John Lam takes inspiration from Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate physicist with an innate curiosity that made him seek out answers simply for the sake of seeking. "It was the art of discovering what the answer was that made him tick," says Lam.

Lam, like many developers, got his start on a Commodore 64. He then moved on to the undiscovered world of Delphi, a place where his curiosity would roam with few distractions - a place where he could make a name for himself. "Nobody had ever written code in this thing before, so I was able to take that, marry it with another technology that nobody else understood or knew called Object Linking Embedding."

Around 2003, Lam started working with open source. He'd taught developers, so sharing ideas was natural and attractive. "A lot of our intellectual property law is all about trying to restrict ideas, and restrict the spread of ideas. I think there is a lot of benefit that can come from being able to create, essentially, a common source of ideas that can be freely used and changed and mixed and remixed; so that new things can happen and arise as a result."

Lam says the "coolest thing" about open source is the people. "You get to meet a lot of people with really interesting and grand ideas." Now Lam's trying to bring Microsoft and the open source community together. "I think it's important for Microsoft to figure out how to do this stuff, and how to do it in the right way, which doesn't wind up threatening or encroaching on existing businesses."

Besides helping Microsoft better understand and incorporate open source approaches, he's helping customers "who don't have lot of exposure to dynamic languages" and who could benefit from Lam's work with IronRuby. "The productivity gains that we can bring to them, by allowing them to use a language like Ruby and some of the libraries that are inspired by that language, are really going to do wonderful things for our customers—the folks who are building software to run on top of our platforms."

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Each Pack contains free evaluation editions of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and the essentials for getting started with open source. Plus, randomly hidden in the Packs are 10 vouchers for free passes to the Open Source Convention (OSCON) this summer.