"That's the big question after the announcement was
made last week about Ramji's pending departure after three years in
his job. Ramji is Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy
and has been primarily responsible for driving the company's recent
Linux and open source strategies. In a post on Microsoft's Port 25
blog last week, Bill Hilf, who held Ramji's job previously before
becoming the general manager of Windows three years ago, wrote that
Ramji is leaving to become interim president of the CodePlex
Foundation and to take a leadership position at a California-based
start-up. CodePlex is the new non-profit group, sponsored by
Microsoft, created to provide a framework to help commercial
software developers participate more easily in open source
projects.
""Sam joined my team three years ago to drive open source
technical strategy," Hilf wrote. "I have eagerly supported him as
he passionately articulated a vision that Microsoft could
coexist--and even thrive--in a heterogeneous IT world. The
perspectives on [open source software] at Microsoft have evolved to
the point where Microsoft's open source strategy is no longer just
locked in a single 'lab' on campus--now OSS is an important part of
many product groups and strategies across the company.""