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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!
I remember editing the source for Gorilla.bas
Women. Lots of women. Covered in baby oil, writhing around me as I did the work for Microsoft.
Open Source IE. That's what they should do.
He keeps saying that he wants the users to give him feedback on what MS needs to improve and if people would be willing to contribute to the programming, but no where does the software get mentioned as becoming free, or even discounted, but "improved, repackaged, and resold." This seems more like customer service than "open sourcing."
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
yes, girls read /. too...
If he wants free-as-in-speech contributions, he should dole out some free-as-in-beer. Everyone knows that beer looseneth the tongue.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?
Eh, a small slice of the profits they make from selling the fruits of my labour would be nice.
Um, yea, as the article states: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/
...or at least give .doc format(s) specifications (if they even exist)
Open up the file formats for Word documents so that other programs (e.g. Open Office) can correctly decode the formatting.
Before I get modded into non-existence for asking the rhetorical question that I did, I want to clarify.
Outside of source with bizarre licenses, source that clearly furthers a Microsoft agenda (such as the Installer SDK Wix), etc..., does anything substantial exist?
Is there a single Open Source project out of Microsoft with a reasonable license that is worth anything in and of itself?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Yes, they even won an award for that one.
Basically there are only three points
- To push competitors out of the field by offering their products for free. This is a more agressive version of what MS did with Netscape. SAP and IBM are using this to attack Oracle and MS.
- To establish own standards and push competing approaches out of the way. Stuff like TCP/IP and XML come into mind...
- To grab control of a competitor's standard base by offering free tools for a modified version.
That's the main point of the Eclipse project targeted at SUN.
So, OSS can strenghten/enlarge your own market share greatly but I don't see people making money by OSS directly.No, RMS getting donated money to get a shower doesn't count.
1) Microsoft quit funding "independent" bogus TCO research to discredit OS operating systems. Oh yeah, and call off SCO.
2) Microsoft quit attempting to make all of their file formats dependent upon the OS/software that they write. The data is MINE, and I should be able to use other software to read the data. Commit to open file formats and I'd look a lot more favorably on MS.
3) Microsoft quit using draconian EULAs that make me fear that any contribution I made to a MS effort would be locked away for good once MS got a hold of it.
4) Money. Truckloads of it.
Well, maybe not so much 4, but the first 3 would be a good start.
My problem is that I've got such a bad image of Microsoft after working with their stuff for the past 12 years or so that at the end of the day I'd rather contribute effort to a "real" open source effort than anything funded by Microsoft. I just don't trust them to "do the right thing" with anything that came out of an OSS initiative.
They could stop being evil for a start. Those sessions in the boardroom that end with Bill Gates going "Bwahahahah" really have to stop.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I don't see any point in opensourcing any //Pingo
Microsoft software except for Windows Media Player series 9 with codecs, perhaps also
Windows Media Encoder could be of some interest.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
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.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I remember fixing bugs in QBasic Nibbles. There were two notable ones, as I recall: First, if you hit Pause, and your target number was located in the same part of the screen where the Pause box showed up, it wasn't redrawn and basically turned invisible. Second was a UI tweak/bug: they turned off Number Lock, but not until all the screens asking you for... numbers. =b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
but I'd rather see them pay more attention to open standards, and "opening" their file formats/protocols.
This is what I seem to be reading:
"Wouldn't it be great if you all improved Visual Studio or whatever for us free of charge between releases and then wouldn't it be cool if we kept your improvements and then sell them in our next version of Visual Studio."
I'm not sure that is a standard definition of Open Source Development.
No, really. I don't think that MS needs to release Office under gpl or anything silly like that. If they really wanted to show that they have changed, they should embrace open standards. Free for any to read, understand and implement. They should make sure that these standards were royalty free, that they could be used equally by any and all developers. They should refrain from later extending these standards with closed code. In short - if they cared they would stop being assholes and fight fair.
Not that I expect it to happen... but it is a nice thought.
Someone needs to
1) sit him down
2) quietly cup their mouth as they bend down to whisper something in his ear
3) then scream at the top of their lungs...
"WE DON'T LIKE, WE NEVER LIKED YOU, AND WE NEVER WILL!!!"
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What I would like to work on is fixing some of the 'standards' Microsoft proclaims to abide. It would allow other products to interoperate with MS software and allow fair competition. But hey, somehow I think that MS won't feel happy for these contributions.
This is a replacement signature.
I'm sure open-source means 'the source is freely available', not 'the source must run on linux/unix'?
I believe that is 'cross platform' instead.
For so many years, Microsoft has brought useless fileformats to complete with those that already exist. Stop trying to innovate and start supporting the open standards. Did we really need BMP? How come PNG is so lamely supported? How about pushing Ogg Vorbis/Theora with your media player?
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Though I would pay attention if they open sourced
What they should try doing is participating with the community rather than trying to harvest/divide it. Ship perl, python, apache... Work with some of these open source projects. Show this isnt headed the direction of mosaic, embraced and extinguished mit licensed works.
Show this isnt just some game. Otherwise, have fun.
MSFT's culture is bankrupt. They have little to bring to the table. Show they are changing their culture, come out and play.
Opensource the API, then you'lll suddenly have a lot more coders working on your system. The way I see it, Microsoft doesn't need to cpmete for customer base any more.
They need to compete for coder base, as we're approaching a time when the system will be sold not on its own merits but on those of the applications it runs. This is already the case in enterprise computing and can only grow.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
As the recent article from ecommercetimes.com mentioned on Slashdot states, Microsoft makes the majority of it's profits by selling Windows and MS Office. Even though it would slightly knock their O/S sales, I think it would be a worthwhile venture for Microsoft to contribute to WINE so that Linux users could run MS products under Linux. It would be a big boost to the WINE project and Microsoft would get product sales in return.
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.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
So far MS released source for two bits of technology that is absolutely useless to Linux. How about something useful for a change: doc file format. That would be very useful -- it would allow Open Office to be 100% compatible with MS Office. And you don't even have to release any source, just the specs.
Of course this will never happen because the whole purpose of this "open source" work is so that Microsoft can say "look, I'm supporting these hippies", when in fact what they released has no effect on Microsoft business or Open Source movement.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"Wouldn't it be cool if there was a process whereby passionate Microsoft developers could work officially with engaged members of the community to build these missing features on top of the VS Platform, then these missing features could eventually be included as part of an additional install step as a part of the product? Microsoft wins because Visual Studio gets extended functionality between releases, the community wins because these would be provided for free and more officially supported, approved, and tested by Microsoft. Ideally the license would work such that Microsoft could eventually include these as part of future shipping products and the contributors could take the source and use it for their own purposes commercially."
Sounds a little like the process with Eclipse doesn't it? The difference of course is that with eclipse the core is open source (well everything except java but apparently it's possible to run eclipse with gcj). Why would an active community contribute work to a project which is at its root closed source? I still don't think they get it.
They do. You can license them. Trouble is, once you have, you're bound by quite a number of restrictions One of the POI developers (Jakarta Word/Excel project) recently had to stop, as he'd changed employers to someone who'd licensed the specs: leaving email What would be nice is getting those docs without all the heavy licensing
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
sign all current and future patents to the EFF.
But if this guy is serious and he really does mean it and he really does have any say in the company I got 2 simple opensource projects for him. Samba and OpenOffice. If he wants to prove MS can play nice after all get him to work on these 2 projects and make sure they are compatible whenever MS decides to "rework" their code and "accidently" break compatibilty.
When the next windows version does not break samba, when Microsoft Office opens OpenOffice files and vice versa without problem THEN I will be willing to believe MS can be just another IT company and not the IT company from hell.
At the moment it is like a rapist asking what will help to get him accepted back into society. STOP RAPING!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
G=C800:5
MS Office files are actually miniature filesystems in their own right, containing serialized objects that are the in-memory representation of a document. There is no intermediate step between the objects that are the document in-memory that translates it into ".doc format" on the disk - it's just the object itself.
So:
When a property developer makes a house, they will often sell the house and the land, but keep ownership of a small strip of land between the house and the street which they license to you.
If you want further access (e.g. for a garage, a second garden path etc.) then they'll happily sell it to you for a huge amount.
Those are called 'ransom strips'. They hold you to ransom for access to your own property by controlling a small strip of land around it.
Microsoft is just open sourcing stuff it has surrounded by ransom strips. The GPL would protect against these tricks, but Microsoft don't use the GPL.
So it's not a real open source effort, its just MS playing its little word, license and patent games.
As I'm sure many of you noticed, Microsoft has been making some 'Open Source' pushes as of late. They started by creating the CPL, getting it certified, and have now been hiring prominent open source developers to work on CPL.
For those of you not in the know, the key distinction between CPL and the GPL, is that I can incorporate a CPL'ed project into my code, whole, without contributing back, as long as I don't modify the CPL'ed code. If I do, I have to publish modifications to the CPL code in the same way I would for the GPL.
I'm of the opinion that the CPL has two serious flaws:
First, the transparency. How often have we all seen companies violating the GPL? I can assure you, it's a whole lot more frequent than even we hear about. I've known many Windows developers, who had no clue about, or respect for, the GPL, and would download bits of code from anywhere to incorporate if it made their lives easier. (Often because they didn't understand the task at hand, and they just wanted to get it to work.) It's not normally a matter of policy, but I've definitely seen it knowingly overlooked at companies I've worked for previously.
Right now, if we find a company using GPL'ed source, we have a smoking gun we can use to ensure license compliance. When someone incorporates CPL code, there's no way to prove that they modified it themselves, and so CPL compliance is based entirely on the goodwill of corporations, and we've seen how generous that goodwill is...
Second, there's the free rides. The CPL is designed so that companies can take advantage of the work of open source developers without having to compensate them in any way. With proprietary code, developers receive fiduciary compensation, and, traditionally, with Open Source, the developers receive the source for their project, and any derivative works.
With the CPL, companies get a free ride, which in the end screws the developers out of any benefit of their hard work.
Now, the reason why I bring this all up is that, as mentioned above, Microsoft has been hiring prominent open source developers, having them release their source under the CPL. It is my belief that Microsoft wishes undermine the Open Source movement. They hope to get the CPL to be popular, so that they can freely incorporate works developed by others without having to contribute back. They've hired 'evangelists' to show the benefits of CPL, without showing the downsides. (Because, of course, Microsoft is currently releasing software, and they want us to believe that's not going to change.)
So, in conclusion, Microsoft, what I'd like to see is Microsoft projects released under the GPL as well, so that we can see a benefit to the Open Source movement, not just to you.
Yeah, and I guess all that mass wealth that gets taken from Cocaine dealers and redistributed is being done by "Communists" too, eh?
... should society allow such behaviour to go by, rewarded?
Microsoft got this way because they were exceptionally vicious and predatory, destroying all competitors, caring not one single iota about quality, just like your average crack dealer
They have ruined the computer industry. Why shouldn't they be punished?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
There are a couple of items that would make me want to use open source Microsoft code - and perhaps even target their platform as a primary with Linux / Solaris secondary.
.net - Languages want to be sheparded, but based on community standards and open. What that means is that any vendor can publish a compiler / runtime according to a published spec, and they won't be sued by the sheparding company if they truely conform to the spec. Heck, I don't even mind paying some bucks for the spec certification (ala Java). There's still plenty of money to be made on advanced IDEs, tools, support, training, etc. The language itself is not a profit center.
:-)
These would be:
Avalon - Honestly, I want an open slick UI to program with. Flash and Shockwave do some pretty slick things in an efficient manner (compared to other mechanisms), and I'd truely like to have an open codebase to do the same things on every platform - in any language I happen to be using. I've seen the transition effects it can handle, and it's pretty decent. Let others help update it, and it will shine far faster, and with less bugs, than you doing it yourself.
These next 2 aren't open source, but just open documentation items.
Document formats - All document formats should be immediately opened so that anyone can read / update them. I know this is one of your bread and butter pieces, but face it, either do that, or Open Office is going to cut your office revenue in half.
Protocols - Open up them all so that true interoperability can exist between Windows / Linux / Unix. Show the strengths of your platform, but atleast allow efficient communication with others.
Doing these four things would go a long way to reducing the "evilness" persona that surrounds Microsoft. Honestly, their UI engineers do a fantastic job of pushing the envelope - even if they get their ideas from sundry locations occassionally.
It is easy to use COM to instantiate Word from your own code and manipulate documents throught the API, so ".doc format" is fully accessible and reusable from your own code, just as it would be if it was "open source".
.doc would be good to have, since quite a lot of documents still are saved in older formats.
Which, of course, don't count a bit on any other platform than Windows.
That said, Microsoft claims to offer "open and royalty-free documentation and licenses for the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas." I haven't looked at them myself, but it looks like the real deal. The FAQ states that the "license is not restricted to particular individuals or entities. It is available for customers, governments, academics, hobbyists, and IT companies."
Granted, the download is available as a Windows executable, but I imagine someone will boot up their Windows boxes to look at it.
This is big plus in my book for Microsoft. Still, the specification for good'ol
"It is easy to use COM to instantiate Word from your own code and manipulate documents throught the API, so ".doc format" is fully accessible and reusable from your own code, just as it would be if it was "open source"."
Having to instantiate the word processor that originally created the document in order to use it doesn't strike me as 'fully accessible', 'reusable' or anything remotely like open source.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
How about the 95/98 operating systems? Sure they're more unstable than a schizophrenic, but they're unsupported now anyway. Plus, XP isn't even based on them, so they shouldn't be releasing any secrets... well, in theory. I'm sure the fact that IE is in there might be a problem, but maybe they could release some of the other parts.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
Unbelievable. People want the specs for .doc so they can build interoperating software. Your response is to use COM, which requires that you have Word installed. Have you personally ever said anything dumber than that? If so, what was it?
Why is anything anything?
Hahaha, I guess you've never read the DOC specs. I read a very old version of them that was distributed/leaked one time on MSDN many years ago - you can get it from the WvWare homepage.
Basically the Word specifications are nearly incomprehensible to human beings, let alone the code. Given that the specs actually partly consist of copy/pasted code I think even if Word were open sourced we'd only be a bit further in having OpenOffice and the like able to read them.
The Word developers use structures with members names like fcPlcffldHdrTxbx. It's hungarian taken to the logical extreme. Here's a line from one of the struct definitions:
FTC rgftcStandardChpStsh[3]; // ftc used by StandardChpStsh for this document
Helpful, isn't it? I'm convinced the Word team are actually robots from the 23rd century, no people could have produced this.
Mind that the specs appear to be internal documentation yet are still incomplete!
Basically it would not surprise me if the internals of Word are like the internals of Windows: the people who truly understood them left or retired years ago leaving a mess of interlocking systems and hacks that nobody can fully comprehend.
When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
This is not going to happen. Linus himself already told innumerous times that he thinks this would make unnecessarily hard to change the kernel APIs, and that, notwithstanding the point "2", below, he is not interested in binary compatibility for kernel-space things between versions of the kernel. This is right, and if you did not get it yet, I'll explain it to you: it leads to Big Bad Difficult Bugs, trying to get kernel modules to work in various kernel versions. Many things evolve from one version of the kernel to the next, many assumptions change.
2. and the 'grey' area of binary modules sorted out as well. I dont think it will happen.
This one has already happened, (*) but many people still want to pretend it didn't. Some binary modules are derived works of the kernel, and such, to be distributed at all, they must be distributed under the GPL. Some binary modules are not derived work of the kernel, and as such, they can be distributed under any license that the author seems fit. What determines if a work (in the case, a binary module) is a derived work of another (the kernel) is copyright law.
In the USofA and in Brasil, the copyright law states that a derived work is the result of some non-automated transformation of the original work. USofAn case law established the method of "abstraction, filtration, and comparison" [AFC] to determine derivation of works.
There is a myth, spread by the last paragraph of the "postamble" of the GPL, "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs": I will repeat here the position I have after carefully studying the GPL, copyright law, and case law: the GPL regulates the licensing to derived works of the GPL'd work, but it cannot regulate the licensing of encompassing "anthology" works. Linking does not make a work derived on other work: to see if some work is a derived work, apply the [AFC] method. Some (not all) linking, non-derived, non-GPL'd, works can be even distributed along with a GPL'd work, because they would be covered by the "mere aggregation" clause in the 3rd paragraph of section 2 of the GPL.
And one more funny stuff: the section 6 of the GPL states: This basically means that you can't even clarify the license further than copyright law would restrict the rights of the recipient of your work (**), without rendering it undistributable by others (and even by yourself, if your work is derived from another GPL'd work).
But, OTOH, IANAL and TINLA. But I am a paralegal. IMMV and the others TFFLAs
(*) Google for: "linus torvalds" abstraction filtration comparison binary
(**) Google: "hans reiser" derivative plagiarism
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'll tell you what you should open source, and why it will benefit MS in the long run.
1) Internet Explorer
IE is free anyway, so there's no money to be lost. But what you are losing is marketshare to Mozilla and Opera-based browsers. This is due mainly to the security problems in IE. You could save developer resources AND marketshare by just releasing the source of IE so that it can be fixed/expanded more easily and quickly.
2) Visual Studio
There's nothing that will get developers rallying around your product like allowing them to customize the development tools they have to use every day. In addition, more people could/would write apps for Windows if they didn't have to spend a bunch of money purchasing compilers that they can get for free on Mac/Linux/Unix. You're already dominating on user-level market share. Having free development tools will undoubtedly convert developers, and the universities that are teaching those developers.
3) MSN Messenger
Instant messaging is a hot topic everywhere. AIM obviously dominates the market now, and open source systems like Jabber are starting to take a small foothold in businesses. A quick way for you to crush all of that is to open source your IM client and it's protocols. It's already in use by a lot of people, but it could be in use by a lot more. In addition, you'll likely get a lot of free ports to Mac/Linux/Unix and draw customer-base from there as well. This will give you more ad revenue, and may also lead to people getting MSN internet, hotmail, as well as purchasing your server products.
4) Virtual PC
I know you guys just paid a lot of money for buying it, but the whole purpose of buying it was to get Mac and Linux geeks to start using and relying on Windows apps, wasn't it? By providing it as open source you'll get faster adoption than ever before, which will only increase the number of Windows apps in use by these non-Windows markets.
5) Direct X
This is likely to be the most controversial one internal to MSFT. I know that a lot of people in MSFT believe that the gamer market is the second biggest reason people are holding on to Windows (2nd to MS Office). You're losing that war though. More and more games are being developed to Open GL and other open standards to make them more portable. Giant games like Unreal Tournament, Savage, and America's Army ship with Linux versions these days. And others like Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights put out Linux versions shortly after their release. In addition, MSFT has become a huge publisher in the gaming market. Releasing Direct X as open source would allow more of your games to be played on more systems, which will increase the profits of that division. In addition, it may help you to hold on to your lead role in the game technology world, instead of losing it to other open standards.
A lot of people fault you for developing your own standards. If you take some of these technologies, and open source them, you can permanently make them become the standard.
The CPL was not created by Microsoft - as mentioned here, it was created by IBM, and is essentially an updated and generalized version of IBM's original Open Source license, the IBM Public License.
Irrelevant - there's no way to prove that someone has incorporated GPL code into a closed source product, short of obvious indicators like embedded strings, etc. GPL compliance is also "based entirely on the goodwill of corporations". The long and the short of the matter is that a company that's willing to knowingly violate the CPL will probably also be willing to knowingly violate the GPL.
As is the GPL. Neither the CPL nor the GPL are concerned with the origin of software, they're concerned with the distribution of software. They're both designed to ensure that the recipient of a piece of software has access to the source code. That's it. Nothing in either license about compensating the original developers, or having to give back source code to the original developers. Even you recognize this - while it's "traditional" to contribute back changes to an GPL'd project, it's not required. In fact, the FSF considers this kind of requirement onerous enough that they explicitly classify licenses that have this requirement (for example, the Open Public License) as non-free.
...which is bad, why? We're talking about Microsoft's own code, here - it's their choice as to what license they want to release their code under. The CPL is recognized by the OSI. It's acknowledged as a free software license by the FSF, albeit one incompatible with the current GPL because it addresses patent issues that the GPL does not.
In fact, at this point, if there's anyone that's getting a "free ride" off of Microsoft's actions, it's everyone except Microsoft, who now has access to - and can use - Microsoft's CPL software, as is, without any obligation.
Overall, I think this is a positive event. It appears there are OSS advocates (not juse Josh!) within Microsoft who seem to be trying to convince the corporate culture there that OSS is not neccesarily a threat to Microsoft, and they're going about it in a very reasonable way. They selected an existing OSS license instead of coming up with Yet Another License. They released code for a couple of trial projects under this license, and have been following the OSS philosophy of "release early, release often". They've apparently met with enough success with these projects that they feel they have a good reason to actively encourage the release other projects under OSS licenses, and they're asking the community for input on what else to consider releasing
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9