Open Source guru Sam Ramji quits Microsoft

BANGALORE, INDIA: Open Source Guru, Sam Ramji, has announced to leave Microsoft to join a cloud computing startup, CodePlex Foundation.

Ramji, who was till date senior director of Platform Strategy of Microsoft, had joined the company about five years ago. In his blog on typepad.com (http://samus.typepad.com/what/2009/09/moving-on-and-the-codeplex-foundation.html), he said, “After 5 great years at Microsoft I am moving on. I'll be joining a cloud computing startup later this month in Silicon Valley. It was a hard decision, as the time I've spent at that company has been both challenging and rewarding.”

Explaining the reasons for parting ways, he said that it was all for personal reasons; wife and family. “I have decided to move our family back to California. I decided that I could not do justice to a corporate/worldwide position from afar, and that I could not bear to live away from my family and commute to Seattle five days a week.”

Sharing his viewpoint about the open source, he said that, “I was certain that open source was an industry wave that Microsoft would not be able to ignore, and that it was getting closer to an inflection point.

He added, “I remember a sense of disbelief when I was first interviewed for the Open Source Technology Strategy role in December 2005 and Bill Hilf told me that one of the core responsibilities of the job would be a quarterly briefing with Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie on open source technology trends. On the other hand, he said it would involve external public speaking - primarily to fairly polarized audiences.”

As Ramji defines, CodePlex is a developer community infrastructure hosted by Microsoft on behalf of Open Source developers - a place for code from both Microsoft product teams and the community to reside and for the developers themselves to collaborate.