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Встреча с главой Microsoft's Linux Lab
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1813672,00.asp
Цитата: Hidden away in Building 17 — when he's not on the road, working to counteract the impression among open-source backers that Microsoft is the devil personified — is Bill Hilf. Hilf works for Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy and Linux point man, Martin Taylor. Hilf is the director of Microsoft's platform technology strategy group. He also happens to run a sizeable Linux lab on the Redmond campus.
Linux running at Microsoft? Isn't that sacrilege? Think of it more as a competitive advantage, said Hilf.ADVERTISEMENT
"I am a non-Microsoft guy working at Microsoft," Hilf said.
His bio verifies his characterization. Before joining Microsoft about a year-plus ago, Hilf was instrumental in driving IBM's Linux technical strategy for its emerging and competitive markets organization. Before his stint at IBM, Hilf was the senior director of engineering for eToys, where he helped build the company's e-commerce business infrastructure. All told, Hilf has been involved with the open-source world for over a dozen years, he said.
Hilf says he spends a lot of time "making Linux more transparent to Microsoft managers." He does a lot of educating around the open-source development, testing, deployment and licensing models, he said.
Hilf's job sometimes involves telling the Microsoft product managers "where we suck" vis-a-vis open source. And sometimes it involves showing the Microsoft teams "where the big holes are in open-source environments."
"The bulk of my job is spent with the (Microsoft) product teams on where open-source software is going," he said.
Check Out the Microsoft Channel 9 Video Interview With Hilf and Taylor
But Hilf also interacts extensively with bigwigs in the open-source development world, maintaining close contacts with folks at Samba, Apache, Red Hat, Novell/Ximian and other key open-source developers.
"I try to help keep the peace," Hilf says modestly. "The reception from the open-source community has been amazingly positive."
Hilf said he has yet to have anyone he has contacted refuse a meeting, though he acknowledges he seeks to dialog with open-source developers, not "zealots."
Hilf isn't the only Microsoft employee looking to increase the dialog between Microsoft and the open-source community. At a recent conference sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) in Cambridge, Md., Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, called for bridge building between Microsoft and members of the open-source community.
Other Microsoft employees have been talking more about reconciliation than retaliation, too, as of late. The change in rhetoric has not gone unnoticed — or uncommented upon — by open-source backers.
In addition to acting Microsoft's good cop on open source, Hilf also runs the Microsoft Linux lab, which consists of a few hundred servers and a variety of PCs running about 30 to 40 different Linux distributions, as well as almost all the different flavors of Unix, according to Hilf.
It is in this lab that Microsoft does a lot of its internal benchmarking, comparing Windows Server to Linux; ASP.Net to PHP; and Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. But a lot of the lab's testing involves interoperability, too, Hilf said.
"The lab itself is an interoperability experiment," Hilf says, since the various systems in it need to interoperate with the Windows-based networking, human-resources, e-mail and other systems that run Microsoft.
"We get to find out lots of interesting things — like how to authenticate against Active Directory, how to run non-Microsoft mail clients with Exchange," and the like, he said.
Hilf's team isn't big. He employs a couple of full-time program managers, plus between four to eight contractors working for him at any given time, Hilf said. These contractors tend to be open-source specialists whom he calls in on a rotating basis.
What's been Hilf's biggest surprise since coming over from the open-source world to the "dark side"?
"I thought I'd have gotten a lot of 'it's crap if it's not built here,' attitude," he said. Instead, he said he has found more curiosity than resistance to open-source software among the Microsoft employees with whom he has worked.
Still, Hilf acknowledged he has a long way to go to bridge the Microsoft-open-source gap.
Hilf said he still hears the same-old, predictable questions and perceptions regarding Microsoft's open-source strategy and intentions. His top five:
When will Microsoft open source X (Microsoft commercial product)?
Why don't you build X (Microsoft commercial product) so it runs on Linux?
Microsoft is all-about closed source.
Microsoft is anti-open source.
Microsoft is always less secure than every open-source product on every front.
So while Microsoft may have made progress from the days of top brass routinely characterizing Linux as "cancer," there's still plenty left to do, Hilf conceded. |
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