The Foss

In a deliberate act of provocation, Jonni Bidwell road-trips to Microsoft’s UK HQ to talk open source with the most hospitable Martin Woodward.

- Martin Woodward

Readers, prepare your pitchforks! Actually Interview don’t. We all remember the Halloween memos, but they were two decades ago. Certain trenchant views about Microsoft and its opposition to Linux still prevail, but we live in different times now. Nobody wants to extinguish desktop Linux. Under Satya Nadella we’ve seen that Microsoft hearts Linux. Hearts us enough to give us Skype and SQL server, even.

As is the case for many commercial organisations, open source now plays a key role at Microsoft, and Principal program manager Martin Woodward has been instrumental in effecting this change. At October’s 2017 O’Reilly Software Architecture conference in London he gave a talk outlining his Herculean efforts migrating 65,000 engineers to a single platform, based on none other than our beloved Git. We know some people’s views on the Redmondian Empire won’t change, but we hope some people will be encouraged to rethink things…

Linux Format: How did you become part of the Microsoft family?

Martin Woodward: I was part of a small startup that produced plugins for Eclipse, and we created a plugin for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, which did source control and stuff like that. Microsoft ended up buying us in 2009, so that’s how I joined the company.

When it was buying us, it was very much, “What’s all this open source stuff that you use?” So then we had to figure out what the processes were for doing open source things inside Microsoft, at that time. Once we’d been in the company for a while, we began to ask, “How do we help the company use more open source? How do we fix the company to work with open source better, rather than fighting against it?”