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Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts

Posted by timothy on from the inspect-gift-horse-carefully dept.

prostoalex writes "Josh Ledgard from Microsoft, the developer responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL, is looking for opinions on what Microsoft should do next in regards to the open source movement that he himself established within the company. "Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?", asks Josh." Update: 08/24 19:04 GMT by T : As Ledgard writes on his site, "I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I cite them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in." Sorry for the misattribution!

3 of 427 comments (clear)

  1. Speaking as a developer with 20 years experience by Progman3K · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I think the best thing all developers can do is turn their backs on Microsoft and only target *nix platforms for any new development.

    It's best for the client, best for the industry and best for us as professionals in the long run.

    Microsoft is untrustworthy and by now is almost irrelevant.

    Rather than listen to promises from Microsoft, I prefer to steer any project I am responsible for towards something that will benefit the USERS, not Microsoft.

    --
    I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
  2. Re:Office.. by sql*kitten · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Don't you need to pay for office to get that COM object?

    Yes, that's true. But you have to pay for your PC too, does that mean that Linux isn't really free?

    Or pay bigtime to be allowed to distribute it?

    I don't know about distributing it - you just list Office among the requirements for the application. It's been a long time since I've seen a Windows PC without Word and Excel at least.

    Lastly, why did you put "open source" in quotation marks?

    'Cos it means different things to different people. Want some MS source code? Just look in Visual Studio, the code for MFC is right there! Go ahead and read it and modify it and whatever you want. But that wouldn't meet many people's definitions of "open source".

  3. Re:Thanks, but no thanks. by freality · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Agreed.

    Johnny come lately to the open-source party that IBM's using to eat your lunch with. Mmm, sweet irony.

    Be warned geeks. There's a heartless money grubbing corporation behind this innocent-sounding appeal. They lie.

    If they're serious about open-source, they know where to go:

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/

    This smells more like "Is there anything we can do to get buy-in from the Slashdot crowd?"