NEW DELHI: A bright sunny afternoon and plush green lawns of capital city's Habitat Center were a perfect setting for a gathering of open source enthusiasts to network and share notes about the conference and inputs given by speakers at Linux Asia 2007.

One could however sense slight disappointment amongst the participants. While some thought that speakers spoke more on general stuff and less about open source, few others thought that there was a cut down on sessions as compared to previous years. However, the general feel at the conference was that the event was completely hijacked by Microsoft.

Was it because MS was one of the main sponsors for the event? Why did MS' presence put attendees in an uncomfortable zone? MS has recently shown signals of patching up with the open source community; is this a part of MS' strategy to get friendly with the community? Or was it there to tap the community before they start swearing by open source? Or convey the message 'let's walk hand-in-hand'? We caught with Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director Platform Strategy, MS India to get MS' perspective.

"We are here to talk to customers who are thinking about interoperability and bridge the two worlds. We are strong believers of interoperability and have given proof of that in many of our products, for example Windows Server 2003 has a Unix sub system. We want our customers to leave this debate behind, and move on, making use of both the technologies. We would want our customers to make rational decisions on total cost of ownership (TCO)," informed Radhesh.

"As far as making the source code available, we at MS strongly feel that there is a need to protect intellectual property (IP) as it is the economic incentive to create better solutions. However, we do not refute the other school of thought, which is why we have created platforms like Codeplex. Microsoft is a part of all standard bodies, and we actively participate in creating open standards for our customers."

In his reply to the general thought at the conference - MS was there to woo developers before they get hooked on to open source, Radhesh replied, "We are not devils; we are here to help customers to help them achieve interoperability at all levels. We just want to convey that interoperability could have been the focus, should have been the focus and let's do it now. We are here to address concerns of open source developers. We want to develop to make life of developers easy such that they can create richer applications."

Is the open source community listening? We would love to hear back from you on this. Do leave us a feedback or mail me at aparnal@cybermedia.co.in with your thoughts.