Recently, Gianugo Rabellino moved to Redmond for a new job at Microsoft and left the open source company he had founded. Improving Microsoft’s credibility within open source circles is his goal. Rabellino believes that it’s the right time for Microsoft to boost its ties with some elements of the open source community as Microsoft has been taking several steps forward in the open source world. A brand new position has been created at Microsoft for Rabellino. Rabellino explains that his role would be to ensure that open source communities have a person to communicate with when interacting with Microsoft.

Rabellino hopes to level up the communications that are going on currently between open source communities and Microsoft. Though there are some controversial issues, progress has been observed as conversations become more specific, according to Rabellino. Michelangelo van Dam, who leads a PHP user group in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands states that Microsoft has been collaborating with PHP developers and has added hooks into Windows server 2008 to automate the process of running PHP apps. Dam adds that Microsoft has obtained a really important person from the open source community on their payroll with Rabellino who knows how all the backchannels and how the open source projects are managed.

Rabellino worked for various companies till 2006 when he founded Sourcesense, an open source services company with offices in Netherlands, United Kingdom and Italy. He left Sourcesense in May 2010 after serving as CEO for several years and consequently joined Microsoft. Just like Rabellino, Miguel de Icaza, creator of GNOME too has gotten flak from open source enthusiasts for admiring Microsoft and its ideologies from time to time. Rabellino’s interview with Microsoft was a two way street as he was expecting to interview the company to know if they were open to change.
According to Rabellino, Microsoft has to make concrete and sustainable efforts to engage the open source community and allow interoperability between Microsoft products and open source software. As the market has undergone a drastic change, Microsoft has warmed up towards open source. Microsoft still has large issues with the open source world after prohibiting developers from using GPLv3-licensed open source software in any application distributed in the Windows Phone Marketplace. By filing lawsuits involving the Linux based Android, Microsoft is still at odds with the open source community.

Enabling PHP to shine on Microsoft platforms is what Rabellino has been focusing on lately. He also believes that Microsoft’s open source licenses like the Microsoft Public license and the Microsoft Reciprocal License provide more patent protection than other routinely used open source licenses. When it boils down to patent language, Microsoft licenses have several advantages. The participatory community model shows its strength in projects like Wikipedia, aside from core software projects like Linux. Open source has a brilliant future, according to Ballerino. While it is going strong right now, it is about to get stronger and all the more pervasive.