participation from Microsoft in various communities. When Bill first started at Microsoft he had a senior engineer ask if it was OK to look at a Linux website.
At one point they had PHP folks up to meet with Windows folks and by the middle of the meeting it was clear that PHP on Windows was really, really bad. The good news was that in a day they had increased performance by 200%, the bad news was they started to wonder what else really stinks on Windows.
Windows is working with the OSI right now to get their shared source license reviewed.
Posted by mike at July 26, 2007 9:22 AM