Port 25 Contributors

Peter Galli Open Source Community  Manager

Peter leads Microsoft's Open Source community outreach, where he works closely with the internal Microsoft Open Source community as well as the broader Open Source communities. He is also the Editor of this blog.

Peter has a long association with Microsoft, starting in August 2000 when he joined eWeek, a magazine in the Ziff Davis Enterprise stable of publications, as a Senior Editor, covering software platforms - from Windows to Unix and Linux. 

Stuart McKee U.S. National Technology Officer

Stuart joined Microsoft in June 2004 as the as the U.S. National Technology Officer. He is responsible for driving a comprehensive set of technical and business strategies for the U.S. Public Sector State and Local segment. As NTO he has both an internal as well as an external focus - shaping and articulating Microsoft's technology vision and strategy.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Stuart served as the Director of the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS) on Governor Gary Locke's executive cabinet. As the DIS Director, McKee served as Chief Information Officer for the state and managed an internationally recognized agency which provides technology leadership and infrastructure for government organizations across Washington State. Stuart also worked as the VP of Global Internet Operations for the Walt Disney Company where he directed operations for a number of the Internet's most visible sites including ESPN.com, Disney.com, ABCNews.com and GO.com

Sandy Gupta       General Manager: Technical and Marketing Strategy

Sandy Gupta is the General Manager of Technical and Marketing Strategy for the Open Solutions Group at Microsoft, where he brings the customer voice and requirements for the open source projects at Microsoft. Sandy works with companies that offer open source solutions to develop strategic partnerships, and engages with various open source communities.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, Sandy spent about 17 years in the Unix industry, starting his career as developer for Unix kernel and device drivers at ICL. Subsequently Sandy worked as a senior executive at other Unix companies, where he drove their technology architectures and product roadmaps.

Sandy holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Delhi and is an alumnus of Kellogg School of Management.

Anandeep is a senior program manager responsible for projects and operations of the Open Source Software Lab (OSSL) in Redmond, Washington. The OSSL, along with the Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, comprise the Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft.

The projects Anandeep is responsible for focus on supporting open source software on the Windows platform. These projects include support for PHP on Windows, enhancing tools and processes for building and deploying open source software on Windows and ensuring interoperability between Windows and Samba implementations of Server Message Block protocols.

Anandeep loves coming to work every day as he not only gets paid to work closely with cool technologies and cool people, but he also gets to pontificate and interact with the OSS community & bring their concerns to the Microsoft world. Someone pinch me!

Hank Janssen Principal Software Development Engineer: Linux Integration Components

Hank has been working with UNIX and later Linux as well as other OSS for about 20 years. He started working at AT&T doing a lot of kernel programming and worked on the SYSV Processed Scheduler used for digital telephone switches. He worked for many years mainly as an architect for large (and small) cellular telephone companies. Virtually all of that work was in or with UNIX, Linux and OSS related areas.

Hank's recent work at Microsoft included leading the Microsoft team behind PHP 5.3, participating in the first Microsoft contributions to several existing open source projects, and spearheading Microsoft's decision to contribute the Linux Integration components for Hyper-V to the Linux Kernel. Hank is now Microsoft's Principal Software Development Engineer for the Linux Integration components Microsoft contributed to the Linux kernel in July 2009.

Tom Hanrahan Director, Program Management

Tom heads the Linux/Windows interoperability work, including leadership of the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab. This development lab undertakes much of the engineering work involved in the multi-year technical partnership with Novell. Tom brings 30 years of engineering, management and community development experience to this effort - and the larger Microsoft community.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Tom was the Director of Engineering at the Linux Foundation where he was responsible for managing a variety of technical initiatives. Earlier in his career, Tom led IBM's Linux Technology Center in Portland, and spent 11 years at Sequent Computer Systems in the early days of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing).

Jamie Cannon Open Source Community & Platforms Lead (Jamie is still at Microsoft, but has moved on to a new role)

Jamie's first interaction with computers was in 1989 when he recieved his first IBM x86 PC... most likely an IBM Ambra. DOS prompt and all,he was hooked. Years later, he would scare his parents and alienate friends by taking them apart, upgrading parts and generally spending unhealthy amounts of time disecting the operations of the machine.

When a friend of his set up a T1 line and SGI Irix machine in 1995 (for his business), Jamie was quickly hooked on the power of the Internet. Before joining Microsoft in 2003, he spent the intervening years getting his IT degree from New York University and freelancing in web development during the .com years.

Bill Hilf General Manager

Before joining Microsoft, Bill led IBM Corp.’s Linux/Open Source Software technical strategy at a worldwide level for the Emerging and Competitive markets organization. Before joining IBM, Bill was vice president of Engineering for eToys, where he helped build one of the premier e-commerce businesses on the Web. Previously, he worked as a software architect for multiple Silicon Valley-based software companies, such as CNET Networks Inc. and Black Sun Interactive. Hilf is a graduate of Chapman University Graduate School.

After that, while he kept his interest in technology (mainly through gaming), he drifted away from the technical details. Bill certainly never thought he'd end up at a technology company. But after several years in the law, he needed a different challenge, and what could be a bigger challenge than championing Microsoft in the open source community.He loves working here and being part of the team that is making a difference at this company.

Brett Shoemaker Senior Product Manager: Virtualization and Interoperability

Brett drives Microsoft's interoperability efforts with Linux within the virtualization and virtualization management space. His work includes gathering market intelligence and product management of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper–V.

After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in business from Wake Forest University, Brett set out down the technology career path but quickly got sidetracked and ended up spending several years in management consulting. Determined to get more involved in technology, he returned to school and pursued my MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Sam Ramji Senior Director, Platform Strategy (Sam no longer works for Microsoft)

Sam started out on the Commodore PET 16K in the 70s, upgraded to one with a built-in tape drive (that was cool at the time!) and finally crawled into the 80s with a ZX Spectrum 48K. He find sit hard to remember whether he started playing games or programming first – and sometimes they were intermingled, hacking up existing games and learning silly tricks like PEEK and POKE to change the characters in a Dungeon Hack clone. Since then Sam has used Pascal, 68000 assembler, C, LISP, CLOS, C++, Java, VB, JSP, Javascript, VBscript, DCOM, J2EE, and 4GLs and macro languages that he'd much rather forget.

Sam still games often, but hasn't written production code in several years. He's been paid to write client, client/server, distributed, and web applications. Sam spent many years criticizing Microsoft and then was offered a chance to put his money where his mouth was and contribute to changing the company.

Garrett Serack Open Source Software Developer

Garrett Serack joined Microsoft in the fall of 2005 as the Community Program Manager of the Federated Identity team, and has worked with the companies and the open source community to build digital identity frameworks, tools, and standards that are shaping the future of Internet commerce and strengthening the fight against fraud.

In the summer of 2007, he transitioned to Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft where he works as a Software Development Engineer and operates closely with open source communities to improve the quality and performance of their software on the Windows Platform. Garrett has started a number of Open Source projects along with working as a committer on several other projects, including PHP itself.

Garrett's motto  is: "I don't make the software you use; I make the software you use better on Windows."

Bryan Kirschner Director, Open Source Strategy (Bryan no longer works for Microsoft)

Bryan's first IDE was a hand-me-down IBM flowcharting template from when ANSI X3.5 was still in draft, a pencil, and construction paper. Building on that auspicious beginning in elementary school, he accumulated a degree in philosophy from Yale University, spent several years applying a passion for statistics and operational research to policy analysis in the public sector, then joined Microsoft in 1999.

At Microsoft, he was the Director of Open Source Strategy, having previously built a primary research team in the Product Support organization and crunched numbers in the Finance organization.