After 15 years working in Open Source, I signed with Microsoft... because Microsoft is the best place to do Open Source today. In this talk I share an analysis of the company and why it needs Open Source, my experience in a Microsoft world as "that guy who runs Linux", my job using developer clout to turn Microsoft's biggest customers into contributors, and an AMA about the whole thing.
After 15 years working in Open Source, I signed with Microsoft... because Microsoft is the best place to do Open Source today.
This was not an easy decision. I came up in the age of the SCO trials, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", and "Open Source is a cancer." For most of my career, Microsoft was the Dark Side. But today, in 2018, I found that Microsoft does enterprise Open Source better than any other company I know. They're doing it The Right Way, and I wanted to be a part of it.
In this session I'll show you my analysis from before I accepted the position, which convinced me that Microsoft really is turning their 100.000-person ship around when it comes to Open Source. I'll update that information with everything I've learned and experienced in the first year, so you can see what it's really like on the inside. You'll learn about the Commercial Software Engineering group - "the MI6 of Microsoft" - which pushes the envelope in every technical buzzword area you can imagine, and turns the largest brands in the world into Open Source contributors. And I promise to save plenty of time for a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) session at the end.
Microsoft is not the Dark Side anymore - but we still have cookies.
