People trying to get a sense for Microsoft's direction will be listening closely in the coming months to Ray Ozzie, who has assumed the role of chief software architect in advance of Bill Gates ending his full-time role. In Seattle this morning, Ozzie spoke on a variety of topics at the annual conference of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals, outside experts on the company's products. Among other things, he was asked for his view on the key issue of open-source software. Excerpts from his comments:

My position toward open source generally is that it's a part of the environment. It's very useful for developers to be able to get the source code to certain things, to modify them. Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open-source as people have been using it more and more. The nature of interoperability between our systems and other systems has increased. I can tell you from an inside perspective ... when you build a new product, immediately you start thinking, how shall this product expose its APIs. ...

Open source is a reality. We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically, depending on how you look at it, will take certain aspects of what we do and we will open-source them where we believe there is a real benefit to the community and to the nature of the growth of that technology in open-sourcing it. ... The bottom line is we believe very much in the quality of Microsoft products and we are an (intellectual-property) based business. But we live in a world together with open-source, and we have to make it possible for you to build solutions, or customers to build solutions, that incorporate aspects of that.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is on stage now. More to come.