AlbertPacino
Skilled
Linux running at Microsoft? Isn't that sacrilege? Think of it more as a competitive advantage, Hilf said.
"I am a non-Microsoft guy working at Microsoft," Hilf said.
His bio verifies his characterization. Before joining Microsoft a year-plus ago, Hilf was instrumental in driving IBM's Linux technical strategy for its emerging and competitive markets organization.
Before his stint at IBM, Hilf was the senior director of engineering at eToys, where he helped build the company's e-commerce business infrastructure. All told, Hilf has been involved with the open-source world for more than a dozen years, he said.
Hilf said he spends a lot of time "making Linux more transparent to Microsoft managers," doing a lot of educating around the open-source development, testing, deployment and licensing models.
Hilf's job sometimes involves telling the Microsoft product managers "where we suck" vis-a-vis open source. And sometimes it involves showing the Microsoft teams "where the big holes are in open-source environments."
"The bulk of my job is spent with the [Microsoft] product teams on where open-source software is going," he said.
But Hilf also interacts extensively with bigwigs in the open-source development world, maintaining close contacts with folks at Samba, Apache, Red Hat, Novell/Ximian and other key open-source developers.
"I try to help keep the peace," Hilf said modestly. "The reception from the open-source community has been amazingly positive."
Hilf said he has yet to have anyone he has contacted refuse a meeting, though he acknowledges he seeks to dialog with open-source developers, not "zealots."
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