Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts

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!

Comments

OpenSource IE

[drater]

Open Source IE. That's what they should do.

Opensource whatever, I'm not interested

[Pingo]

I don't see any point in opensourcing any
Microsoft software except for Windows Media Player series 9 with codecs, perhaps also
Windows Media Encoder could be of some interest. //Pingo

Why ask first?

[houghi]

What I think is distuurbing that they want to askt this question. Just start the project and see who is interested. If it is interesting, people will jump aboard. If not, people will not.

It almost looks as if they know that the OSS comunity will spit them out and then the can play the underdog.

If people are interested, they can first play the nice guy who allowed the OSS comunity what they wanted and then let it blow up to proove that OSS does not work.

This is a win-win situation for them. So my question to them is, if you think that Open Source is so good, when can we help you with other parts that ARE interesting (and who need to be open by European court desision anyway). If you truly believe the project is interesting, it will create followers. If not, it will die a silent dead, as many projects that were started.

I would

[Apreche]

If Microsoft started open source projects, with "real" open source licenses I would be glad to work on them under two conditions. First, the project has to interest me. That's rather obvious that since open source work is volunteer that nobody is going to work on something that doesn't interest them. The second thing is it has to be software I can use. Since I don't run windows there are probably going to be very few MS OSS projects I would work on.

What MS SHOULD do is appeal to all the Windows developers out there. Yes, there are people out there who live in Visual Studio and love windows. They should get these people to fix all the bugs in windows and IE and such. There are people out there, willing and able to do work which the internal MS developers have failed to do multiple times over. Give someone else a try.

DirectX

[GuyFawkes]

Because it is the one area where MS completely and utterly destroys Linux and the one are where Linux really needs to grow up.

Course, it won't happen, ever.

Code contribution tracking

[afreniere]

I'm being a weenie and posting this to an early reply because I think it's one of the few thoughtful replies. :P

One of the major potential benefits of contributing to open-source projects is that, when searching for a future programming job, one can point to one's open-source contributions and say "Here's some of my code, and people are using it." This works especially if one has contributed to a project with prestige - something that a Microsoft-sanctioned project would certainly have in the closed-source corporate world.

However, it can be difficult to pick out the code that one has contributed from a large project and say, "yeah, download this tgz and look at kluge.cpp lines 377-421, that's my code!" So I would propose, as a carrot to your future open-source contributors, that you design a system that keeps a database of who contributed code, how old it is, and maybe some other statistics about it. You could post a summary page for each contributor with browseable links to the code and statistics.

-Ansel.