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Microsoft recruits latest open source expert

If you can't beat em...

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Software & Security, 13th June 2007 01:37 GMT

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Tom Hanrahan has left the Linux Foundation, where he was director of engineering, to work for Microsoft instead.

His job as director of Linux Interoperability is to to get Windows working with Novell. That means directing work marrying up Windows and SuSE Linux in virtualization, Active Directory and eDirectory on directory and identity, and on systems management.

Sam Ramji, director of platform technology strategy, said Hanrahan has "much to teach us on 'developing in the open' - how to work in a transparent way with a broad engineering community."

Hanrahan, who has more than 30 years software development experience, is Microsoft's latest open source hire in a policy that began with Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy in charge of leading long-term platform strategy and planning for the company's server and tools division. Hilf had led IBM's Linux and open source software technical strategy. Microsoft has also been cherry picking talent from the scripting language community.

Hanrahan, also an ex-IBMer who was in charge of software development and testing, joins from the Linux Foundation that was formed from the merger this year of the Open Source Development Labs and Free Software Group. The Foundation has positions itself as an advocate of Linux and bulwark against legal suits arising from SCO Group's long-running prosecution of IBM.®

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