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Top 25 Hottest Open-Source Projects at Microsoft Codeplex
willdavid writes "Via CNet, a link to a blog post with the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. As the CNet blogger notes, 'Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.'"
open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.'"
Some open source is good for MS - the sort of not particularly open software that relies on MS's OS & libs. Any software that can be easily ported to another platform is a threat.
Oh - and Open Source? Pah-lease. A license that governs USE of the software sounds neither permissive nor open:
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
MS is harly breaking new ground here. So, what is their interest? Control?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I guess it is no surprise that I didn't see a single one of those "open" projects in the top 25 list run on anything other than MS-Windows. Reading through the list, I see ".NET", and "C#", "Vista", "Excel", "IIS", or "Sharepoint", etc, on just about every single one.
So, it is hard for me to get excited about a collection of projects that only serve to continue to lock people to a single platform.
So far, I only see projects that require you to use some proprietary MS software to compile, run or use it. It requires you to have .net to compile/run, it requires you to have proprietary MS-SQL database services, or tools that are geared towards the MS flavor of general purpose languages and tools (Ajax, Python...). What's "open" about that?
If anything, it's an attempt to appear open source while at the same time luring people into the unholy MS embrace-extend-eliminte trinity.
If they were serious about "open" projects, they would first of all accept the existance of platform independent standards, adhere to them and move their developers towards using and supporting those standards. So far, all I see is a very cheap trick to lure people into the MS-way.
"Open" and "free" software does neither mean that it doesn't cost anything nor that you can read the code. It means that you are not dependent on a single specific tool to make use of it. If you don't like gcc, take another ANSI compatible compiler and your gcc code will compile. If you don't like Apache, take any other HTTP server and it will understand and supply the same webpages. If you don't like samba... ok, bad example. But I think you get the idea. To be "open" and "free" for software, it must not be limited to a single operating system, a single database system or a single flavor or implementation of some standard, be it SQL, Ajax or Phyton.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wrote some C# Visual Studio addins and tried to upload them to codeplex. The only GPL license choice was gpl2, but I put in the comments "don't download this if you don't accept GPL3." Some code-monkey unpublished it because the license didn't match the chosen license - but GPL3 wasn't an option!
So I won't host it there.
I've long been saying to those goliaths, like Microsoft and IBM, that it's not a battle of who will win - closed source or open source companies, but that both are on a collision course to become one, evolving and taking on the best parts of each. Open source companies and projects need some level of commercialization to fund innovation and development. Closed source companies need to open up more to be trusted and stay relevant in today's fast moving market.
I work for an open source company, Hyperic http://www.hyperic.com/, and we make systems management software. Early on Hyperic embraced the fact that there is a demand to manage Microsoft techonologies, and we built our open source software to do just that (in addition to everything else we manage) - and not with some archane NRPE remote-watered-down mechanism. Natively against Microsoft's APIs - WMI. So we work with them.
True, their open source labs with channel25 and their codeplex efforts are very much behind the rest of the company. They are relatively new compared to the rest of Microsoft, and there's a lot of ballast to turn that steamship around. But it is making some inroads, and open conversation and criticism is getting attention. These companies have to listen or become irrelevant. True, Microsoft waited a long time to accept and embrace open source, but they are not that foolish to not make efforts in today's market. And with the amount of usage of Microsoft products out in the market, it would be even more foolish of us not to pay attention.
Here is a project an acquaintance of mine recently posted on codeplex because he does not have time to maintain it. It's more or less a Quicksilver clone for windows, with plugin architecture and everything. Pretty cool, hopefully someday someone else will have time to pick up where he left off. It certainly has lots of promise.
http://www.codeplex.com/kodachi/
That old saying comes to mind: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
By all means, I think they got a late start, but economics and the resounding voice of communities like slashdot, bloggers, and the media should work to keep a sharp eye and the conversation going. I'm not defending them actually, I mean to encourage staying critical. (A given on this forum!). I am saying that this opposition is on a collision course to their further adoption of openness and someday even real open source.
It is optimistic. And it will take a VERY long time, just look at Sun's example. But dismissing their efforts entirely is naive in itself. Their progress should be watched, and frankly, encouraged...even if that "encouragement" is criticism pointing them towards what the market is demanding.
IronPython is very compatible with CPython and it can run on Mono, which is cross-platform and open-source. Perhaps you were thinking of Boo, but it can also run on Mono.
IronPython makes mixing Python with other languages much easier. Imagine coding the backend in C# (or Java or Lisp or whatever you want) and the frontend in Python.
Using a common interpreter will allow the Python project to focus more on the language features and leave the interpreting to others. I think it would be fantastic for all scripting languages to target the CLI. It results in huge performance gains and makes producing new languages much easier. There's no reason for all these languages to have their own interpreter.
Well Microsoft make a bunch of .Net development tools that don't seem to have caught on very well with third parties, so it does make sense.
.Net compatibility for the projects they work on. The VirtualDub author actually ported to .Net and decided that the increased size and decreased speed were not worth it.
.Net applications. And it's new third party Windows only applications that made Windows a killer platform. Old ones will tend to run fine in Wine once people have time to reimplement the API functions they depend on.
Most third party shops I suspect have stuck with a mixture of Win32 SDK, ATL and MFC development because they have an enormous codebase and don't feel the need to port. Now to be honest some of those are a pain to learn, once you know them you can churn out Windows applications incredibly quickly. And because they were the only way to do that a few years back, people did learn them.
There was a straw poll on a Microsoft development newsgroup and the vast majority of people actually prefered Visual Studio 98 to later versions since it was quicker and they don't need
All this despite the fact that they give away Visual Studio 2005 Express on their website. I think it's strange case really. In the same way that people don't like Vista because it's slightly bigger and slower than XP, later development environments have never really caught on.
And people graduating from college tend to have used Linux so they don't use either the old or the new Microsoft tools. So Microsoft sense a danger to themselves in the long run. Like no popular
All in all, it seems like a sudden conversion to supporting open source projects based on Visual Studio Express seems like a prudent move on their part.
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