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

I'll follow them here too. :D

[His name cannot be s]

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

Garrett Serack
CoApp Project Owner

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

[Meshach]

In the same vein feel free to ask me about Linux.

Linus Torvalds
Linux Kernel Founder

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

[His name cannot be s]

Well, considering that I spent several months hacking thru red tape to get VP approval, and the enthusiasm that I've been getting, I'm pretty damn confident that we're clear sailing.

And given the first three targets that on my radar are PHP, Apache and Python (and the 40 or so shared library dependencies), and that's what I took to the VP, I'm fairly confident that's not going to be an issue.

And, on top of that, MS doesn't own the project, I do. "Shutting it down" is not an option for them.

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

[causality]

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

Garrett Serack CoApp Project Owner

I'll bite. Given Microsoft's track record, particularly its embrace-and-extend tactics, its questionable business practices, its status as a convicted monopolist, its use of vendor lock-in, its related use of proprietary file formats, and the Halloween e-mails from top management clearly defining Open Source as an enemy, I have just one question: why should we trust them?

Most (nearly all) of the upper management people who arranged everything I just listed are still working at Microsoft.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

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

[Cryacin]

I'm Santa.

Ask me about anything to do with snow, the north pole, midgets, flying reindeer and flying midgets.

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

[martin-boundary]

I'm Batman.

Uh. That's it.

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

[His name cannot be s]

That is precisely the red tape that I had cut.

Microsoft has given me a signed contract that says that whatever I produce for the CoApp project isn't owned by them. They do get a license to everything I make (fair deal), but they don't own it in the end.

That, and I've also chosen the BSD license for it's do-what-the-f*-you-want spirit.

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

[His name cannot be s]

No.

My intent is to completely do away with the practice of everybody shipping every damn shared library. It's one of the things that piss me off the most. I've got a very workable solution that uses WinSxS to cleanly handle this.

It is extremely important that there is a unified method for sharing libraries between apps.

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

[His name cannot be s]

Is this some kind of back-handed comment based on the general view at Microsoft about Open-source software, or the general view that MS would like to push out to userland? That people should use MS OSS because you need to be a developer to use it on other platforms?

No-no.. exactly the opposite

Have you tried to roll out some OSS apps on Windows?

On Linux it's two clicks, and BAM! Done.

On Windows, it's almost never that easy to setup OSS apps.

The problem I see is that it doesn't take a Developer on Linux to get Apache installed and configured. Why should it on Windows?

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

[toastar]

At least you can diff a config file. Try that with a gui.

I do that that all the time, screenshot + OCR only takes me 30 secs to pop the data into excel.

office/windows is a pretty stable work platform, Linux I'm always spending 15 minutes getting a screenshot app working.

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

[Compholio]

Ask me about Grim Fandango.

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

[His name cannot be s]

As for the first five points, yes I'm aware of all of that, and I'm working to solve all of them. Some of them are not possible (mixing compilers has a lot of bad mojo) and some are solvable with some really good best practices.

1/ Microsoft are stopping using WinSxS assemblies for managing the C/C++ runtimes as it is complex to manage and get right;

Ah, Visual Studio is backing away from WinSxS. I read their justification. I didn't buy into it. I think it's a solvable issue.

2/ With XP, Microsoft were selling WinSxS as being able to deploy different versions of the binaries, but for Vista/Win7 they are now saying that WinSxS is for archival purposes (see the Engineering 7 blog)

Uh, what? I've been talking to the maintainer of the WinSxS system. He's fully supportive of my plans.

3/ It does not really work as intended in practice -- e.g. comctl32 version 6 is different in Vista/Win7 than in XP, yet the applications that reference the XP version use the Vista/7 version

It works just fine, as long as you use it correctly; if they didn't, it's not my fault. Some of the tools I'm building will make it easier not to screw up.

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

[Cryacin]

FROM: Santa's Workshop helpdesk
TO: Virignia

We have finished the research on flying midgets. We are moving on to flying goats next, which should let us finally allow pigs to fly.

We thank you for your patience whilst we satisfy your mother's prerequisite requirements on when you can have a pony.

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

[TubeSteak]

I'm Alfred the Butler.
Would you like a cup of tea Sirs?

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.

How Long Before ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

... MS pulls the plug on this and leaves OSS developers hanging high and dry? Or worse, pulls some slight of hand with licensing, copyrights or patents and forces OSS dev's to stop in their tracks waiting for MS's next move?

Re:How Long Before ...

[ChrisMounce]

Maybe they recognize that there's a ton of open source software that people really want to use, and that easy installs of OSS on Windows adds value to Windows.

Like how they contributed some Linux stuff a while back to make it easier to run Linux in a VM... with Windows as the host machine (I'm not clear on the details, so I'm probably getting the terminology wrong).

Re:How Long Before ...

[aBaldrich]

Do you know what was the first thing I thought when reading the article and the project's launchpad? Halloween Document II. Why does Microsoft need to support Free Software? I mean, they claim to have everything they need, their new shiny should 7 have it all.
This article's summary should be something along the lines of: Microsoft embraces OSS. How long before they extend their dirty tactics to OS? I don't trust them.
The jewels of OSS were built because we, developers, needed them. We needed an OS and made Gnu, and Linux. We needed a web server and made Apache. We needed a GUI and made GNOME, KDE and Compiz. We needed a web browser and made Firefox.
Now Microsoft needs package managing software, and they really believe we are going to build it for them. Laughable.

Re:Why only open source?

[His name cannot be s]

Why limit this to open source? It would be great if the users could update every program easily and painlessly, at least the ones that use this new system.

I'm Busted. It isn't really restricted to Open Source... but that's my mission. Commercial apps will be able to play just fine in this ecosystem.

I am assuming that this system will allow easy and painless upgrading like on most Linux systems. Is that true? Will it have automatic dependency handling and command line installation?

Yes. Painless and automatic dependency handling, and yes command line tools. You are singing the chorus to my theme song!

Re:Why only open source?

[His name cannot be s]

I second the question about limiting to open source. A good package management system that can could make using SxS painless would be awesome in an enterprise environment.

I agree. it ain't really limited to Open Source

Since this is open source and .msi based I assume you will be leveraging WiX somehow?

Yes indeed. The author of WiX is on the mailing list, and a personal friend. He's very excited about all this too.

I hope this isn't going to be a big collection merge modules with duplicated component guids..

Nope. I don't believe in merge modules. I believe in a system that works.

Re:Microsoft has been surprising me lately

[phantomfive]

I can't help but think you are incredibly naive. Have you been paying attention to how Microsoft is suing third party controller makers? Or how they are subverting their own standards? Or if you are in Europe, how they are heavily lobbying your representatives to hurt open standards? If you live in the US, don't worry, they are working to influence your representatives too. Not to mention they stand firmly committed to helping out a truly evil empire (yeah, saying 'evil' is a bit much but a government that censors political speech and has secret trials for people they don't like isn't exactly nice).

I mean, this is just in 2010. You shouldn't have particular love for any company, but claiming that Microsoft has changed can only be done by ignoring the facts and reality. Don't do that.

Re:"bring OSS more users"

[im_thatoneguy]

And more *windows* users, more windows license, more vendor lockin, and fewer alternative OS's...

Until Windows users realize that all their favorite apps run great on Linux as well as Windows.

If chrome runs on Windows and Linux and you just use Chrome most of the day then it becomes trivial to switch over to Linux since your app will look relatively familiar. The largest obstacle to Linux adoption besides its contempt for its users is the lack of applications people are familiar with. If someone got used to pidgen then they would be less likely to revolt when they tried using Linux.