Microsoft's CoApp To Help OSS Development, Deployment

badpazzword writes "Microsoft employee Garrett Serack announces he has received the green light to work full time on CoApp, an .msi-based package management system aiming to bring a wholly native toolchain for OSS development and deployment. This will hopefully bring more open source software on Windows, which will bring OSS to more users, testers and developers. Serack is following the comments at Ars Technica, so he might also follow them here. The launchpad project is already up."

Comments

Re:I'll follow them here too. :D

[DoofusOfDeath]

Ask me about CoApp, I'll tell ya everything ya wanna know.

How do I know that MS won't file a software patent related to this work?

Re:I'll follow them here too. :D

[His name cannot be s]

think you had no choice to choose the BSD license instead of the GPL. Had you chosen GPL, it is likely the project would have been immediately rejected by Microsoft.

That's not true actually.

I didn't tell anyone what license I was going to use until a few days ago, by which time they'd already signed the agreement.

In addition to that; as a Microsoft employee for Microsoft, I've contributed code to GPL, LGPL, BSD, PHP and Apache licensed projects.

Re:I'll follow them here too. :D

[His name cannot be s]

I do have one question. Why, exactly, do you think that this sort of approach is likely to be easier than doing what Apple did and simply exposing a Posix API that is actually useful?

Because, even if we could get a great POSIX experience on Windows, it leaves out Windows developers.

One of my goals is to get Windows developers in the OSS game.

On top of that, there is a hell of a lot of non-POSIX open source software on Windows that needs fixing too.

Look at it this way: Would you respect someone who told you the best way to get FireFox running on Linux was to use some sort of Windows emulation layer... Like WINE? no, because FireFox *can* compile for Linux. Same thing with nearly all Open Source I encounter. I want to get the OSS quality and experience on Windows to exceed commercial developers... it needs the most love.

Like I tell people:
Working as an open source software developer at Microsoft is like being a preacher in Vegas. I figure I'm in the single most important place in the universe that I can be.