Microsoft pulls community manager from press corps
When eWeek's Peter Galli wrote last year about Microsoft fracturing the open-source community, who could have known that he would become the very person chosen to strengthen the software giant's role in it?
This past week, Galli accepted a job as the newest member of Microsoft's open-source team, focused on community relations. According to an internal e-mail sent out by Robert Duffner, Microsoft's senior director of Platform Strategy:
It is my great pleasure in welcoming Peter Galli who is joining Microsoft as Senior Communications Manager on the Platform Strategy team. This is a unique opportunity for the Platform Strategy team to leverage Peter's talents and experience as he plays a key role in setting strategy for our Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community marketing efforts. Peter's distinguished career as a journalist, his illustrious tenure at eWeek, his intimacy of our customer's voice, and his impactful storytelling will offer us a force multiplier in our ability to change customer and industry perceptions as we reach broader audiences.
Galli is the latest member of the media to find himself joining a company he once covered. Joe Brockmeier, former editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine, joined Novell last year as its OpenSuse community manager. I guess this means it's about time for John Markoff to leave The New York Times to head up Google's community relations. :-)
On Galli, I've found him to be fair in his past coverage of open source. Let's hope it stays that way.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
