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Father of Wiki Quits MS, Moves to Eclipse

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wonder-if-that's-a-paycut dept.

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."

9 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Wikipedia by WebfishUK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What was he doing there anyway?

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    -- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
  2. Ballmer to blame? by tjstork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One wonders how many Microsoft developers are bailing because they are sick of the increasing lack of creative room under Herr Ballmer.

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    This is my sig.
  3. Someone explains this to me... by Rhoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does Eclipse really effect MS' sales for Visual Studio? If I'm developing in Java, I'm going to use Eclipse of course, but I wouldn't buy V.S. for Java development... there's no support. I'd use a Borland or a Sun product to do that.

    And conversely, why would I use Eclipse for developing in a MS created Programming language (apart from the price break). IF I (or my company) have/has the cash to purchase V.S. and we're developing in C#, MFC, Visual C++ for a Windows program, then I will buy Visual Studio. I don't see how Eclipse is a direct competitor to MS at this point in time, they're hardly in the same market.

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    "If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door." - Paul Beatty
    1. Re:Someone explains this to me... by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Recent development on Windows using anything other than Visual Studio was always hit and miss.

      VS was a nice environment to code in and was what the kiddies and college students all used. There was no real programs using java on the desktop.

      Now, a couple of things happened, MS released .net and fucked up visual studio, and Java started to become l33t.
      We see more diverse programs recently written in numerous languages and runtimes (BT clients in java and python, .net this and that, more java here and there).

      Its not just Eclipse MS should be afraid of, Interpretted languages are back in fashion and they need a dev environment.

      Up until recently, I would have (shush) used Visual Studio, I have v6 at home and handles everything all legacy code, but I won't get the .net version. I've recently started playing with the sharpdevelop/mono combination and have no complaints thus far.

      Why do I need to pay x hundreds of pounds for Visual Studio?

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      liqbase :: faster than paper
    2. Re:Someone explains this to me... by daem0n1x · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I had the misfortune of becoming a ASP VB developer during a year. I hated it with all my guts, but I had to pay my bills.
      My employer was too cheap to move on to .NET, so we had to work with that old ASP shit using legacy VS6 that somebody had bought ages ago. We did the classical stuff, editing ASPs in VB and T-SQL stored procs.
      Later, I found out, to my surprise, that Eclipse was better for ASP and T-SQL development than the very M$ tools in VS6 and SQL-Server. Some weeks later, I was using Eclipse for everything, ASP, T-SQL, PHP, XML, etc., integrating with M$ Visual Source Safe, and all. I had an Eclipse instance running since the very first minute I sat in my office chair every morning. My M$ drone colleagues used to look at me as if I was a freak, or something. But I was more productive than them.
      Installing the right plugins, Eclipse can be the IDE for any kind of development you imagine.

  4. Gates had already predicted this move by digitaldc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From:
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20051017/tc_nf/38691; _ylt=Amqnvtqy9Q9fJYcw8Yn1dq4jtBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJ vMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

    "In the next decade, there'll be a shortage of great software engineers. We'll be scouring the schools for them," Gates told the students at Madison. "Software is the place where all the action is. It is an area that will continue to generate jobs. This is the golden age of software."

    Another interesting quote that sounds like the 640k one:

    He (Gates) predicted that the HD DVD will be "the last physical media format there will ever be." To help make that happen, Gates said he will need a lot more software engineers.

    Oh boy, I hope that doesn't come back to haunt him.

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    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  5. Re:What Wikipedia has become by smooth+wombat · · Score: 2, Interesting
    that promotes socialist misinformation by ignoring futures markets and speculation, the fundamental methods by which resource fluctuations and overuse are stamped out.

    You mean like Enron used to hike the price of electricity, right?

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    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  6. Re:More info at EclipseZone by LDoggg_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks for the link to eclipsezone. Been a long time user of eclipse and never come accross the site.

    Maybe its time slashdot added an eclipse topic?

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    "If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
  7. Re:About time by hoggoth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > MS shareholders should be happier than ever since they just recently received a whopping dividend payment.

    As an MS shareholder, I can assure you the whopping dividend was no big deal. I got a check and at the same time my MS stock value dropped by the EXACT same amount of my check.
    The market adjusted immediately to the payment and loss of cash from MS's war chest.

    The only difference is I have to pay tax on the dividend. I don't have to pay tax on the stock until I sell it.

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)