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

Re:Future Open Source efforts?

[iendedi]

I quote:

Windows Template Library (WTL) is a C++ library for developing Windows applications and UI components. It extends ATL (Active Template Library) and provides a set of classes for controls, dialogs, frame windows, GDI objects, and more.

Looks to me like something completely strapped to Windows. More like example code from VC++ than Open Source, if you ask me.

Re:Future Open Source efforts?

[rokzy]

no.

Nothing new there.

[twitter]

Microsoft is the king of free beer, but that's not enough anymore. Every version of Windoze has been easy to "pirate" and they have been giving it away to "decision makers" forever. That's why it's entrenched in business schools and many big dumb companies. What happened next was date rape and a big hang over. Few people will continue to be fooled when cheaper and better software is all around them.

Nothing short of complete software freedom will gain them much interest from the free software community. Who really wants to donate time or money to the people funding SCO and other nightmares? Even if they did free all of their code it's so tortured that it would take years to tame it and bring it up to par.

What do they have that's worth the effort? Who wants a single user, single screen GUI that's mixed up with low level floppy access? All the real rendering stuff belongs to Nvidia and ATI. Who wants Outlook? Word formats have already been decoded by Sun and friends. IE sucks. If M$ put their codebase up on Sourceforge tomorrow, there'd be an initial flurry of interest, but it would mostly be people looking to make migrating away from Windoze easier.