Barton's Blog

Last week at OSCON I ran into Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft's worldwide open source and linux team, outside of Starbucks.  He had a back-to-back meetings lined up that day but since my podcast last year was singularly responsible for his rise within Microsoft, he cut out some time for me.  [BTW, this was the day before their Apache announcement] Here is the result:

My interview with Sam (11:02)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)

I came bearing gifts.  Sam holding a real operating system (turns out he already had BeleniX loaded)

Some of the topics we tackle:

• His new position and team (its grown from 12 to 112 people and spans 65 countries) and what they're responsible for.
  
• Strategy without execution is hallucination
• The two licenses Microsoft submitted (one BSD-like and the other copyleft and which allows dual licensing), and got approved by the OSI last year.
• The importance of interoperability and making sure MS stuff works well with Linux/Solaris etc.
• The work they've been doing with the Jeremy Allison and the Samba team
• Ballmer's recent quote regarding Open Source and "recovering their agnosticism"
• What Sam's proudest over the last year and shout outs to team members.

Want more Sam?  Check out this Infoweek article, also from OSCON.

Pau for now...