Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community
Roundtable Q&A: Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, and Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, discuss the company's release of Linux device driver code under General Public License v2.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has spent four years building toward this moment: the 2005 conversations with OSI about shared-source licenses opened the licensing question, and the open-source strategy Bill Hilf laid out in 2007 was followed that same summer by commercial bridge deals — the Xandros collaboration agreement and an Xandros distribution partnership plus a similar pact with LG. Those were all licensing arrangements between companies; none put Microsoft's own code inside the GPL ecosystem.
The release of roughly 20,000 lines of Linux device-driver code under GPL v2 — announced through a Q&A with Platform Strategy senior director Sam Ramji and Open Source Technology Center director Tom Hanrahan, and picked up under headlines like 'Pigs do fly' — is different in kind. It is the first time Microsoft has contributed directly to the Linux kernel rather than brokering around it.
First-order effects
- Linux distributors and kernel maintainers receive working device drivers for running Windows Server as a guest on Linux-based hypervisors, closing an interoperability gap they previously had to engineer or license around themselves.
- Sam Ramji and Tom Hanrahan's teams become active upstream contributors, meaning Microsoft now maintains code whose acceptance into the mainline kernel depends on community review it does not control.
Second-order effects
- Commercial rivals such as Red Hat gain virtualization interoperability for free that they might otherwise have had to develop in-house or negotiate for — undercutting the value of paid interop bridges like the Xandros model.
- Other proprietary vendors holding back from GPL contributions face a new benchmark: if Microsoft will ship GPLv2 code, the 'GPL is poison' argument loses its most prominent corporate sponsor.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward interop being settled in the kernel tree rather than at the negotiating table — a shift from bilateral patent-and-licensing pacts to upstream contribution as the default mechanism for cross-platform compatibility.
- If the contribution holds, the Linux Foundation-era kernel consolidates further as the neutral substrate where even competitors meet, raising the strategic cost for any vendor still outside the tree.
The trend: Microsoft is moving from treating the GPL as a legal threat and licensing around it to participating in the Linux kernel itself, completing an arc that began with the 2005 OSI discussions and the 2007 Xandros and LG agreements.