OStatic

Many of the news outlets are hyping Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's comments on open source Thursday at the Most Valuable Professional Summit in Seattle. As I thought was true when Senior Vice President, Corporate Secretary and General Counsel Brad Smith wooed the open source community at OSBC in San Francisco, much of this looks to be PR in advance of the company's proposed acquisition of Yahoo.

Microsoft's eye on Yahoo seems to me to be a big part of why the top executives--Ballmer, Ozzie, Smith--are whispering sweet nothings about open source. Still, ever since his days at Lotus and Groove Networks, Ozzie has really known software, and almost always has something interesting to say. He did on Thursday.

InfoWorld quotes Ozzie as saying: "Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source," Ozzie said. "As people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and others has increased. That means that from the very start when Microsoft begins developing new products, it considers what components it will want to open up to outside developers." Ozzie cited the .NET framework as an example of how the company is trying to offer things to open sourcers. And, of course, Microsoft recently made sweeping changes to some of its interoperability policies.

There is some truth to that comment about Microsoft's own products, and Microsoft's commitment to the Apache POI project is evidence that it's not completely shutting out the open source world anymore. Still, the number of positive comments about open source coming from the absolute top execs at Microsoft make me believe even more that some of this talk is PR surrounding the proposed Yahoo acquisition. That move looks like it's about to get downright Hatfield-and-McCoy hostile, and Yahoo is noted for its long-standing open kimono toward open source tools and protocols.

Interestingly, InfoWorld also quotes Ozzie as possibly foreshadowing a mobile technology announcement at the Web 2.0 conference next week: "The Web really is a hub. It can be viewed conceptually as a hub for a social mesh and device mesh. Using the Internet as a hub for a social mesh means people can connect a wide range of online content like information they tag and rank, content they publish and information they subscribe to." Ozzie has discussed mesh architectures on more than one occasion.

Ozzie also made positive comments about virtualization, especially in terms of the cost and security benefits it can offer in data centers. Definitely check out his other comments. but I'd take the open source comments with a grain of salt--or ten.

For more thoughts from Ozzie, see Om's excellent interview with him. Do you think Microsoft's recent praise for open source rings of public relations?

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• Virtualization