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Top 25 Hottest Open-Source Projects at Microsoft Codeplex

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the kind-of-a-coole-name dept.

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.'"

4 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Open source projects? by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One things is for sure - they all rely on proprietary Microsoft produts (.Net, sharepoint, SQL server, etc) to run. They're not particularly useful to the Open Source community, just the Microsoft community. (In Debian, they would sit in the non-free repositorty).

    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:

    Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)

    This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.
    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:Open source projects? by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why put the GPL in that box then? Why not put a simple concise message in there stating that "There are no restrictions on the use of this software, only on the distribution. For restrictions on distribution please see the GPL at http://..../". Then you're making it clear to the person that they aren't restricted in any way from just using the program. A short little message like that sure would be an eye opener to most people who are used to seeing license agreements that are thousands of words long.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  2. Won't accept GPL3 by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. A fact of life by stacey7165 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.