Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hi Bryan, great to have you here for the interview. Thank you for joining me.

Bryan Kirschner: Thank you! Good to be here.

Sandro Groganz: So tell us about your role at Microsoft. What are you doing?

Bryan Kirschner: I am Director of Open Source Strategy, and there are really two sides to that coin. One is working with groups inside Microsoft to ensure that they are looking at open source in view of their business and in each of their customers’ and making thoughtful decisions, and the second is talking to people, working with people, outside of Microsoft to communicate what we are doing, how we’re thinking about it, and hopefully to engage them in a dialogue that makes us a little smarter.

Sandro Groganz: At Microsoft, you built up a team that dedicatedly deals with open source. Who are some great people in your team and what are they doing?

Bryan Kirschner: The team is somewhat unusual in that we have technologists and engineers and people in other disciplines, like strategy, working together on one team. Sam Ramji runs the strategy organisation. Tom Hanrahan runs our Open Technologies Lab. He actually came to Microsoft from the Linux Foundation, formerly the Open Source Development Labs, and has a fantastic team working in Labs in Redmond and a joint technology lab with Novell in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We also have folks like Peter Galli, you might recognise his name, a very long-time technology reporter who actually now runs Port25, the web site of the open source community at Microsoft and blog site. He’s doing great work building more community dialogue. And then we have people around the world. We have strategy leads in many, many countries, including Germany, looking at engagement with their local open source communities and starting great projects like the Interoperability Lab in Germany, in Munich.

Sandro Groganz: You recently started to release open source software yourself. So how do you deal with marketing these open source projects?

Bryan Kirschner: I think there’s two aspects to it. One is, our team specifically looks at things that we are doing or things that are happening across the company, that are really important to communicating how Microsoft is thinking about open source as a company, or engaging in new and different ways. So becoming a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Foundation, for example, is something that I think indicates a new level of engagement, and we really wanted to make sure that people are aware of that, broadly.

But a lot what goes on is really product group specific. So, an individual product group or developer division, for example, is really looking at the needs of their customers, the health of their business, and what’s going on in the market, and making decisions about working with open source technologies or communities on their own. They communicate that in the normal way they communicate anything.

One thing to remember is that, in some respects, it’s probably true that the whole of Microsoft in open source is greater than the sum of the parts that you are likely to see. And if you start to dig into a particular area you’ll find that a product group like System Center is working with an open source project and community called Open Pegasus, which is an important part of their product strategy. But it’s not necessarily something that there is some sort of dedicated marketing campaign around, that is intended to reach everyone in  the world, as opposed to people who actually use the System Center product as IT administrators.

As an open source strategist at Microsoft, I often wind up talking to customers, not just at events, but on campus who come for briefings and so on, and I’ve really seen this trend where Microsoft customers, heavy users of Microsoft technologies, people who have endorsed the value proposition of Windows Server and Exchange, are actually asking their account teams, asking Microsoft, “I use these PHP applications, for example. I would really like to run them on Windows Server, I would really like to use Active Directory with these applications.” So it’s really a noticeable trend where open source is clearly a part of the data centre in the IT environment. There are Microsoft technologies that are clearly a part of this.

They’re really looking to Microsoft or others to say how are those things better together. And their starting point, where they’re at as customers, is “Look, I’ve made informed choices - I like this technology, it’s from Microsoft, I like this technology, it’s open source. Don’t second-guess my choices, help me make them work better together.” There’s an opportunity there which I encourage folks who are open source businesses to think about, because it’s had a big impact at Microsoft, really making clear to the folks who are sales folks (and they’re the folks who also have to compete with other products), but it’s really demonstrated that working with open source is also an opportunity for them - it’s not all about competition, it can really be about making your customers happy!

Sandro Groganz: What do you tell those people who say that Microsoft is publicly embracing open source only because they want to avoid problems with the European Commission, for example? How can you show that it’s a real commitment that you are making and that you understand the value of open source?

Bryan Kirschner: If you’re asking this question, do you believe that there’s value in open source? I’d say, we’re listening to our customers, and our engineers, many of whom have experience with open source as users or developers before they started their job, and they’re looking at the same thing you are and saying “Huh!”. We see a lot of adoption of PHP applications and we’re running it in a test lab, or we’re going to PHP conferences and understanding why do users like it, what’s going on in that community. And obviously, working with the PHP community is something that’s been going on for a while at Microsoft, probably for over a year now, and it’s just continuing. It’s leading to very pragmatic, customer-focused decisions.

I can’t tell someone not to be sceptical. If they feel sceptical, that’s a decision they need to make. But the trend in the overall market, what we see and hear, all points to pragmatic, case-by-case evaluation of what meets customer needs, how do you combine things in interesting ways, and if you believe that open source has value, that shouldn’t really surprise you, that should just make sense.

Sandro Groganz: From a personal point of view, what is the one single thing that you like most about open source software?

Bryan Kirschner: I was at an event at Harvard, a round table, where the folks at the Berkman Centre had invited me to talk about open source strategy and Microsoft. It was being recorded, it’s online, and at the end, a computer science professor says, “You know, I waited until they turned the cameras off, turned the recording off, because I didn’t want to be rude. But you and your colleague here from Microsoft were talking about Microsoft’s open source strategy for a while and you seemed pretty excited about it. But I’ve been doing software development for a long time, and it actually sounds like what Microsoft did in the late 1980s, when your openness to third-party developers was really what made you interesting and differentiated you. So why do you think this open source strategy is so cool if it’s basically the same?” And I said, “That’s why I think it’s cool!”

I think that democratizing development is a thing that’s really exciting to me. Personally, if I think back to when I was first writing code, 10 years old, I didn’t have a modem, never mind the concept that you could actually interact with others and it could be a social activity. I think about the late 1980s period, when Microsoft was pretty innovative, giving away the SDKs for free, API documentation for free, and was really enabling this explosion of little businesses to build applications. I think open source is taking it to a new level – there are Forges and collaborations, new ways to license or distribute or build a business around software and collaborate.

You’re seeing another wave of democratizing software development, and that in itself is exciting. If Microsoft can play a role in helping that grow, that’s both exciting and personally fulfilling, and at the end of the day, it’s also probably good business!

Sandro Groganz: Great, thank you very much, Bryan!

Bryan Kirschner: My pleasure!