Microsoft has appointed a new point man to put a face on its interaction with the open source community. That man, Robert Duffner, takes on a big task as senior director of Platform and Open Source Software strategy at Microsoft. His IBM and BEA roots will help him place his mark on the Microsoft strategy, but the core message remains the same.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world.

When Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, describes his company's open source strategy, I believe him. Every word.

Last April (April-29-2010) there was a local event in Ecuador organized by AESoft, the Ecuadorian Software association. This event was names “Integrated Technologies” and was sponsored by Microsoft, CodePlex, Port25 and The Apache Foundation. On this conference Microsoft sent a message saying that they are Open Source friendly and they support Open Source development.

The open source community is literally rocking the world and so is India’s largest Linux and Open Source convention and expo. The community is now being supported by Microsoft, long considered to be the 'opposing side'. Open Source India Week (OSIW) 2008 kicked off yesterday in Delhi after completing the Bengalure and Mumbai editions. At the occasion, Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft, could be seen wooing the open source community, holding an olive branch in the form of promoting interoperability between the two systems.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, held last week in San Francisco, an interesting panel discussion took place about Linux' position in the wider operating systems market. Included were Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director, Ian Murdock, Sun community and developer vice president, and Sam Ramji, Microsoft platform strategy director.

The FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) Community knows, thanks to leaked Microsoft internal documents, that since about 1998 Microsoft has been in a sort of war against them. Because of this, it is not surprising that the FOSS community has looked at Microsoft with suspicion and has vilified it to no end. But, is Microsoft really evil?

What a goldmine my inbox was this morning. I also received the news that Microsoft’s Windows Competitive Strategy team is searching, via Linkedin, for “a strong team member to lead Microsoft’s global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.”

Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for the open-source online learning system Moodle. Microsoft released the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under the GPLv2, a move outlined in a blog post by Peter Galli, a community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group.