Speaking with my Microsoft Hat on, but not in an official capacity... In summary MS employees come from all over the world already. We are working hard on diversity within our workforce. All of those employees are encouraged to contribute upstream in order to enable 1st and 3rd party products. Some are required to do so, but they are a minority. If the ASF is not ready and able to work with the diversity found in a company like MS then there will be missed opportunities in ASF projects regardless of any efforts inside those companies.
In more detail... Need to think about two grips of staff 1) product groups who build solutions both in house and with partners. 2) field teams who deliver product, with partners, to customers (pre and post sales). Employees here in the product groups of MS are not employed to work on external open source, our contributions are a by-product of good software engineering practice (there are, of course, a few exceptions in which specific individuals are employed because of their roles within key open source projects). People are employed to work on a product and the product team as a whole will decide how to build it. Very often that includes contributions to open source, but people are rewarded for the success of their product not the success of the open source components within it. Good engineers will contribute to and rise open source when delivering product. As a multinational we have engineering centers across the globe. The core is in Redmond, Washington, US. We are working very hard to improve our diversity numbers and have made some good progress in recent years - still a very long way to go though. This effort is independent of open source activities. ASIDE: When MS is the "owner" of the open source there are plenty of people employed to work on the open source, e.g.. Net, visual studio code, typescript etc. But that's not going to help answer the original question. As Kenn suggests employees decide which projects they want to work on. This means some employees seek projects where open source opportunities are strongest, but they are self selecting. A lack of diversity in open source may be leading to a lack of diversity in our open source focused employees, or maybe the opposite is true. Most likely both. We do partner a great deal in delivery of product into the market. Often this involves collaboration in open source projects. In these cases we can have both direct and indirect contributions to the open source components. That is sometimes we work with the partner and they take that code and push upstream as appropriate for their strategy, other times we work directly on the open source to unlock a partner. In these cases we tend to be very much driven by the needs of our shared customers and thus the engineering talent will often be where the customer /partner is, supported by our product groups. In the case of MS this could be anywhere in the world. So, again, a lack of diversity inhibits contribution. Finally. There are our technical field teams and Systems Integrator partners. These folks deal directly with customers solving very specific problems. Engineering is always where the customer is and thus could be anywhere in the world and thus impacted by diversity issues. In my opinion, MS has done a really good job of enabling every one of our employees to contribute to open source (especially when one considers the history of the company). There has been massive cultural shift to enable this. But it's about empowering all individuals to contribute as they desire. That is, I'm not aware of D&I initiatives that target open source contribution. All our employees are expected to contribute as they need to. What this means, from an ASF perspective, is that we need to ensure anyone, anywhere in the world, can easily contribute. Any friction in the community will result in missed contributions of value. Worse still, it means missed opportunities to turn contributors into committers through specialization. This is not new for the ASF, but the ASF no longer lives in a technology world dominated by startups mostly in the US. In summary, MS employees come from all over the world already. We are working hard on diversity within our workforce. All of those employees are encouraged to contribute upstream in order to enable 1st and 3rd party products. Some are required to do so, but they are a minority. If the ASF is not ready and able to work with the diversity found in a company like MS then there will be missed opportunities in ASF projects regardless of any efforts inside those companies. Ross --- Sent from my phone, likely while waking down the stars and having a conversation. Sorry about my carelessness, I blame the machines. ________________________________ From: Justin Mclean <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2019 5:04:22 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Open source as employment? Hi, This may also be of use [1][2]. There's a section on employment. In short 70% are employed of those 65% contribute to OS, but less are allowed to contribute at work due to IP concerns. Thanks, Justin 1. https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fgithub%2Fopen-source-survey&data=02%7C01%7CRoss.Gardler%40microsoft.com%7Cc80065841cac44cbdbfe08d70bfe3b6c%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C1%7C636991058852817091&sdata=JJ6f8pl8L6co%2FH5RNYXfWUCLMX7ncGJCfN2ze2rHewo%3D&reserved=0 2. https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopensourcesurvey.org%2F2017%2F&data=02%7C01%7CRoss.Gardler%40microsoft.com%7Cc80065841cac44cbdbfe08d70bfe3b6c%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C1%7C636991058852817091&sdata=v9Y%2FMeTj0tMjIhYPQyOgqHzkrnCBntUzKl7c3VTgcB8%3D&reserved=0
