Solving Microsoft's Linux problem

...with Microsoft's internal IT folks to explain the Linux lab's needs. He found himself speaking a foreign tongue to a shop that acts as a test bed for Microsoft software but has little experience with rival products.

"As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft," Microsoft CIO Ron Markezich said in a December interview. "My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world. It's an easy choice for me, in that sense, to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server."

Not surprisingly, Markezich's underlings were a little stymied by Hilf's requests.

"After a lot of discussion, they said: 'We're going to put a piece of fibre through the wall. What you do from there is up to you. Just make sure you follow our security guidelines,'" Hilf recalled.

Inside the egg
Though the Linux lab chief was able to set up his own networking layers, it was a challenge to get access to things like email and instant messaging. Even browsing the Internet was hard.

"We are this hugely mixed environment inside the egg of a totally Microsoft IT environment," Hilf said.

More than once, Hilf was thwarted by bugs — glitches in Microsoft software, glitches in open source products and even in third-party software designed to help the two technologies talk to each other.

One example, Hilf said, was on the instant-messaging side. There was an IM client called Gaim that allowed connectivity to MSN instant messaging, but the program was not able to use the HTTP protocol, the only technology means available to Hilf. So he set his team of open source software experts to write the needed patch. He submitted it to the open source group that oversees Gaim's development and the changes were accepted.

"Now we can use it, and so can everyone else who uses Gaim," Hilf said.

In other cases, the glitches were on the Microsoft end, and Hilf said he let the Microsoft product teams know about them.

These days, Hilf is able to do more than just pass bug reports along to the Microsoft product teams. One big area of work focuses on the "R2" update to Windows Server 2003 that Microsoft plans for later this year. The update will include an overhaul of the current "Services For Unix" tools that currently ship with Windows.

"We're right now running a whole battery of tests across AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, tons and tons of Linux, even Mac OS X, making sure that (R2) really holds water," Hilf said.

As a lifetime Unix guy, Hilf believes he is helping Microsoft to help make Windows a better option for companies than either Windows or Linux are today.

"At the end of the day, we're in it for business reasons," he said. "I exist for business reasons. I do not exist as a PR stunt or as sort of an olive branch.