The Man Who Introduced Microsoft to Open Source Leaves For HP

Hewlett-Packard has hired the man who introduced Microsoft to the notion of open source. Bill Hilf -- who also served as general manager of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service -- left Microsoft for HP this summer, and now serves as HP's ‎vice president of converged cloud products and services. It's the original Silicon Valley startup' Bill Hilf Hilf originally made a name for himself at IBM in the early aughts, helping Big Blue embrace the granddaddy of the open source game: the Linux operating system. But eventually, he created an open source lab inside Microsoft, hiring a man named Sam Ramji to run it, and he started a dialogue with the open source community, attempting to dispel some of the skepticism -- and anger -- that had built up against the tech giant, which had actively worked to suppress open source projects, seeing them as a threat to the business it had built around proprietary software like the Windows operating system. But if Microsoft had embraced open source earlier -- listened a bit more to people like Hilf -- it could have avoided a great deal of pain and even used open source to its advantage, as it's trying to do now.