Speaker: Bill Hilf
billhilf@microsoft.com


Wants to make sure their position with OS software is well understood. Wants us to understand their motivation.

He is trying to make sure the relative positions are understood and does not care about the feelings or internal politics.

Timeline:
2004
Rotor
FlexWiki
MS Hires IronPython developer Jim Hugunin
Wix

2005
Open Source Lab founded

2006
Mentioned that they started doing activities with companies. SugarCRM, JBoss were key logos.
Bill Stapleton - product manager IIS

2007
SharePoint Community Kit
Sponsoring many things open source

One of their key ideas is that of Sockets. A socket is something that can be plugged into their platform and may grow over time. They need to keep adding more streams of functionality that will entice users to their platforms.

24 points of coopitition
They are getting better at working with competitors to have better interactions. The more that a product can be used with their base platforms, the better off they are, even if that product may compete with one of their products. Mentioned competitors:
not new (sun apple SAP)
new: IBM, JBoss, SugarCRM

He had one very interesting slide with 6 key lessons:

  • patience is key
  • Learn what you can handle
  • find people smarter than you. Invest in friends and skilled allies.
  • Identify goals and suitable targets
  • The right place at the right time
  • Use all resources.

These are feeling like a pretty powerful list at this point. They also feel a little too powerful perhaps? He then mentioned the source of the list: From the official strategy guide world of warcraft.

He spent a little time talking about why they founded CodePlex instead of using SourceForge. They are concerned about restricting the licenses that developers are allowed to release software under. They want the model to be more open. They also like a community where they are able to release and manage internal projects freely under any license they choose.

When evaluating a license, he suggested looking at how it handles Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents.

There was some definite discussion about why the ODF is different than OpenXML. The main gist that I picked up is that the Office framework makes a lot of assumptions about the file format and leverages their internal file format while working with the document. This would seem to be relatively easy to work around with a proxy that automatically translates on loads and saves (much like editing an Excel document that is saved as a .CSV). Any formatting differences would be lost by this mechanism.