A few weeks ago we took a look at the newly announced Foundation CodePlex. At that time, hung some doubts about the foundation and its plans. We asked Sam Ramji, interim president of the foundation (and former senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft) to fill some gaps. Here are the answers he gave to our questions, ranging from management and the plans of the foundation to his opinion on open source strategy at Microsoft, as well as information about his new company and its relationship with open source software.

LWN: To open up the discussion on CodePlex Foundation, you give us an overview of the foundation and its mission? The idea is that it serves the community of open source software companies or the two?

At two. The Foundation's mission is to enable CodePlex code-sharing and understanding between software companies and open source communities. We organize to serve both the open source community and software companies, and that is why we choose to operate as an independent foundation and nonprofit. As LWN and others have noted, there are foundations - GNOME, Mozilla, Apache, Linux and Eclipse, for example - with similar goals, although these foundations have a specific technological focus. We saw the need for an organization that dealt with the process of participation in open source communities more broadly. In my own forays into the open source, I noticed that the corporate software developers often do not participate as much as one would expect the open source projects make use of them. We are working to provide an answer to the question being a software company or an enterprise software developer, how can I contribute to my code or design for a project or a foundation of open source?

LWN: As president, you, the board of directors and advisory board are responsible for pointing a CEO and permanent members to the two councils. What was the term given to you to make these choices? The adoption of a statute for the foundation will be in similar term, or it will be in the new advice? You will remain as president after that, or this function it will be the new CEO?

The deadlines we have set are tight. In the first hundred days, we will reconstitute the board of directors, appoint a new chairman and CEO hire a full-time. I hope the new board members are equally distributed between software companies and open source community, which should avoid the center of influence of Microsoft. In fact, if you look at the current lineup of the council, will see that three of us are not employees of Microsoft, so I would say that this balance is already undergoing changes. In addition, the advisory board is a team of industry experts and the community, we have people with a background in MySQL, at VA Linux and projects. NET open source.

We will continue recruiting new members to the advisory board. The intention of the council is to make the advisory council represents more accurately the collaboration between software companies and open source communities. When the permanent council take, he will have the task of formulating the status of the foundation, then it is likely that this document takes shape within five months.

In the first one hundred days, I will act as interim president, but then I will return to the private sector: I am vice president of strategy Sleep Systems, a company infrastructure cloud in Silicon Valley. After my role as president of the foundation to quit, I will continue working with the foundation, probably as a member of the advisory board. I am not a candidate for the role of chief executive. Just to explain: the role of president (which is a function of the board of directors) and executive director (working full-time and unpaid) are quite different. There are some exceptions to this model, as Jim Zemlin, who is operations manager and porta-voz/líder the same time, but generally, in organizations that are non-profit, the executive director has very active participation in operations, while the President gives the direction of high level and is the most important pronouncements.

LWN: There was criticism about the initial training of advice, especially from Andy Updegrove (still here), because it is dominated by Microsoft. He claims that, at least superficially, the foundation seems to focus on Microsoft, without much room for outside opinions, and more importantly, unable to act independently of Microsoft. This description it seems appropriate? If not, why? What gives the Foundation the ability to act independently?

I have much appreciation for the comments Andy. He devoted much time to analyze the structure and management of the foundation, and his suggestions are guiding the board in their search for the CEO and President permanent.

I understand that the initial composition of the board has led observers to conclude that the foundation is dominated by Microsoft, but the goal of 100 days to re-define the advice should reassure them, showing that there is plenty of room for other views . As more companies join, and the more points of view are represented, the better.

The donation that Microsoft has made to open the foundation has given us the ability to operate independently. This may not seem very obvious, but with the sponsorship, the foundation gave Microsoft the ability to open a bank account, hire staff, rethink its mission, to reconsider how the foundation is governed and formulate a work plan to move forward . This training put his ball rolling, and now the foundation is following a different path and only yours.

To attract more sponsors, we are confident that we will need balance and independence not only in our actions, but also in how the foundation is governed and the composition of the board of directors. We are working along the lines suggested by Andy and others with experience in the area. You will see some changes after a period of one hundred days.

LWN: What are the criteria for the entry of new members on the board of directors and advisory board? Increasing the diversity of these councils (under Microsoft employees and / or more voices outside the sphere of influence of Microsoft) is one of the goals of the selection process? If so, how this can be done, and if not, why not?

We are looking for board members who have independent thought. They need to understand the source, know the value of open source in a commercial context and have the proven ability to bring the two together. Some good examples of such people are the boards today. These parameters mean that we are doing our search in a very diverse group of candidates. Currently, for example, I think we need a board member with expertise in legal aspects of open source, and someone who has driven the use of open source in enterprise environments that go beyond the software industry. We are looking for people in open source communities and also in commercial software companies outside the sphere of influence of Microsoft. The expectation is that Microsoft will continue to be represented - after all, she is the sponsor who founded the CodePlex - but there will be many other voices. In addition, the interim board is committed to the long-term success of the foundation, we know that we will be judged by what we do, not only for what we do.

LWN: The foundation will sponsor specific projects such as the Apache Foundation do? What is the criterion used to decide which projects deserve the sponsorship? What are the benefits for a project that became part of the Foundation CodePlex?

We are still developing the process for acceptance of projects, and we talk about our progress on our website, in my blogand the blog of Mark Stone. In October, we will post a public draft of the process of project and process management foundation, and began to look at the projects that we are subjected.

LWN: Until recently, you were the man of the open source "from Microsoft. Important steps have been taken in the period that you served this function. What do you think of open source initiatives at Microsoft, CodePlex taking the Foundation? Where do you think that Microsoft is following in terms of participation in open source?

The defense of open source at Microsoft has been growing for years. Maintaining the strength of this movement was my job, and I succeeded in that direction. We promote the idea that open source business complements the basic Microsoft.The contribution of the device drivers for Linux at OSCON was a good proof of this: this work is complementary to the Hyper-V and virtualization industry. When I left, I saw that the number of proponents of open source in the company had grown thanks to the success we've had to work with PHP, with OpenPegasus and the MPICH2, and the appearance of natural talent in the industry. In a company with 91,000 people and is always hiring people, it is impossible to hire engineers with less than 30 years who have experience with open source, it is impossible to escape this new paradigm.The collective vision of them creates an internal pressure for the company to adopt and work with open source. The same is true for more experienced developers and business leaders who came to Microsoft after working with companies that make strong use of open source, for example, Lee Nackman of IBM, who worked on the Eclipse project, now is vice president Microsoft corporate. My expectation is to see the participation and contributions increase, with a clear focus on areas that lead to sustainable growth and long-term business, basic operating systems and databases.

LWN: Many Linux developers are concerned about the attacks related to Microsoft's patents against TomTom and its attempt to sell 22 patents for companies considered unjust and aggressive in defending patents. What would you say to these developers to convince them that Microsoft is well-intentioned, and to cooperate with it (through the foundation or through other means) is the right thing (and safe) to do?

Your question contains a real issue and a false alarm. The false alarm: as far as I understand it, these 22 patents were offered to Red Hat and IBM individually before being sold to Allied Securities Trust, which has no profit and lists both Red Hat and IBM among its members. It is strange that they have given up the purchase of patents, accepting the subsequent benefits on the use of license to these patents coming from its association with AST, and then take the public about risks that patents and AST representing, acting for buy them through the OIN. It seems a very honest.

The real issue, which is the patent litigation, I think that Microsoft does not act very differently from other major software companies - IBM, for example, has increased history of patent litigation, and similar issues with the managing its patent portfolio. The structural problem I see with this industry is like the Cold War and nuclear proliferation that led to it: big companies feel the need to protect each other, and act to ensure that your arsenal is strong, up to testing in the courts and other vehicles . Such actions often cause much fear in other people and businesses, and tend to stifle innovation in the industry. Personally, I would like to see a structural solution to a legislative reform or even a review of the application of software patents with a focus on copyright, as it was in years 70 and 80. Until that happens, I do not think any big company will change its behavior.

Finally, work on CodePlex Foundation is working quite independently of work at Microsoft. We are building a safe haven for the collaboration software companies and open source communities. One of the ways in which we intend to do this is by requiring software companies to grant a patent license for all code that contribute to the foundation, so that these patents are re-licensed without charge to all users and developers, including its use in derivative works. I believe that for projects and companies that participate in projects of the Foundation CodePlex, this will be a valuable innovation that would allow more developers to participate in open source.

LWN: What can you tell us about your new job? They say it is in a startup cloud computing, is that right? This company uses (or intends to use) open source technologies? If so, how?

I am responsible for the strategies of sleep. She is a firm infrastructure of cloud computing-focused analysis, control and security of cloud services. We have seen a dramatic increase in cloud services - last year, for example, eBay claimed that 60% of its traffic from the cloud, not the web. There were six billion API calls per month in 2008, going straight for the back of them, and not to the site. As the "invisible web" of connections programmatic services business expands, these connections become more critical for businesses that do use them, and there is value in being able to ensure availability and performance, the record and audit logs and also dynamic changes in the way that everything is offered to different customers and partners. The products of sleep do. We have a free product, the APIgee.com, which runs on the Amazon EC2 environment and allows any service provider cloud to manage uptime, limit subscribers and gain visibility of current subscribers. This product was built on the ServiceNet our paid product that can be run in the cloud (EC2) and locally as an appliance software or hardware. The ServiceNet has much more resources available than the APIgee the moment - it is effectively a platform for low latency routing for cloud services.

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

I think there's much more to be done by the Sleep in this area, both in return for projects from which we benefit directly with the product and the projects from which we benefit as a company. For example, before people need our products, will need to have cloud services, APIs are REST, SOAP APIs or RSS feeds. First these people have to create these things, and then deploy them. We do not offer anything in these areas - we are providers of application servers or IDEs.Logically, we should support projects like the Apache Axis2 frameworks and PHP REST. The open source strategy of Sleep is a blank page, and this is one of the things that excite me.

LWN: Is there anything else you would like to tell our readers?

It was a privilege for me to work with several industry leaders in the role that I held at Microsoft. I learned a lot from the Samba team, and I appreciate the optimism of them being willing to work with me after the negative experiences they had with Microsoft in the past. The success of our union has allowed us to bring many things to optimum levels, as our relationship with the Linux Foundation. Generally people who take the time to understand the work of my staff on the issue of interoperability with Linux like the work and give good tips. I wanted to do much more than I did, but it will be for my successor and for the company as a whole. I am happy to continue putting into practice what I believe in the Foundation CodePlex, namely: that we can build a software industry best making software companies systematically contribute to open source projects. Still, I miss the days when he led the progress of Microsoft in the Linux and open source.

I would say the following visitors: it is through education that we reduce the gaps that separate the industry. I believe that every system administrator would rather have less work to do different operating systems operate in the same environment, and I know that every developer would like your work had a major impact, running on more platforms and computers. So if you have advice to offer people who make decisions and design strategies, do so constructively and be patient, because significant changes take time.