Open source roundtable: Sam Ramji

Microsoft's senior director of platform technology holds out hope that open source developers will reap deserved rewards

 

A second dimension is that there’s a challenge to the community nature of some projects that have been developed in the commons. When these are commercialized, there is typically an uneven return of wealth from the commercializer to the original developers. This is currently causing some strains between the developers and the business people, but I think ultimately the industry will figure out some standards for fairness and generally follow them.

IW: What are the next steps needed for open source as a software production methodology to reach the next level?

Ramji: As a production methodology, open source development reduces to distributed collaborative software development with an implicit social model (power users, community developers, committers, leads, maintainers). This is largely independent of the scale of the project. Past models that have reached maturity have generally “arrived” when they are richly supported by tools (for example, object orientation and UML). We are already seeing team development tools on the market that are built around these distributed collaboration models, and include wikis, forums, and the typical features seen in open source forges.

IW: There has been a fair amount of controversy, competition, and dissent within the various open source communities. Does this lack of agreement damage the long-term goals of open source, or would you like to see more of this?

Ramji: We’ve made so much progress in terms of opening the channels of dialogue between the OS community, partners, vendors, and customers. Dissonance won’t help anyone progress and innovate. One of the biggest misconceptions that we continue to battle is that we compete with open source. Microsoft does not compete with open source. We have over 70,000 commercial software companies as Microsoft partners, and we compete with a relatively small number of commercial organizations. For example, when we did the deal with JBoss, we found that half of their users were running on Windows. After the deal, we sold more Windows server licenses. So if you want to look at this from a competitive standpoint, our work with JBoss essentially helped our Windows server business grow.

As for the overall conversations in the various communities -- I think we progress as an industry and as a species though honest conversations and a process of “creative destruction.” Dissent coupled with rational discourse leads us to new ideas and solutions. Choice and independent thinking are hallmarks of the most successful open source projects, and I can’t see how you would remove this characteristic and still see the communities grow and evolve.

Roundtable home page: The state of open source

Other roundtable participants
• Matt Asay
Vice president of business development, Alfresco
• Andy Astor
CEO of EnterpriseDB
• Chris DiBona
Open source programs manager, Google
• Bruce Perens
Creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative
• Eric S. Raymond
Programmer, author, and open source software advocate
• Dave Rosenberg
CEO and co-founder, Mulesource
• Javier Soltero
CEO, Hyperic
• Mark Spencer
Founder and CTO, Digium
• Robert Sutor
Vice president of open source and standards, IBM
• Zack Urlocker
Vice president of products, MySQL

Jason Snyder is senior editor at InfoWorld.