The Loneliest Man at Microsoft

In late 2003, Microsoft surprised everyone by hiring Bill Hilf, who had run IBM’s sucessful Linux strategy. During the recruitment process, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, told him, “We have to have an answer to free.” Nothing the company had done so far had stemmed the tide, and when Hilf arrived and started talking to engineers, he could see why. “In my interviews it was clear that they had no idea how open source worked,” he said. “There was massive misunderstanding - the saw it as only a threat.”

One of the reasons Microsoft seemed so ill-informed about open source was that its lawyers had forbidden its engineers from working with it. The license that Linux and similar open source software uses, known as the GPL (general public license) requires that every “derivative work” of open source software also be open source. The lawyers decided that this made it a virus: Any Microsoft programmer who touched it might be at risk of infecting anything else he or she worked on, with a possibility that one mistake could even accidentally open-source Windows.

So when Hilf wanted to build an open source lab at Microsoft, it was treated like a biohazard facility. The buildings department punched a hole in a former storeroom and let him thread network cables through. But after that he was on his own, without a budget. Hilf had to use recycled computers and circulate a “Help Bill” campaign to get spare equipment. Anybody who worked on open source couldn’t work on any other Microsoft project, for fear of spreading the GPL disease. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called him “the loneliest man in Redmond.”

Excerpt from Chris Anderson’s Free. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out for free on your Kindle or iPhone.