I'm curious, what's does your job entail? This question partially stems from the obsolete understanding of Microsoft's relationship to open source, but also wondering how it compares to other open source business models that provide support for open source packages.
Happy to explain a bit! I work with developers out there, putting code on GitHub, contributing to other projects or making our own stuff work better with open source projects. I also "hack" on our new and upcoming products (we have a bunch of hardware announced and already out there where SDKs haven't been released yet), trying to see how well they play with "the open source world". I also visit dev conferences around the world, talking about the code we wrote and the lessons we learned.
My job is kind of awesome - I'm basically at a full-time hackathon, juggling my MacBook, Windows Notebook, a bunch Cloud solutions, some IoT devices and whatever our hardware teams come up with.
The team is brand new - and we're still hiring. Hit me up (felixrieseberg.com / @felixrieseberg) if you're interested!
Hey Felix, I will be joining Microsoft this summer ( Visual Studio Team ). Any Idea how one can move to working on Open Source stuff like you are doing.
I work at MSFT too, and have been involved with open sourcing a major project, called Bond[1]. I'm happy to chat about this offline, if you like. Email is in the profile.
The short answer is that there are divisions in the company with a direct imperative to open source things, so if your manager is willing to encourage this (easy enough to figure out), the answer is often yes. Like almost every company, we tend to open source tools but not products (e.g., yes to Orleans, but no to the game it supports, Halo), so from there it's a matter of finding a group that has such tools, or is open to developing them.
Felix (who works for my old boss -- hi Felix!) is a special case. He works for a team called strategic engagements, whose job (I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong) is specifically to engage with the public, usually on their own terms, which often involves non-MSFT tech. _That_ is an uncommon job, but if you want to talk to people in the group, just ping me when you get here and I'll put you in touch with the dev manager for the group.
Hey! @hausdorff (Hi Alex!) below already commented on it, but feel free to hit me up. We do things with devdiv and there are a bunch of people who're into releasing things - just hit me up via email (felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com), I'm happy to chat about it!
I work on the team doing Visual Studio's Tools for Apache Cordova. While I don't work on the open-source side of the fence, we have engineers focused on contributing to Cordova.
Search the mailing list for "microsoft" (which picks up e-mail addresses) compared to "windows" to see where MS involvement picked up.[1]
A lot of Microsoft's involvements in open source are via MS Open Tech. See their website for more information about their contributions.[2] While this doesn't show checkins, here are their blog posts about Cordova.[3]
I don't really get why that's important. Just because the kernel is GPL'd doesn't mean the drivers, WM etc. have to be.
That's kinda been my vision for how Linux may succeed on desktops/laptops. The GPL'd Linux kernel with almost everything else closed source. I realize I'm just describing Android.
