Very rarely do you ever learn anything new in a QA, but they are great for clarifying positions. My take away was that Microsoft's Sam Ramji is very pragmatic and dedicated to his work. I take what he says at face value: Microsoft will increase its involvement in the open source community, and its legal team will make it somewhat easier for product groups to get involved with projects that further a business or technology goal. However, Sam was unable to answer one follow up: Will Microsoft get involved with projects that use copyleft licenses such as GPL?

We will continue to follow up for a response after the holidays (maybe Sam just went away on vacation). His response could dictate just how far Microsoft can go before it hits a plataeu and Ramji's efforts are dismissed as marketing.

Microsoft's failure to embrace GPL is a contention point for the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and other open source advocates. I spoke with SFLC's Bradley Kuhn for reaction to Sam's remarks, and could not help but notice that he was acutely skeptical of Microsoft (just a bit). After all, Redmond spent most of the past decade attempting to extirpate open source software from the enterprise, and Kuhn fought off its machinations.

Kuhn's remarks were strong, but are rooted in the reality of Microsoft's past behavior and continued footdragging in regards to GPL - the most widely used open source license. It is safe to say that every other big vendor other than Microsoft is GPL friendly. He's got a point.

This may come as a surprise, but Ramji and Kuhn are actually on the same page: The both recognize that actions will dictate the open source community's perception of Microsoft. Sam Ramji has made inroads, and if the past year was any indication, the company has more surprises up its sleeve. Whoever would have thought that Microsoft would become one of the primary financiers of Apache?

I'm certain that there are many folks that would have liked me to be harder on Sam, but we would have ended up with many of the same canned responses that we have all read before. I view our QA as the beginning of a dialog, and we will continue to ask questions and engage Microsoft on the topic of open source into the future. That and I live a few blocks away from SFLC's headquarters. ;-)