Microsoft revising its attitude toward open source

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

The scenario of having open-source technology in a product is a first for Microsoft, which to date has had only proprietary technology in its software, said Robert Duffner, a senior director in Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group.

[ Microsoft's relationship with open source sometimes has been adversarial, as when it sought royalties from open-source companies. ]

Letting the acquired technology exist as it is, and letting the former Powerset employees continue to contribute code to Hadoop, represents a shift in mindset and strategy at the company to be more friendly toward open-source technology and realize that "innovation occurs across a wide variety of technologies," he said.

In addition to the Powerset code, Microsoft also for the first time in 2008 began contributing other code to open-source projects. In July, Microsoft began providing code to a PHP project called ADOdb. PHP is an open-source, freely available scripting language that developers widely use for Web development.

Duffner's group, under the direction of Microsoft Senior Director Sam Ramji, is driving this movement to not only accept open-source software as a technology with which Microsoft's software has to interoperate effectively, but also to see it as beneficial to both Microsoft's own business goals and the industry as a whole.

Having long positioned Windows and other proprietary software against open source as "us versus them," Microsoft is now trying to convince customers that the two technologies are not mutually exclusive and in fact can even be complementary at times.

Part of the duty of the Platform Strategy Group, formed a little over a year ago, is also to reverse the message of Microsoft's previous and infamous "Get the Facts" campaign, which aggressively tried to show customers the value proposition of deploying a Windows environment instead of Linux.

This new attitude also is a far cry from the Microsoft of only a year-and-a-half ago, when CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that Linux violates 235 patents Microsoft holds and said the company was considering seeking patent royalties from open-source distributors.

"It's been quite a while since we've heard very much saber-rattling [from Microsoft] on open source," said Jay Lyman, open-source analyst with The 451 Group. "It's indicative that there is true change going on over there."

However, even members of the Platform Strategy Group team admit that turning the entire Microsoft ship to accept this new attitude is no easy task, and it's a process that is still evolving across the company.