Sam Ramji is a busy man. As Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy, his job is a big one: overseeing the company’s initiatives in Linux and open source.

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.

Now that Sam Ramji, Microsoft Corp.'s point man on open source software, is leaving the company at the end of the month, who will possibly fill his shoes and continue to lead Microsoft further into the world of open source collaboration.

Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.

Microsoft's Patent Attorney Jim Markwith told the Open Source Business Conference that the reason they hadn't named the supposedly infringing patents was that it would be 'administratively impossible to keep up' with the list.

I asked Sam Ramji senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft about TomTom the other day and he claimed that patent issues aren't causing any chilling effect on his part of Microsoft's open source plans.

Sam Ramji gave an excellent short talk at OSCON 2007 on Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and on the Wire. Sam described the collaborative work being done inside the Microsoft open source labs to better enable virtualization with the Xen world.

It has always amazed me how many people pirate. As the well-known anti-piracy video clip says, “You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag,” but people do regularly steal software and other copyrighted materials. They seem to have an innate belief that software should be free.

"We occasionally discuss Microsoft’s very clear plan to ’steal’ free software projects from GNU/Linux and bring them over to Windows. The OSI ‘invasion’ was merely a first step. At the moment, Microsoft is trying to grab Apache..."