 Hey, welcome to another episode of Azure Unblocked. I'm here with Rene, who is the open source lead of Microsoft Western Europe, and we're going to talk about open source at Microsoft, so stay tuned. Hi, my name is Thomas Maurer, and I'm here with Rene and as I said, he is the open source lead for Microsoft Western Europe. Rene, how are you doing and can you explain me what your job is as open source lead? Of course I can. Hi, everybody. My name is Rene Moldejoen, and I'm responsible for open source within Western Europe. It's quite a big thing, but it's quite a broad thing obviously. My role involves it. I promote the OSS motions throughout our sales motions within the region. So that means on the migrate parts, we support also the OSS motions focusing on Linux, for instance, and OSS databases. I also support the innovate part, where I'm working together with lots of colleagues, so somebody's owning the innovate motion over there, which talks about cloud-native applications. So through all the reason, I want to make sure that open source is an important topic. All right. To be honest, open source at Microsoft sounds like, I think for a lot of people, still very, very strange and difficult. But you also have that history, right? This is not the first time you're in contact with open-source technology. Where have you worked before or what have you done before? I mean, my great beard actually tells that I have a little bit of history in IT. Actually, if I only going to focus on the OSS parts, I started my career at Red Hat back in 2009, where I progressed my career over there, and I started as a stellar when I move into leadership roles over there, pushing the open-source message. Back in 2009, there weren't a lot of companies using embracing open-source to the extent that we see right now. So it was pretty appealing to be part of that organization at that point in time, and see also the open-source motion grow. Afterwards, I joined Microsoft, and then somebody stepped up and said, Renee, I'm setting up this company called Docker. Do you want to be part of this? So I've been a year, I think almost two years out where I joined Docker, also to set up Docker in the EMEA region. That involves lots of travel, but also lots of evangelizing the whole container motion. So I was pretty happy to be part of that motion. But then Microsoft came back and said, well, we have this position called open-source leaders for Western Europe. Would you be interested? I applied, have a multiple candidates obviously, and I'm extremely happy that I got the job because I get to do what I do right now, is represent Microsoft and at the same time, also represent this open-source motion. Yeah. To be honest, we are definitely happy to have you back here. So again, I want to come back to this and ask you a little bit about the open-source at Microsoft. I know that a lot of people are going to watch this, and they're going to say, hey, Microsoft is that company, which is not really still not having that reputation for doing an open-source. I know personally, and we talked about this, we were actually doing a lot in the open-source field. But can you a little bit explain and more how, especially also the history and how this new wave of Microsoft basically started? There are a couple of ways to answer this question. We can take a look at the facts, and the facts also talk about the number of contribution were part of multiple foundations. But what I did the last year, I've presented at lots of different forums, whether it was Red Hat or open-source forums, where I got to also present the history of open-source in combination with Microsoft. I don't want to spend too much time on all the details, but I think it basically all changed for the general audience when Satya came on board. That's his famous picture where Satya is explaining IT, and then suddenly this picture pops up, Microsoft loves Linux. To the external world, this was like, hey, Microsoft and open-source, what's going on? But I think Satya made a really important statement in that presentation. He said, judge us by the action we've taken in the recent past, our actions to date, and in the future. Actually meaning, of course, we have a history and we will never neglect that history, and we know where we're coming from. But at the same time, if you take a look what we're doing, how we're embracing open-source nowadays. A couple of examples, of course, we did a DICE acquisition. There was a company, Gabe Molderoy was part of it, for instance. We acquired the company because of their Kubernetes skills and also the people in there. The majority of the team actually stayed within Microsoft because they also were bought into the idea of, hey, Microsoft and open-source, that is really a combination. Another example and also a great example is what we're doing has to do with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We're a big contributor also of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where Microsoft people are also contributing. Not only that one, we have the Linux Foundation and there are multiple other examples where you can definitely see how we're contributing. If I talk about open-source strategy, there are a couple of parts where we are focusing on. Of course, first, it's enabling open-source use cases in the Clouds. To us, Azure is a big Cloud. We want to be the best Cloud out on the world, and we want to make sure that we offer the best use case and the best also experience for our users. That means we also enable these open-source use cases, talking about Docker, talking about Linux, talking about Java, talking about all kinds of other technologies in there. That's the first one, that's the enabled part. On the integrate part, we want to make sure that we integrate open-source technologies in our platform. A couple of examples are Hadoop, for instance, Spark, there's MySQL, and there are multiple other technologies that we're making part also of our offerings. The third part is the release part. We want to make sure that we also give back, and what we're giving back is, for instance, .NET Core-based has been open-source, PowerShell, and there are so many different other examples that I can think of that we also open-source. There's also this big patents, the Open Invention Network. Not a lot of people are aware of this, by the way, but we donated, I think, two billion worth of patents to this specific Open Invention Network community, so they can leverage also this technology which is part of these patents. I think that's also a good proof point where we are also releasing or we're also giving back to the community. The last part I already mentioned, which is the contribute part, we are contributing to all kinds of different communities, including the ones we already mentioned. Last but not least, in the old days, I mean, we're an open company. We want to make sure that we are an open company. This is open-source T-shirt and open at Microsoft in here, and what I mean by that, we want to make sure that we partner with the larger ecosystem. So we partner with Red Hat, we partner with SUSE, we partner with Canonical, we partner with Pivotal, it's Tensu nowadays, of course, Redis Labs, so there are multiple partners that we want to make sure that we go to market with together that can offer the solutions on our platform. Does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. I'm really stunned by all the work we are doing, and all the different initiatives we have running, right? For me, when I had personally just look at what we did, and what I saw, what we did in open-source, I mean, I just had a very small view on what we're actually doing. Especially when we looked at, for me, it was always like the contribution, for example, we did on the Hyper-V kernel done by the Hyper-V team, for example, to make sure that Linux runs really, really well on Hyper-V on our virtualization platform, but also then obviously on Azure as well, right? So it's just making like, this is just one of the basic parts, right? This is one which probably was more for us than for others, but then we also, as you said, we shape a lot of other things which to make other lives better, right? Yeah, and that's also, of course, we want to empower every individual and organization in the world to achieve more. And of course, I've added some words, the open-source way. We want to make sure that we include also the open-source technology to the same mission statement. And also what I mentioned in the contribution part is really important to us. We do not only want to take stuff from the open-source community, now we want to make sure that we're part of it and that we give back to the communities. I think that's crucial. It's collaboration, it's sharing those are the foundation of open-source and we want to make sure that we live up to those. And if I take a look, I was talking about numbers a little bit. If I just share a couple of numbers of the number of contributions that we're making and the numbers of commits that we're making, I think more than 6,000 people are contributing, Microsoft people I'm talking about. They're worth for, I think they're good for two million commits, OSS commits, whether that's part of the Linux project or other open-source projects, it doesn't matter. I think that's quite amazing already. And that number goes up significantly. So I think that's also something that we're seeing right now. And we don't develop stuff and throw it back over the wall, but we want to work together with the open-source community. I think that's also a good statement to make. Yeah, no, I'm always impressed by these numbers. And I really like what we are doing there. What I also find very impressive and one of the numbers I know, I don't know how it is exactly right now, but I remember when we basically created PowerShell Core 6 and PowerShell 7, the team made this open-source. And after a while, there is this Power BI dashboard out there who shows the commits and contributions to PowerShell, for example. And we realized that like over 50% of like contributions are coming from the community and not from Microsoft because like people are so excited about and they can actually help working on these products. And same thing with like new things like the Vinget client or the Windows terminal and all of those cool tools we release now as open-source. So people can actually contribute. Absolutely. I mean, the subsystem for Linux, of course, that's also something that you're involved in. I think there are so many things that we can share from that side. And I think the cool thing about open-source is that there are less limitations whatsoever. I think the community is almost limitless. The sky is the limit. So you can do whatever makes sense. And the value that comes out of it is working the open-source way. I think that's quite significant already. And the way that Microsoft is embracing that I think is quite astonishing. And I'm really, really, really happy to have the possibility to represent that motion. No, that's, again, I'm really excited about all these things happening. Another question I have, and obviously it's not just, as you said, it's not just about Microsoft and it's not just about what we do and all that and not just about the community. But you also, obviously, we are collaborating with a lot of other companies like let's say Suzy, Canonical. And again, you mentioned a couple of them before. How do you feel about their, like how do they think about Microsoft working with them? What is their expectations? How do they feel about this situation? I think let's take one example. Let's take Red Hat. I mean, when I was still part of Red Hat collaborating together with Microsoft, I mean, they've been working together with us for over 10 years. But the last couple of years, you can see that collaboration being increased even more. Despite the fact, of course, that they were required by IBM. It's all about, you know, we still wanna make sure that we put somebody on top of everything, which is the customer. And the customer expects also this integrated motion together. They've got good solutions. We got a good solutions. They wanna make sure that these integrated solutions have a good SLA and that they also have some support. So that's what we're doing. For instance, together with Red Hat, where we have joint engineering, joint support, and it's not only Red Hat, by the way, we offer the same also together with SUSE. But in case of Red Hat, let me give you one example. We just released, last year was already released, but we just released the newest version of a product called Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is an integrated solution based on OpenShift technology, but it runs on Azure as a managed service. And all the work that has been going on behind the scenes, making sure that that is really a well integrated solution and also a really good experience for the end customer. That was something that we needed to be on top of. So all the R&D people were working together. All the commercial people are working together now to position this well together with the customers. The support departments needed to be aligned so that we have this. You can call them and you don't know whether you got a Red Hat support engineer on the line or Microsoft. It doesn't matter. They're gonna solve your issue. And I think that was practically, nobody would have thought of that years and years and years ago, and that's something that we're executing as we speak. And that's only one example of many. And I think that's really outstanding that we're seeing right now. Yeah. No, I couldn't agree with you more. It's really fantastic to see where these partnerships are going. Also with the announcement, I think especially on the side we have with Azure Arc and the support for OpenShift and then as well as on the Azure Stack side and in the whole hybrid space we are in. Oh, yeah. So just to wrap this up a little bit. So if I wanna know more, if I'm now watching this video and if I wanna know more about what is Microsoft doing in the open source space, where would I go? Where do you would recommend? Where can I find more about open source at Microsoft? I think there's open at Microsoft, which is a Twitter handle, but there's also a lot of information behind there. And also on the website, there is a specific section also that talks about the collaboration that we have with Azure, the general open source topics. If you have specific questions, always good to reach out to me. I mean, more than happy. I will make sure to put my Twitter handle also in the comments below. It's really easy. It's my last name, ModoJonga. So it's Ed ModoJonga, which is my Twitter handle. So ask me any questions you want. I will make sure to answer all of them. Yeah, and again, there, this whole open source motion, it's so evolving. Things are changing so much. And then you were talking about Azure Arc and we had Scott Gertry in a keynote together with Red Hat CEO also to discuss, you know, the integration of Azure Arc in combination also together with OpenShift and there are multiple other examples that we can think of, stay tuned. I mean, that's basically the message. There's so much more we will share. And yeah, that also brings me to another subject that we're briefly gonna handle. In order to promote this more, we're also setting up open source conferences. And in case of what we're setting up now is we're setting up a virtual open source summit and we're gonna have the first European edition shortly. I think it's gonna be less than a month. There's gonna be the 16th of June. This is the first of many. So we expect to have more also in the next fiscal year. And that's a really good moment for yourself to get to know more what we offer when it comes to open source at Microsoft. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that one. I also saw that there is a amazing speaker list. There you have people from, I think from Suzy, but also even Microsoft. I think you will have Scott Hanselman and others, right? Yeah, I mean, it all started pretty small to be really open with you guys. I mean, what we basically did is you have this guy and I have a dream. Hey, we had a dream here in Europe. We wanted to set up a really amazing open source summit. So it started small. What we ended up with is we're gonna have 30 net new sessions. So that means 30 new recordings. So it's all gonna be pre-recorded. We're gonna have four different tracks. So it's gonna be an infrared track. And I know some guy in this call, Thomas is also gonna be part of that track. We're gonna have an innovation track talking about cloud native. We're gonna have a dedicated data and AI track talking about all the OSS database and all the difference. There's so much technology. There's so much going on on the innovation side in that track. So please also make sure to tune into that one. And the last one is a developer track where Scott Hanselman is gonna be. We're gonna have two keynotes. We have, I don't know what we did, but we managed to get net Freedmen CEO of GitHub to do the first keynote. Stephanie Shiraz from Red Hat is gonna be the next keynote. And then we're gonna break up in these tracks where these four different tracks are gonna be recorded. There are all times in there and some of the names you already mentioned. We have Scott Hanselman. We've got Ulrich Hohmann. We have Gabe Montroy. We have Brandon Burns. We have John Gosman who's part of the Linux Foundation. So, and from the partner side, we also have a great lineup. We've got 10 open source partners also contributing. We have even CEOs that are promoting the event on our behalf. So, this is gonna be massive. So, if you have the possibility, please tune in the 16th of June. I think it's gonna be aka.ms-ms-v-o-s-s. So, Microsoft Virtual Open Source Summit. You can register over there. If you wanna know the link, also let me know. And if it's after the dates, stay tuned to find the next one. No, thank you very much for sharing that. Again, just by listing all the speakers and the companies who are involved in that, I was like, hey, we need to spend much more time talking about this. Unfortunately, we don't have time in this video. So, I really wanna say thank you. I wanna say thank you to all the listeners here. And I really hope to see you in the next video. Thank you.