Sam Ramji: On the CodePlex Foundation and more

Both. The CodePlex Foundation's mission is to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities. We are organized to serve both the open source community and software companies, which is why we chose to operate as an independent, non-profit foundation. As LWN and others have noted, other foundations exist – GNOME, Mozilla, Apache, Linux and Eclipse, for example – which share similar goals, although those foundations have a specific technology focus. We saw the need for an organization that more broadly addressed the process of participating in open source communities. In my travels in open source I've observed that corporate software developers don't often participate as much as one might expect in the open source projects that they make use of. We are working to provide an answer to the question: as a software company or as a corporate software developer, how can I contribute code, or a project, to an open source project or foundation?

We set some tough deadlines. In the first 100 days, we will remake the board of directors, appoint a new president, and hire a full-time executive director. I expect the new board members to come equally from software companies and the open source community, which will shift the center of influence away from Microsoft. Incidentally, if you look at the current board, three of us are not employed by Microsoft, so I would argue that this balance is already shifting. Additionally, the board of advisors represents a cross-industry and cross-community team of experts; we have people ranging from backgrounds in MySQL to VA Linux to open source .NET projects.

We will continue to recruit new members for the board of advisors. The board's intent is to have the advisory board more accurately represent collaboration between software companies and open source communities. When the permanent boards are seated, they will take on the task of formulating the Foundation's charter, so look for that document to take shape in the 180-day timeframe.

For the first 100 days I will serve as interim President, but my path is back to the private sector: I am VP Strategy for Sonoa Systems, a Silicon Valley cloud infrastructure company. After my term as Foundation President ends, I will continue to work with the Foundation, probably as a member of the board of advisors. I'm not a candidate for the Executive Director role. Just as a point of education – the roles of President (which is a board of directors role) and Executive Director (a full-time paid staff role) are quite different. You have exceptions to this model like Jim Zemlin, who is both an operational manager and a spokesperson/leader, but in general for non-profits the ED is a very hands-on operational person, while the President provides high-level direction and spokesmanship. .

I really appreciate Andy's comments. He spent a lot of time analyzing the Foundation's structure and governance, and his suggestions are guiding the board as we look for a permanent president and executive director.

I understand that the initial makeup of the boards would lead observers to the conclusion that the Foundation is dominated by Microsoft, but the 100-day target we set for revamping the boards should reassure observers that there is plenty of room for other points of view. The more companies that participate, and the more points of view represented, the better.

Microsoft's founding donation gave us the ability to operate independently. That might not seem obvious, but with the sponsorship, Microsoft gave the Foundation the ability to open a bank account, hire employees, revisit the mission, reconsider governance and formulate a work plan to move forward. It set the ball rolling, and now the Foundation is on a distinct – and separate – path.

In order to bring in more sponsors, we're clear that there will need to be balance and independence not just in our actions but in our governance, and therefore in the makeup of the board of directors. We're working through Andy's suggestions and those of others with experience in this area. You will see some changes by the end of the 100-day period.

We are looking for board members who are independent thinkers who understand open source, know the value of open source in a commercial context, and have a proven ability to bring the two together. You can see some good examples of these on the current boards. Those parameters mean we are searching a diverse pool of candidates. For example, right now I think we need a board member with open source legal expertise as well as one who has led use of open source within corporate environments beyond the software industry. We're looking at people within open source communities and also at people in commercial software companies that are outside of Microsoft's sphere of influence. We expect that Microsoft will still be represented – the company is the founding sponsor – but there will be many voices. Also, the interim board is committed to the long-term success of the Foundation, and knows that we'll be judged by what we do, not just by what we say we'll do.

We're still working through the process for accepting projects, and will be talking about our progress on our website and at my blog and Mark Stone's blog. October will be the month where we're able to post a public draft of our project acceptance and governance process as well as go into reviewing projects that are submitted to us.

Advocacy for open source has been growing within Microsoft for years. It was my job to get that initiative going strong, and in that I was successful. We socialized the idea that open source is complementary to Microsoft's core business. The contribution of the Linux device drivers at OSCON was one good proof point; that work is complementary to Hyper-V and the virtualization business. What I saw as I left was that the range of advocates within the company had grown, both through our collective successes with work on PHP, OpenPegasus, and MPICH2, and through the natural influx of industry talent. In a 91,000 person company that is hiring engineers constantly, it's impossible to hire engineers under 30 years old who have no open source experience; I think of it as a generational shift that's inescapable. Their collective views create pressure within the company to find ways to adopt and work with open source. The same is true for more experienced developers and business leaders who have come to Microsoft from companies who make extensive use of open source – for example, Lee Nackman from IBM who shepherded the Eclipse project is now a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. So I expect to see more participation and contribution, focused clearly on areas that deliver long-term, sustainable growth in core businesses like operating systems and databases.

There is a real issue and a red herring in that question. On the red herring, it's my understanding that those 22 patents were offered to both Red Hat and IBM individually before they were sold to Allied Securities Trust, a non-profit that counts both Red Hat and IBM among its members. You have to wonder why they would turn down the option to buy the patents, subsequently accept AST's membership benefit of gaining a license to those patents, and then raise issues in the public about the risks posed by both the patents and AST and stepping in to buy them through OIN. It strikes me as disingenuous at best.

On the real issue, which is patent litigation, I think that Microsoft is not very different than other large software companies in their behavior on patents – for example IBM has a longer history of patent litigation, and similar issues with the management of their patent portfolio. The structural problem that I see in this industry is a lot like the cold war and the related nuclear proliferation: large companies feel that they need them for protection from each other, so they take actions to ensure that their arsenal is strong, including testing them in court or other bodies. These actions end up causing a lot of fear for other people and companies, and tend to inhibit innovation in the industry. Personally I'd like to see a structural solution such as legislative reform or even a revision of the application of patents to software with a focus on copyright instead, as it used to be in the 70s and 80s. Until this happens it's not clear to me that any of the large software companies are going to change their behavior.

Finally, working with the CodePlex Foundation is quite separate from working with Microsoft. What we are building is a safe harbor for software companies and open source communities to collaborate in. One of the ways we plan to do this is by requiring software companies to grant a patent license for any code they contribute to the Foundation, and then by relicensing those patents at no cost to all downstream users and developers, including their use in derivative works. I think that for the projects and companies that participate in CodePlex Foundation projects, this will prove to be a valuable innovation that lets more developers participate in open source.

I'm responsible for strategy at Sonoa. It's a cloud computing infrastructure company focused on the analysis, control, and security of cloud services. We've all seen a ton of expansion of cloud services – as an example, a year ago eBay stated that 60% of their traffic was coming through the cloud rather than the web. That was 6 billion API calls per month as of 2008 that went directly to their backend rather than their website. As the "invisible web" of programmatic connections to business services expands, and those connections become more critical to the businesses providing and subscribing to them, there's value in being able to ensure availability and performance, logging and auditing, and dynamic modification to how they're being offered to different customers or partners. Sonoa's products do just that; we have a free product called APIgee.com, which runs in Amazon's EC2 environment and lets any cloud service provider manage their uptime, rate limits on subscribers, and get visibility into their current subscribers. That's built on ServiceNet, which is our paid product that runs in the cloud (EC2) and on-premise as a software or hardware appliance. ServiceNet has a lot more features accessible than APIgee currently – it's effectively a high-scale, low-latency routing platform for cloud services.

We use a number of open source technologies, starting with Linux, which is our base platform. While much of the product is in C, we're using Java, and more specifically Apache technologies in the server. We use Xen in packaging our EC2 AMI and some of our customer environments. We also have a design studio for cloud policies which is an Eclipse-based authoring and editing environment.

I think there's a lot more that Sonoa can do in this area – both in giving back to the projects that we're benefiting from directly in the product, and in the projects that we're benefiting from as a company. Here's an example: before someone needs our products, they need to have cloud services, whether those are REST APIs, SOAP APIs, or RSS feeds. They need to build them, and they need to deploy them. We don't have any offerings in those areas – we're not an IDE or application server provider. It's only logical that we should support projects like Apache Axis2 and PHP REST frameworks. The open source strategy at Sonoa is a blank slate, which is one of the things that makes it exciting to me.

It's been a privilege to work with a number of industry leaders in the role that I served in at Microsoft. The Samba Team taught me a great deal and I appreciated their optimism in being willing to work with me after prior negative experiences with Microsoft, and our success together enabled us to move a lot of things forward, including our relationship with the Linux Foundation. In general those who have taken the time to understand the work that my team did on interoperability with Linux have appreciated the work and had good advice. I feel that there was much more I would like to have done, but that work will fall to my successors and to the company as a whole. I am glad to carry on putting my beliefs into practice at the CodePlex Foundation – that we can build a better software industry by getting software companies consistently contributing to open source projects – but I will miss guiding Microsoft's progress on Linux and Open Source.

I would say this to each of your readers: it's through the outreach and education that you have to offer that will narrow the rifts in the industry. I think every systems administrator would prefer to do less work in making multiple operating systems work in a single environment, and I know that every developer would like to have their work have more impact by running on more platforms and more computers. So if you have advice for the people making decisions and enacting strategy, give it to them constructively and with patience, because meaningful change takes time.