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."

Comments

Father

[smvp6459]

Boy how I'd like to father a wiki.

Re:Father

[Red Flayer]

" Boy how I'd like to father a wiki."

I'd rather father a wookie. Imagine the birth announcements!

Re:Father

[chris_mahan]

I know French women don't shave their armpits but this is getting ridiculous.

Wikipedia

[WebfishUK]

What was he doing there anyway?

Re:Wikipedia

[metamatic]

What was he doing there anyway?

Oh, you know... Evil.

The usual.

Re:Wikipedia

[frank_adrian314159]

What was he doing there anyway?

What most of us do every day... Trading his time and effort for a pay check.

About time

[Sheepdot]

With all these individuals leaving Microsoft for open source or other commercial ventures, does anyone suspect maybe there is about to be a shareholder shakeup of upper-level management? It would appear to me that Microsoft has gotten far too rigid, top-heavy, and doesn't provide autonomy at the development level anymore. Anyone else get the same idea based on the staff that are leaving?

Re:About time

[jtwJGuevara]

I don't forsee current shareholders giving a flying hoot about individuals leaving as long as the bottom line numbers remain prosperous... and you know as well as I that with all the successful product lines and forced upgrades, the bottom line isn't going to turn south anytime in the interim future.

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

Of course, as an individual investor, I wouldn't buy Microsoft for a long term investment for the very reasons you stated. Its potential for growth isn't attractive any longer either.

Re:About time

[Deinhard]

Not likely. Despite the exodus of high-profile indidivuals such as Cunningham, an organization such as Microsoft (or Apple or IBM, &c.) have constant turnover. In some cases it is from disgruntled employees, but in others it is simply a desire to expand one's horizons and move on to different things.

I suspect that there are more "former Microsoft employees" than there are "current Microsoft employees."

Re:About time

[TheWanderingHermit]

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.)

Re:About time

[Sheepdot]

I suspect that there are more "former Microsoft employees" than there are "current Microsoft employees."

But isn't that the breaking point then?

Think of it like this. Microsoft has, for two decades now, shown itself as the bright younge upstart. But the truth is they are coming to maturity now. They aren't "cool" anymore. iPods are "cool". Facebook is "cool". Google is "cool". Microsoft is like the youngest uncle at the family renions, too young to know that he's too old to be hanging out with the kids anymore.

IMHO we're likely to see Ballmer have a heart attack or other adverse health issue during a promotional gig (don't laugh, remember how he required vocal chord surgery after yelling Windows?) and shareholders will ask him to step down for safety concerns. His problem is that he doesn't realize what Microsoft is. IBM didn't realize who it was till Lou Gerstner defined it.

Re:About time

[mwvdlee]

I wonder; if somebody leaves Microsoft, do they get their soul back?

Re:About time

[pete6677]

I suspect there hasn't been much autonomy among developers for a long time. Look at how most of Microsoft product are designed. It's clear that the marketing department makes all product decision and engineers just get to figure out how to meet their demands. For example, why does Outlook inform me it is dangerous to display "active content"? What the hell is active content? In my case, it was apparently a font that someone used. Would any technical person use such a stupid, generic, meaningless phrase as "active content"?

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely, souls are held in escrow and are returned as long as the employee has fulfilled at least two full years of employment. Those leaving the company after less than two years receive back a fraction of their soul proportional to the length of time they worked.

Re:About time

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Microsoft is like the youngest uncle at the family renions, too young to know that he's too old to be hanging out with the kids anymore.

You just made my day with that line. Thanks.

Re:About time

[hutchike]

Is that what the "Silo" storage concept was all about? A way to store souls in escrow? I don't think NTFS has a native soul-storage capability, although there's probably a driver somewhere... I wonder what would happen if the M$ soul-server crashed? Truly a BSOD!

Re:About time

[TheWanderingHermit]

The more I think about it, the more I wonder. While I stick by my other response, I think many people buying MS stock are doing so (or did so) on advice from a broker or because it was "the thing" to do. While it is not true in every case, in many cases, you're talking about sheep following a trend. There are probably a good number of stock holders who aren't thinking long term. I'm sure many bailed when it stopped going up. Now there are those who will see only the dividend and focus just on that -- not on growth or anything else. So, while my feelings on dividends haven't changed, my thoughts about how nearsighted the vision and how shallow the understanding of most investers is remind me that many don't make decisions on investing by thinking it through thoroughly.

Re:About time

[rho]

It used to be that dividends were the norm. Then came the awful idea that "if the company doesn't know what to do with its profits, there must be something wrong with them". This was the idea that fueled stock options and an incessant drumbeat to keep those quarterly reports positive and upbeat.

When a company pays out profits to shareholders, then the stock is acting in a "classical" stock sense. The company is then working for its shareholders. When a company doesn't pay dividends, and the whole value of the company to the shareholder is whether the stock will rise in value, then you get into dangerous territory where stock manipulation is a key skill, rather than business acumen and "knowing thy customer".

As for taxing dividends, IIRC, the nasty Republicans want to cut the dividends tax to zero. That encourages companies to offer dividends. That encourages investors to look at companies that pay dividends. All of the above encourages business practices that are less stock market oriented and more investor oriented. That is, it's a Good Thing. Now you're investing in a company because it produces a product that sells well, instead of investing in a company because you think you can fool somebody else into buying from you at a higher price.

There's room for the latter in a modern market, but the former is much less fraught with criminal or unethical doings.

Re:About time

[hoggoth]

> 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.

This Just In

[the darn]

Ballmer vows,"I'm going to f**king KILL the Eclipse Foundation!"

Re:This Just In

[xtracto]

Yeah, fortunately, when Ballmer told Ward "just tell me it is not Google!" he could answer calmly "No, it is not Google".

Now I know why did I saw the BG borg sad

Re:This Just In

[M1FCJ]

That won't work. Eclipse is just a wrapper which spawns a number of java processes:

m1fcj 4180 4114 0 17:14 pts/10 00:00:00 /usr/java/jdk1.4/bin/java -Xmx256M -jar /home/m1fcj/eclipse/./startup.jar -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86 -launcher /home/m1fcj/eclipse/./eclipse -name Eclipse -showsplash 600 -exitdata 1a20000 -vm /usr/java/jdk1.4/bin/java -vmargs -Xmx256M -jar /home/m1fcj/eclipse/./startup.jar

A "killall eclipse" will only kill the shell. The output above is after my "killall eclipse".

A good old way of doing this is as follows:

#for i in `ps axuww|grep eclipse|grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'`; do kill -9 $i; done ;

Works all the time although it is somewhat an overkill... but I still can tpe that faster than doing it in Windows (ctrl-alt-del, task manager, processes, select, right click, select kill or whatever, wait until it dies, get impatient, try to kill it again, click on the modal box stating that an application can't be closed while it is being debugged, get annoyed, scream, punch the screen, locate where the first aid kit and antidepresseants are... Waay too many things to do.

MS's new corporate theme song

[ianmassey]

lately ought to be "exodus" by bob marley.

In other news

[MemoryDragon]

The entrance door of the Eclipse foundation has been smashed with a chair recently...

Ballmer to blame?

[tjstork]

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

Someone explains this to me...

[Rhoon]

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.

Re:Someone explains this to me...

[Xarius]

The summary states Microsoft has lost a unique asset, not sales of some generic product.

Re:Someone explains this to me...

[LiquidCoooled]

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?

Re:Someone explains this to me...

[anomalous cohort]

How does Eclipse really effect MS' sales for Visual Studio?

I think that this post if a little off topic but I will reply anyway. One of the criteria for deciding what application stack to build from for decision makers in technology companies is the developer experience. The harder it is for developers to build in a particular application stack, the longer it will take or the more resources it will take to develop what is needed. When deciding between two application stacks of similar merit and assuming that either the existing staff is familiar with both or that there is no existing staff, the tie breaker just might be the tool.

I have been in ISVs in both camps. I can tell you from first hand experience that the J2EE stack is just as feature rich and architecturaly sound as the ASP.NET stack (though the actual details are profoundly different). For any company honestly considering which way to go, the choice boils down to VS.NET versus Eclipse (or Netbeans or IntelliJ, insert your favorite J2EE friendly IDE here).

Re:Someone explains this to me...

[Mechanik]

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.

Re:Someone explains this to me...

[daem0n1x]

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.

Shares of IKEA and other furniture makers ...

[ArsenneLupin]

... rise to record valuations!

Re:What Wikipedia has become

[Anonymous Coward]

It's gotten to the point where on the front page yesterday, it mentioned dildos and pegging.

OMGWTF

This is seriously a disturbing turn of events! We can't let Wikipedia inform of methods to relieve sexual tensions with dildos! OMG, what is this crap? Think of the children! We must actively start aiming Wikipedia's front page for specific cultures and religions. Act now! Do YOU want your children to grow up in a society where people are informed about human sexuality?!

Gates had already predicted this move

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:Gates had already predicted this move

[Citizen of Earth]

He (Gates) predicted that the HD DVD will be "the last physical media format there will ever be."

He could be right. First there will be High Definition. Then there will be Hyper Definition. Then there will be High-hyper Definition. Then there will be Hyper-high-hyper Definition. Then there will be Hugely-hyper-high-hyper Definition and Honkin'-hugely-hyper-high-hyper Definition. The superlatives are never-ending.

(What would be the radio-frequency designation for gamma rays?)

Re:What Wikipedia has become

[ArsenneLupin]

Why not make g**tse a featured pic?

This has already happened, about a year ago. Lasted for about an hour, and caused a helluva ruckus. Especially because at that time you could register IP addresses as a user name, hehe.

Re:What Wikipedia has become

[smooth wombat]

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?

Watch out...

[guruevi]

...for flying chairs in Redmond.

More info at EclipseZone

[Ed Burnette]

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.

Re:More info at EclipseZone

[LDoggg_]

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?

Oh dear!

[oneandoneis2]

How are Microsoft going to be able to tell people "There's no money in Open Source" if their best & brightest keep getting lured away by companies based on it? :o)

Indeed, Wikipedia

[Dolda2000]

Since you mentioned Wikipedia yourself in the title of your post, why not take the step further?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham.

Father of Wiki Quits MS, Moves to Eclipse ...

[Eric Damron]

...and Balmer vows to kill Eclipse and its little dog toto too.

Re:What about Gates?

[TheRaven64]

I'm surprised it isn't common practice to defer management bonuses by around five years, and base them on the stock price at the time they are paid. This would encourage CEOs to ensure that the company was around and profitable five years after they quit, and not reward people who come in, run a company into the ground, and cash out.

Re:Tool?

[Just Some Guy]

One who'll always use open-source software, even when there's proprietary software more suited for the job?

I'll bite. Any software that makes my company's existence depend on the whims of an outside party is unsuitable for the job.

In my opinion, you have it backwards. An MS tool is one who believes Microsoft will always act in their best interest and stakes their financial future on it.

Yes, but...

[WindBourne]

you can never get rid of the sulfur stench.