Gianugo Rabellino has a solid history of leadership in the open source community: He founded the Italian Linux Society, served as CEO of open source services company Sourcesense for many years and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Although he calls himself “a hard-core Debian-ista,” he recently traded his Mac and Linux PCs for a Windows 7 system when he took a newly created position at Microsoft.
“My role is to make sure that open source communities have a go-to person to talk to when it comes to having conversations with Microsoft,” Rabellino explains. “My hope is that I may be able to bring the conversation to the next level.”
He notes that reaching out to developers is very important to Microsoft and that “developers nowadays are mostly to be found in the open source world. We need to go where they are.”
