Slashdot Mirror
Father of Wiki Quits MS, Moves to Eclipse
linumax writes "Microsoft has lost one of its high-profile hires to an open-source consortium. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, announced on Monday that Ward Cunningham is leaving Microsoft to join the staff of the open-source tool consortium. Cunningham's new title is Director of Committer Community Development.Cunningham, the father of the Wiki concept, joined Microsoft about two years ago. At Microsoft, he was not involved directly in social-networking-software development. Instead, Cunningham worked as an architect with the company's Patterns & Practices Team."
In fact, MS shareholders should be happier than ever since they just recently received a whopping dividend payment.
I don't know about that. I learned investing from my Father, who has literally made several million, just since his retirement. While dividends are nice, there are problems with them. They're taxed when they come out, whereas a rising stock price is only taxed when it is sold. So even if you use a DRIP so you never actually see the dividend, just the new shares it purchases, you still get a yearly tax. Dividends can be a big help if you are retired, or otherwise using dividend income as a primary source of support, but in terms of investing, they are not always as nice as a stock price that constantly goes up -- which is something MS Stock hasn't done much of for a while.
You're right -- it isn't a good idea for a long term investment, which is about the only kind I make. (I've found turnover can be fun, but after fees and taxes, long term investments generally do better once you see past the next year or two.)
This news was first posted on EclipseZone. There, you can find an article announcing the move that goes into a little more detail about what Ward will be doing at Eclipse. Please add this article link to your main post.
As a committer on the CDT Eclipse project, I can say right now that if you are doing doing win32 or MFC development, right now you'd be crazy to not use Visual Studio over Eclipse, unless you're willing to help work on the IDE support yourself.
Right now work is beginning in the CDT community on a prototypical debugger that uses the dbghelp APIs of Microsoft's free windows debugger (WinDbg). Work is also ongoing in the community on support for the Visual C++ compiler under CDT's Managed Build System. What's really needed right now is people to help out on these efforts, and someone to step up and make a windows resource editor (a la Eclipse's Visual Editor Project). We would love for CDT to be a serious (and free!) competitor to Visual Studio that required only the free debugger, compiler, and platform SDK downloads from Microsoft that are currently available... help us make it happen.