More Microsoft Engagement with Open Source Projects

Article
08/20/2004

UPDATE: Welcome Slashdot visitors. I'm not sure how to submit a correction to slashdot, but I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I site them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in. It would be great if someone at Slashdot could change the wording here since I really can't take credit for the work the WIX and WTL project leaders have done.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to whoever updated the story on Slashdot. To be honest I'm going to be a bit behind responding to a lot of these comments. I just wanted to let you know that I am working my way through them and will take the time to respond to constructive feedback. There is a LOT of it so it will take me a while. Be patient. I am listening.

UPDATE #3: I've started to respond. So my responses aren't lost in the comments I'll list my responses here as well.

Slashdot Comment Responses #1 (On Cardkeys and Trust)

Slashdot Comment Responses #2 (A bit about Patents)

Slashdot Comment Responses #3 (Your Requests for Open Projects)

Slashdot Comment Responses #4 (Contests, Free Software Distribution, Halloween, and More)

Slashdot Comment Responses #5 (Ending on a Good Note)

I'm currently working to enable more collaboration of the "Open Source" type with the developer community and Microsoft. It should be easy for teams here at Microsoft to develop extensions to their platforms and potentially pieces of the platforms with customers in an open/transparent fashion. What better way (especially for teams that make tools for developers) to form real connections with developers than working with them collaboratively on real technical challenges?

Working with customers on actual source code forms a stronger connection than simply answering their questions in the newsgroups. You get to see, in a more real way, how customers work with code and where holes in your platform exist since you are effectively dogfooding. I experienced this first hand with my efforts to get the original "VS Powertoys" off the ground and open sourced. Several of the customers I've worked with from these efforts are now on my MSN buddy list and chat with me frequently about the specific projects and technology in general.

Engaging the "open source crowd" is something that we have historically neglected. Hell, from their perspective, some of our assaults on Linux are downright insulting. I cringe when I see the news headlines like "<Random Microsoft Executive> Rails Against Open Source". Of course, they get to fire back and be just as insulting with some of their initiatives. Some bridge crossing could do both sides some good. There is a balance to be struck somewhere between the "free software radicals" and the "only for profit" mentalities. There are several extensions, for example, to Visual Studio that we just don't have the time to get to for one reason or another.

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a process whereby passionate Microsoft developers could work officially with engaged members of the community to build these missing features on top of the VS Platform, then these missing features could eventually be included as part of an additional install step as a part of the product? Microsoft wins because Visual Studio gets extended functionality between releases, the community wins because these would be provided for free and more officially supported, approved, and tested by Microsoft. Ideally the license would work such that Microsoft could eventually include these as part of future shipping products and the contributors could take the source and use it for their own purposes commercially. In this example we could eventually ship the VB PowerPack as basic control in the toolbox, but the contributors could also take the source, improve upon the basics, and re-sell the improved versions as part of their control vendor package for current and down-level .Net versions.

This sort of engagement can be good press as seen by the reaction to the WIX and WTL experiments

"I think the download numbers, while not mind-boggling, certainly indicate the depth of interest from the developer community in working with Microsoft oriented projects," Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with research firm Redmonk, told internetnews.com. "Microsoft and open source may not be all that comfortable in the same sentence yet, as some of Bill Gates' recent remarks abroad indicate, but I think these shared source projects are a good indication that each party has something to contribute to the other."

What I (and others) are working to-wards is a world where we have a simple, official, process for Microsoft employees and customers that covers all sorts of collaboration initiatives that may range from "Wiki-ized Whitepapers" to code samples to platform extensions to product specifications to whole pieces of a platform. You can see bits and pieces of this today @ Microsoft (in ad-hoc or one off fashions) and other companies. The Sun JCP and Real Helix Communities stand out as examples today.

I was inspired to post this because of several other posts I've seen recently that touch on the subject and it's something people internally are looking at me to help them accomplish. Before I'm accused of re-inventing the wheel, I'm aware that there are currently open source projects managed by people at Microsoft today. However these are projects that are further removed from the owners area of work at Microsoft and are less tied to official commercial offerings at Microsoft. There is a lower risk of taint or injunctions against Microsoft because of their participation in several of the existing projects. It's also a space where Microsoft teams could use some best practice advice and guidance to enter.

I've talked long enough about this. I'd like to hear your thoughts...

What types of projects or specific projects should we look to open source in the future? And don't just say "Everything". I'd like suggestions I feel I could actually help teams deliver on in the near future.
If you have participated in any of the current Microsoft sponsored shared or open source projects how could we do a better job of managing these projects?
If you have participated in non-Microsoft sponsored shared/open source projects... what did you like or not like so much?
Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?

This is going to be a fun world to open up. I'm personally really excited about some of the potential projects I've heard being discussed. Good Times ahead! - Josh

Comments

Anonymous
August 20, 2004
OR-Mapping, although controversial, is considered a really useful tool by a sizeable fraction of programmers. For a moment it seemed like Microsoft was going to offer an official OR tool, but then ObjectSpaces was delayed, and delayed, and delayed... And now we are starting to face the splintering that happened in the Java world: too many choices is bad! So I suggest that you take whichever looks more promising (say NHibernate) and nourish it.
Anonymous
August 20, 2004
An Apache like Project hosting a lot of subprojects under the umbrella of MS.
NMS (.NET Message Server) :-) I know MSMQ is available, but it is a big hassle for a developer - as it is tightly integrated with Active Directory. Also an open source Naming Service Provider would be great.
Anonymous
August 20, 2004

Honest, there's at least one goldmine to open : the windows source code of user32.dll, shell32, ...as a way to help us developers write more consistent code. As a replacement or complement to Raymond Chen's blog like.
Anonymous
August 20, 2004
Articles like this are totally cool with me. This is a guy that seems to honestly make the world a better place with projects that he is involved with. Yes, he has obvious associations with the "Big M", but it does not appear to affect desire to want to participate in the Open Source movement. This leads me to wonder about something....
Anonymous
August 20, 2004
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Anonymous
August 20, 2004
Microsoft can not go open source. Microsoft, by definition, is a closed source company, and this is it's most important achievment. Locking people into code Microsoft has 100% control on.

There's room for co-existance of, weather Microsoft likes it or not, it doens't realy have a choice. But trying to delute the ideas behind free software and open source into this mish-mash of ideas, seems more intentional then serious.

Talking about WIX and WTL, relased under CPL, is a good enough example. Thought open, Microsoft buisness-minded approach lets it keep patent rights. Unlike IBM, it does have full intention to use is at will.

It's a conflict of intrest, more blogs like this are not going to make thing less obvious.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I'm interested on more automated testsing tools. Pitching in with Nester (http://nester.sourceforge.net/) is one good possibility.

Another interesting possibility is working on the tool described in "Effective Software Test Automation" (http://www.sybex.com/sybexbooks.nsf/booklist/4320).

I'm interested in any tool that will help us test and improve the code quality in our application.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Wow, lots of great comments here!

Caius: Another choice would be partnering with sourceforge. But yes, it would be great to see a much better release of the GDN workspaces that actually work for normal applications.

Stephane: I think we are a little off from that at the moment. But I admit, it would be interesting for people doing certain types of development.

Luc: We are thinking along the same lines. These are the types of things I think would be great to see happen. I, of course, can't make any promises, but there are a lot of people here who would like to do these things as off cycle releases.

Tux: I never said MS would go open source. I'm not sure how what I'm suggesting dilutes rather than co-exists with effectively. I'm not sure what IBM does differently. Could you elaborate?

Mark: :-) And we have some really cool testing tools here we use that I would LOVE to see open sourced. They will be some of the first people I approach once we have a standard mechanism in place.

Lockgnome: Thanks for the kind words. I like working here because of the freedom I've been supported with to work on efforts like this. Steve's comments haven't had much effect on the work I do, except for the aforementioned negative clips. If he was to come to my office and lay out some ground rules I would have to consider how I felt about each one and the freedom it gave/removed from my job. It's all part of the value proposition of working at Microsoft and if some of the freedom is removed then the value of working here goes down for me and I would look to work elsewhere or on my own.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I have wondered before if Microsoft could make some of the non-core parts of Visual Studio open source. For example, all the functionality of the Solution Explorer window could be implemeneted through the publically documented automation interface so perhaps it would be possible to release it as a mini open source project.

If there were mini-projects for things like the Solution Explorer and the Output Window and perhaps even the text editor users could fix parts of the program that annoys them and help make Visual Studio better.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
The most useful think to open up isn't code so much as specs. Un-encumbered specs for Word/Excel/Publisher/etc. would encourage the development of complementary tools.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
re: the above, I mean file-specifications, in case that wasn't clear.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Maybe it's about time Microsoft stopped complaining about Linux and Unix, maybe it's about time they made their products work well with standards and other operating systems. Stop trying to dominate, lock-in and takeover the computers of companies.

Try and give computers users a proper choice and a reason for using each operating system/plaform based on their merits.

Open source isn't going away and neither is Microsoft. You will never see the twain meet while Microsoft does it's best to spread FUD about the competition. Open source advocates don't trust Microsoft and some of Microsoft's internal memos give them reason to.

Open source gives people back control, computer users used to have control. They bought Windows because it was something they wanted to use, but many Windows users would switch if the competion did everything they needed. However due to licenses and uncooperative hardware vendors, there are still plenty of drivers missing from Linux.

Why do they want to switch? complacency, security and the sheer cost of the OS license.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
My job involves developing applications using the DirectShow API. In order to improve our applications we would love to understand the internals of DirectShow and even contribute to the future direction to the API.

A large amount of example code is already provided by Microsoft and I think that continuing to build upon this by opening the source of DirectShow Microsoft could reinvigorate development in this area. I think a lot of future applications will use video and rather than just leaving DirectShow to gather dust it could be extended to accomplish things that no other platform is capable of.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Microsoft should stop the FUD against Linux and the GPL.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
We would love to collaborate with Microsoft on the open source Stabilizer project, a system for quickly stabilizing buggy GUI applications:

http://stabilizer.sf.net

Currently, it supports Java GUI applications. Perhaps a collaboration with Microsoft would provide solid support for Windows applications as well.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
The biggest thing you could do would be to document, publish and allow open use of file formats and API's. Open sourcing code is all well and good, but is kind of an all-or-nothing scenario (it's no good opening selected parts of the source base) whereas opening the specifications, formats and API's allows completely independent OSS developments to enhance or interoperate with your products.

I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what the MS marketing strategy doesn't want to support/encourage but it's what you've got to do to gain any plausibility in teh OS world, IMHO.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Copyleft compliance. Simple as that.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Build tools, in general will probably get a good reaction to being opened source. Also the user communtity for those tools is the communitity which can do the most with them.

It's prolly no surprise that the there are such a wide range of open source developent tool out there which target unix.

Whether tools like gflags should be opensourced in an interesting question, but I suspect making more of the api it uses known would only aid good (I've had success using app verifier with gdb for instance) and better tools for your platform.

Equally it's worth allowing those tools to build for other platforms, eg, I'd like to be able build Msi's striaght from LINUX (I x-compile windows applications) just by adding the approirate rules to by make file. You shouldn't write a linux installer, but allow other to build and windows installer for their windows apps from a linux/bsd/whatever xbuild envoironment I think would be a good thing. It opens up your platform and encourages people to build their apps form windows. Not that much encouragemnt is normally needed, but why put problems in their way.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
GPL baby!
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
The .net framework libraries (especially
Windows.Forms) This will give great
insight and makes working with .Net
so much richer and easier.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
List of things that should be openned up and let loose in the world.

1. File Formats

2. File Systems FAT/NTFS/WinFS, etc

3. Protocols like SMB/CIFS,Exchange

4. IE
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Oh, yes, and IE is another Microsoft product that started as an open-source (though not open-license) project, NCSA Mosaic.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Microsoft is a closed source company. It looks now that under the GNU pressure, it is trying to save some apparences.

This "open-sourcing" is a dead project from start to end, because you will inevitably stay locked in small details as CRLF, path separator, incompatible make files, COM+, ActiveX , DLL dependencies, CLI... so in the end you'll be running wizards in Visual Studio on top of Windows XP.

So please, what's the whole point?!?
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
How about some Microsoft contribution to WINE?
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
There is an big interest in using .NET as an alternative to Java (see www.go-mono.com). But questions of stability and security come up and until these are truly addressed .NET will always be #2 to Java. I was a .NET developer from Beta up to 4 months ago when I abandoned it for Java because of a lack of open source tools available, stability of the .NET framework, and security.

I think that a big reason you don't see more open source projects created for .NET is people are concerned about it's stability and compatability with itself. If Microsoft were to open source the .NET framework it would help to stabalize it, better tools would become available, and a bigger community would embrace it.

I think there is a big myth out there that open source does not like Microsoft. I personally don't have a problem with Microsoft. I choose to use linux and Java right now because of stability and security concerns. Both of which I think would greatly improve with an open source .NET framework.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
MS is not nice. Frankly if you are anywhere near serious and not just another "MS is serious about security" type marketing droid then it is pretty obvious what you gotta do.
<p>PLAY NICE. Convince us that you get opensource. Stop trying to break opensource projects. Two very important projects that MS is constantly trying to break are OpenOffice and Samba.
<p>Let MS go to these two projects and help them to fully work with MS software without trying to crush them.
<p>Prove that you are serious. But of course you aren't MS doesn't want competing Opensource projects. Proof me wrong.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
As for the idea of releasing the Visual Studio 6 IDE, I suspect the biggest hurdle is somehow allowing the old IDE to handle the new core changes (new debugging symbols format, new languages like C# and all the other stuff added since the aging Visual Studio 6 IDE was written).

Also, something else that would be good to see Open Sourced is some of the various utillities that come with windows (e.g. Notepad, Wordpad, Paint, Solitare etc).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Activesync. Again, it's not core, it's got some real simple problems that would really benefit from OS work (like, how about using link-local addresses instead of 192.168.55 which happened to conflict with one of our internal networks and broke Activesync until we renumbered), and it would improve market share for the Pocket PC if it could be ported to other operating sustems.

And speaking of which, I'll bet there's a bunch of Pocket PC code you could open up.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I think a good area for open source collaboration would be tools that help integrate or support Microsoft products into other environments. There is a real life need for non-MS and MS products to co-exist, that MS is not going to escape from. If MS can sponsor some open source integration tools, then it can get some good will. Unfortunately this very integration ability seems to run counter to the MS strategy of lock-in, so I'm not sure how management could justify it...unless the goodwill outwieghs to the risk. Glaring candidates are document formats, migration tools, and "viewers" of documents developed in the office suite.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
It ain't research till others can verify it.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
If you want suggestions on Open Source, why not invite RMS to give a talk at Microsoft. How open and free can a piece of software be if its on a pay for OS. Why not open source XBox, forget about Windows leave that for a history lesson. Don't get me wrong I think MS and GPL have a lot of good things to offer. In the long run GPL is better, "I'd like to by a value please".
FM :)
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Give it up. Why keep a proprietary core that you can extend? For MS, it's a win-win. They get to charge you money, and you do the development of really cool features. Eventually, wouldn't you like to gut that core and replace it with something free?

Enter opensource. You can contribute to Eclipse, KDevelop, or whatever. You get a compiler that works pretty much on every 32 bit platform under the sun (gcc). You get open architecture and the complete source.

The other point I don't get is you have Ballmer running around in stage saying "Developers!" and then they turn around and charge you to develop on their propritary platform, which only helps them.

I've used both OSS and MS about the same amount now. O have to say OSS wins every time (for development) Maybe .Net is different, but I remember having to manually recalc control coords just because of a resize. I've never had to do that under Linux, thanks to Layout Managers. Something so simple...

VB Changes with every release of the DE. Python is just as easy and doesn't change.

Just about any application made with Linux is cross-platform. YMMV, depeding on your toolkit, but it is a lot more portable. Qt, GTK, wxWindows are the 3 best out there. And all have C (C++ for Qt) or Python, so your C and VB people will be happy.

Josh, you will come to realize that Microsoft is not the way to go. Between platform issues, poor documentation and inablity to access source, you're ending up paying for pain.

Ask yourself this: Is Enlightenment better associated with MS or OSS?
Never is Enlightenment associated with lock-in, fees, and poor documentation. Enlightenment instead is only achived when one is free.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I'd love to see enough of ATL/MFC released so that WFC could be used by folks without Visual C++. Otherwise, the public release of WFC doesn't really mean all that much.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
So a group could who contributes the code gets to license it however they see fit, and microsoft gets to use it, but what about the rest of us? this sounds like a way to give the illusion microsoft is promoting open source, while just taking code from developers and then distributing free binaries. so where's the source? is that up to the contributers to decide? as a contributer why would i want to "contribute" code to microsoft who has contributeed nothing to me?

maybe you just don't go into the details, but it seems that what you're talking about is contracting without exclusive rights, but microsoft doesn't pay and gets to reap the full reward (aka distributing it in their comercial products). write another article when you understand the open source movement.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
i agree with a lot of the other comments. if microsoft is really interested in open source, show some good faith and GPL, or heck, even BSD license something significant. if you want to take from the community, give something first. i don't know IE, the XP/Longhorn Kernel, Active Directory, the Office file formats, SMB/CIFS, whatever the current domain authentication scheme is, someone mentioned active sync, something, but something significant.

i think that would shock the open source community and you might attract some developers that way.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Josh, I have to agree with Luc. Opening up the code to more advanced MS UI tools would be of great benefit to many companies, as well as to Microsoft.

One of the biggest hurdles for a user to overcome is learning a new UI. However, if cross-company UIs are similar in their implementation, users would become more productive at a quicker rate, thereby increasing the enjoyment of a given application. If, for example, the VS "Solution Explorer" code was made public and used by various companies, users of one app would immediately feel at home in the second app due to the commonality. Familiarity breeds loyalty.
I'm no economist, but I would think that:
Loyal users = More income

If "people" get more familiar with the MS UI through external applications, then Windows would have an(other) advantage over the competition.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I think one very important thing MS can do is via its MFC for win32 apps and via the .NET framework for .NET apps is to begin supporting the POSIX APIs.

I know windows is not a UNIX etc etc, but I think such a move for windows would attract more code to be written and run under windows, it would also make the development of cross-platform code much easier.

Currently MS has an excellent opportunity with their next version of OS to implement such basic compatibilities.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I would never support Microsoft's efforts in any way because of their history of 'embrace and extend.' They swallow up anything they get involved in and spit it out with proprietary twists. Change the way Microsoft does business, and I'll consider changing my view. It would take a very long time to do this as Microsoft's history makes them untrusted.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
>> Ask yourself this: Is Enlightenment better associated with MS or OSS?

Enlightenment is better associated with Rasterman. Oh wait, wrong project. ::grumble, grumble::

Yeah, have to agree on another point: open source ActiveSync. The PocketPC platform doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot. Better integration of the PocketPC with, say, Thunderbird would probably make a few people smile (ahh, don't burn me! I never researched this so I don't know if it's really a problem!).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
We have already decide where to help Microsoft with open source.

OpenOffice
Mozilla
Samba
wine

You recognize the need to start winning back trust? Burn the BSA.

Quit trying to befriend your enemy. we don't want to be friends with the likes of you.
Ken
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I think that the NTFS and WinFS standard should be published. It would be awesome if some code can be contributed, but if code was not contributed, a published standard would allow other OSes to mount your windows drive without problems. On the other side, I would like to see native support for XFS, Riser, and ext2/3 in Windows. If you couldn't install Windows onto an ext2/3, I wouldn't care, I'd make a WinFS for the OS, an ext3 for Linux, and a shared ext3 data drive. The more interoperable Windows and Linux are, the better off both camps are, and the anti-trust lawyers will definitly back down a lot more.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
The best thing for MS would be to GPL the source of .Net. That will immediately attract half of the Java developers and all people participating in Mono project. This way Steve B. won't have a reason to complain about the lack of developers.
Just my 2c.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
If Microsoft were serious about cooperating with the open-source movement, they would have to abandon their dreams of one overarching framework. It's the source of the most frustration for developers (having lots of cruft in the software to trip over) and the biggest drain on IT budgets (having to pay $$$ for people whose main stock-in-trade is knowing how to work around COM and COM+ quirks).

They could also break the linkage between Visual Studio and Visual SourceSafe, or provide open hooks so that instead of being stuck with VSS we could use CVS or Subversion or some other real version control system. In doing so, they could stop trying to do our thinking for us (which is really meant to foster dependency instead of actually helping, and is kind of insulting to boot).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
How are all the comments on this page copyright of jledgard??
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Start/work on an open-source calendaring interoperability project; working with the existing standards or simplified versions of them. Calendar interoperability is not at a very good state right now, for MS to improve the situation can only help everyone (and, if interoperability improves, it might help sales for you too, who knows?).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
It probably has been said before here, but I will repeat it

documentation regarding the protocols

open up your protocols, document them. When they change, document the change at the same time, not years later.

documentation regarding the document formats

open up your document formats and document them. When they change, document the change at the same time.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Now that I think about it, they could provide an Eclipse plugin so that we could use their compilers with a fully customizable (and less annoying) IDE.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
>> The best thing for MS would be to GPL the source of .Net. That will immediately attract half of the Java developers and all people participating in Mono project.<<

We already have this. Its called Rotor. I'm sure more than one contributer to the Mono project, while developing, said "I wonder how they are doing that?" and took a gander at the Rotor code. Heck, I do it from time to time and it is extremely useful. Of course Rotor doesn't cover some of the more important items of the framework, like Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET. These are things the Mono developers have had to implement on their own.

>> They could also break the linkage between Visual Studio and Visual SourceSafe, or provide open hooks so that instead of being stuck with VSS we could use CVS or Subversion or some other real version control system.<<

They already do this. You can use any version control system you want. Its just there are some idiosyncracies to deal with if you want to use something other than Visual SourceSafe or another vendor's source control software that doesn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars behind it. MS needs to improve this API, publish it if they don't already (they probably do), and probably just open up the source so add-on developers can work around some of these weirder bugs. A few fixes to the way VS.NET communicates with the source control provider libraries is warranted as well (c'mon; I can't use F2 to rename a file in a source controlled solution when I'm using AnkhSVN because AnkSVN can't capture that renaming event?).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Microsoft already provides a good POSIX environment. It's off hidden inside Services For UNIX, but it's there.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
You already give away a product that needs security and standards adherence improvements..

If the patens and previous copyrights bought from others can be satisfied..why not open source MSIE?
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Microsoft with its extra billions of cash and its extreme profit image should have the courage to behave consistently. Instead of mimicking others, it could organise open competition for original applications. The selected winners would be rewarded with generous monetary prizes. But is this company so greedy that it can not even imagine such a scheme?
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Personally I would like to see the NTFS file system opened up. I know you can already mount it on Linux, but think if a geek could make it more stable like the ext3 and the reiser4 file system so that you don't have to defrag every week/month. It would also increase the interoperability of *NIX and Windows since Linux has a hard time writing NTFS partitions. ( Matter of opinion I know, no need to flame. )
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Standards and fundaments.

MS software runs on a too different platform, namely MS Win32; and embodies too bad development and administration practices. You have been improving, but be it the marketing smokescreen or whatever, sometimes it seems you only improve points without ever seeing the picture.

IMNSHO you really missed the boat when you scuttled the planned migration from MS DOS 2.11 or some successor of it to MS Xenix, deciding instead to keep patching MS DOS until it became real-mode MS DOS^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMS OS/2^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMS WNT^H^H^H^H^H^HMS .Net, whatever.

Now what you can do? Even if MS .Net is relatively good, the platform it runs on is just too complex. You could possibly migrate to a free software kernel like Linux, a BSD or even the GNU Hurd, but I doubt it. Making MS .Net a standard could help, but it would need to come with assurances of no aggression with patents or whatever.

MS SQL Server should not only strive for but indeed achieve ISO SQL compliance at least on par with IBM DB2.

Just as good or better would be to freely publish specs of protocols, interfaces and file formats. That would in effect preclude nearly all the antitrust nastiness, and create a level playing field with free software. It would, as a huge bonus, build the bridge with free software, as in enabling you to use more of it – apart from hoarding the BSD IP stack into MS Windows and using the GNU toolchain in MS UIS – and enabling the free software community in using more of your tools and platform.

Now as we are talking about this, why not go to the root of the problem?

One of the main reasons there are so many standards (and non-standards like your proprietary interfaces, protocols and formats) is complexity, and one of the main causes of complexity is lack of power deriving from poor fundamentals. Look at Lisp: one of the three oldest programming languages, it is also one of the simplest and at the same time more powerful. Even C and POSIX, bad as they are, have such longevity compared to MS platforms due to their inherent power.

One way here would be to collaborate with the GNU Hurd, that tries to stabilish a bridge between the POSIX (and why not MS Win32 and .Net) world with the functional programming world.

But an even better way would be relational data.

MS SQL Server may be nice enough as far as current SQL products go, bar IBM DB2 and PostgreSQL, and MS .Net has a real nice concept with its common type system. But you could both make MS .Net and an RDBMS successor to MS SQL Server much better if you made a sane type system the base of your whole platform, and integrated a D language-accessible TRDBMS compliant with Date’s and Darwen’s The Third Manifesto at the core. The icing on the cake would be functional programming as a preferred systems programming language, but perhaps that’d be asking too much.

And what would that have to do with free software? Well, it would be such a leapfrog on systems development and deployment that it would stabilish whole new standards. Make them real standards – just as IBM did with ISO SQL –, and you won’t really need to give much away to be a good member of the global village.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Support open standards and make implementations of those standards open source.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
An open source .NET would definatly be great :)

Something else that I just thought of would be for microsoft to detatch backend parts of visual studio (the debugger for example) from the front end parts (the editor, project browser and stuff) and basicly Open Source the front end/IDE so that people can make a better IDE whilst still using the same Visual Studio compiler, linker, tools etc as they always have.
For example, the debugger could go in a dll with a COM interface so you can do things like "add watch" and "get data at memory location x" and "step the next ASM instruction" and "disassemble bytes from address x to address y" and so on and the debugger core could do events back like "stopped at breakpoint x" and "watch x has just changed, new value is x" and stuff.

Not just the debugger but the compiler, source code control and such too.

Also, how about opening the file formats of things like the MS Debug Symbol files (PDB files)
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I'd love to see Microsoft do one thing in particular (well, two really):

* split the "window manager" part of the GUI into it's own executable
* open source the code for the new exe

Within months there's be a myriad of different Windows window managers, just as there is in Unix-land. This would also benefit MS by helping users of different GUIs to migrate to Windows more easily.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Microsoft provides very strong IDE and desktop environments. Make use of this.

Add features to Visual Studio to support more deployment targets. Support more third party development tools such as CVS/Subversion. Make VS a viable alternative for J2ME, GNU C, and other developers. Compete with Borland and Metrowerks.

Don't waste time attempting to bridge the back-end and create N-tier solutions involving MS servers. This is where emotional sensitivities and Intellectual Property issues are strongest and realistic benefits are minimal.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I think that parts of the ui would be the perfect place for Open Source: Explorer, shell32, user32 etc. There are a lot of people who like all the bells and whistles on their desktop and (people like me) who take away all of the eye-candy and would like to see even more optimized Windows GUI. I think that Explorer is very usable at the moment but the size just seems to be increasing with every new version of Windows.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
For me, there are two attractions of open source. The first is the guarantee it gives me - I know that my data will be forever safe. As Microsoft explores new licensing options (particularly "software leasing") I have no guarantee that I can obtain legal copies of software to unlock my data from Microsoft formats for terms that I consider reasonable. Sure, my existing programs will keep on working, but if I buy a new PC, I need to buy another license, and MS may not wish to sell me one. With Free Software, I don't have that problem. Even if the developers of my favourite application give up, I can always install more legal copies of the application, and if there's a feature I need badly enough, I can always pay someone to implement it.

There's not an awful lot that MS can do about that, except publish complete specs of all the file formats and give a binding undertaking to allow implementations of them for no license fee. That way, I know that it's at least possible to always get my data back if MS does something bad, and in practice is probably a goof enough guarantee.

The second thing is configurability and scriptability. I want hooks everywhere so I can plug python scripts into, well, everything, really, and make the environment behave in a useful way. Some of this can be done, but most of the interesting stuff requires me to pay $1000 for some IDE or other. I don't want to pay $1000 just to make my Windows work a bit better.

Oh, and for the love of Bob, get the IE guys to learn how to render PNGs properly. Alpha transparency really isn't all that hard.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Tons of enterprise and univ level sysadmins would be happy to work on projects to make intergrating windows systems into the enterprise easier.

Open source anything needed for authentication and authorization. Open source anything needed for remote monitoring and management.

None of "us" are ever going to be "MS only" -- so there's no market advantage to the "tower of MS" anymore.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I am little confused. The idea seems to be to 'engage the free software community' and then you start saying about what projects Microsoft can open up. I feel this is the wrong approach. At the moment there isn't the motivation for a lot of free software developers to work on Windows based software. Why not take the alternative tactic and come join us. I'm not saying 'Immediately GPL all MS products', simply start contributing to projects as a member of the free software community.

A little public domain documentation (and it would have to be public domain) would buy a lot of good will with the WINE and NTFS project teams, financing a handful of your developers to contribute to GNU and GPL products, shifting development towards using open standards and open protocols, a donations to GNU, FSF or OSTG would be a lot more cost effective that advertising, stop the anti-free software rhetoric and start offering support and tools for hetrogenous environments. The immediate financial cost of this sort of thing - not significant, business oppertunities - would probably create more than it 'looses', publicity - invaluable.

I (as something of a free software evangelist) think it's a good idea, 10 - 15 years ago IBM was 'the great evil', they've turned things around and are now gaining significantly from their involvement with the community. There is no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same.

There have been a lot of disagreement between the two camps but this division could be healed if Microsoft are serious about wanting to. Rather than inviting 'us' into your closed, propriatory world - why not come and join the 'open to all' party that is going on.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
MS need not do anything thanks, we have things in the free software world going along just fine. But, maybe MS employees should follow Bill's lead and start dumping your stock before it's too late. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Learn from Google : do not be evil! Stop funding SCO, killing small companies with frivolous patent litigation and spreading FUD about Linux. Just be nice.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I think that the most buggy, user-visible software Microsoft makes is Internet Explorer. It's also the least likely to contain anything valuable to Microsoft - even if the application itself is of strategic importance, the code is years behind that of its competitors.

Even if you aren't willing to open the source for anything, having an open Bugzilla that anybody can read and post comments to would be valuable.

As I have to work around Internet Explorer bugs on a daily basis, I would be more than willing to participate in such a project.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
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Anonymous
August 23, 2004
The trends I'm seeing in this thread are:

1) Open source .NET.
2) Open Source IE.
3) Open documentation for the stuff you already have.
4) Improve and stabilise the APIs to make OSS easier to integrate.

That sound about right, folks?
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Oh yes...

5) Come out and play in our sandboxes as well.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Open source the majority of the .Net Framework, and allow porting to Linux, OSX, etc. As a .Net developer, being able to do cross-platform development would be very beneficial.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
CSP looks alot like running a bunch of child processes that communicate via FIFOs | pipes.

You can do that now on a *nix machine and/or across a network with just about any OS that supports Python and sockets (I would assume Windows would - but don't have the time to dig through the dogfood to get a definitive answer).
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
I would love to work with Microsoft on an object persistence framework (and OR mapper), and would gladly submit the existing code base of Gentle.NET (see URL) for use in such an endeavour.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
If MS had an ounce of decency, it would open its formats and APIs. I bet it won't though, for it knows that that would only accelerate its collapse into irrelevance.
Anonymous
August 23, 2004
Too late. Microsoft has no credibility in the Open Source or Free Software communities, so anything it does will be of interest only to Windows customers, and of little interest to the open-source community.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
This is such a joke.

MS refuse to even open so much as their office file formats.

It's just a classic divide-and-conquer technique. Anyone who cares about the future of software should have nothing to do with it.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
what is this community you speak of? The only people interested in open source microsoft projects are those who want to steal intellectual property
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
PROTOCOLS...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Continue with new releases of IronPython under the Common Public License so that it can be used in Mono as well as in VisualStudio .NET.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
3D Movie Maker.
I doubt you've heard of it, but it was a little program MS made in '95, aimed at kids, that let you make simple movies, using premade actors.

It's 9 years old and still has a community of hundreds of directors. I run a site that stores 1344 movies made with this great little program.
By letting you use premade actors,props, and backgrounds, they shifted the focus on the voices and story. It's basicly a movie prototyping program.

But it still has flaws. It was made right as Direct3D was being released, so it missed the boat. (It's using a software renderer). Some very useful tools were left out (multi-select, texture/model importing, dynamic camera movement) either because they were aiming it at little kids, or because of limitations of the software renderer.

Our community is pretty unknown because you have to own the program to view these movies. With the source we could make a 3dmm2AVI converter and let others view some of the best 3dmm movies without having to buy/download the program. We've got several C++ programs and a dozen VB coders, we could do so much with this program.

It's sad that one of Microsoft's best programs is almost completely unknown, and the hundreds of great movies made with it suffer for it.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
many of us would like to see a world where anyone can freely choose whatever software they want, including yours.

you are doing everything you can to prevent this, and drive us away.

it doesnt make sense to help someone who is trying to drive you under.

as for balmer, he seems to want some kind of war.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Open standards and interoperability are what Microsoft is missing right now. The most valuable collaboration Microsoft could have with its customers would be to document its file formats. Word, Excel, Power Point, and so on.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I would really like to see the shell opened up (either in source or in specs).
Microsoft over the years has really focused on providing a better and better user experience. Based on the current demos, Avalon will only move this goal further.

However, I am unconvinced that a single user experience is right for me. Explorer.exe may be a wonderful environment for 95% of users, but true customization (not just theming and custom animations) can only be acheived by having third parties contribute their own innovations.

Some environments already exist that replace explorer.exe: <a href="http://litestep.net">Litestep</a> and <a href="http://bb4win.org">BB4Win</a>. These programs are only marginally useful as they were not programmed against the specs, and will likely no longer work under Longhorn.

I believe that a fair amount of teenagers+ who migrate to Linux do it not for the OpenSourceness, but for the possibility to tweak their environment. Wouldn't it be great if one day we had a variety on Windows such as <a href="xwinman.org">this</a> ?
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Open source Windows 3.1.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
My ideas are wiki (which at least one MS developer started on his own already) and build and test tools.

The idea I read that makes the most sense to me is ActiveSync.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Everyone else has already said it. But the file formats needed to be opened if MS wants to play nice with the other kids in the sandbox.

And since that will NEVER happen, it seems pointless to waste time and engery trying to open up MS. Longhorn is all about locking down and locking out. I don't see much of a balance in the the future; only a battle.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Hi, it's me again. I don't know if you are naive, optimistic or simply trying a cynical image stunt, but I just wanted to add that I sincerely wish you all the best for what you are attempting. I really hope you find the cooperation you are looking for.

Good luck -- Caleb
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Your choice of "Powered by" says it all. And they are not very "open" choices at all (pay full price for these? I bet not).

L.A.M.P.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
More Microsoft Engagement with Open Source Projects I'm currently working to enable more collaboration of the "Open Source" type with the developer community and Microsoft. It should be easy for teams here at Microsoft to develop extensions to their platforms...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Open up the specs.

The IFS driver kit is $800... I just paid $2000 for MSDN Universal to get the checked build of XP, plus DDK, etc. (admittedly I could get MSDN Prof. instead for this but the point stands I thnik). That's a huge barrier to entry for opensource projects.

The reason given for this is that driver development is 'hard' and they don't want any old developer doing it (they recommend a company that wants $25,000 for a 2 day training course on it)... which for me just about sums up the MS attitude ('we can't let the peasants vote.. only landowners are qualified').

btw. filter driver development is not 'hard' if you have the documentation (for any half decent programmer). I'm nearly finished just from using google and a little bit of luck. Still need to wait for the proper docs to arrive to find out what horrendous bugs are in there, though...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Don't open source anything. I have to work daily with a number of open source jihads and I see the code they produce.
All they do is vent the fact that they have no life in horrible code and use comments to insult each other.
Why would MS support that? If anything, create a way for small ISVs to gain access to MS source code where it is mutually beneficial.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Wow, this is a LOT to read through. I normally try and respond to every comment on my blog. I generally don't get more than 10. :-) In this case, however, I think I'll have to respond to themes of comments. I'll write up a post today/tommorow with a LOT of my responces.

I just wanted you to know I am listening.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I think Travis Wells' comment about 3D Movie Maker says it best:

"It's sad that one of Microsoft's best programs is almost completely unknown, and the hundreds of great movies made with it suffer for it."

What's sad is that if there had been an Open Source alternative to hitching all his wagons to a proprietary product and format, there'd be hundreds of films that wouldn't have to rely on anything but the passion and technical skill of them people behind them.

having lamented about the past, this all boils down to trust: MicroSoft has a long and storied history of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". There are a lot of people that see Open Source as a final and effecive protection against MS's predatory business practices. You need to help peopel overcome years of fairly slimy past history. I know many people feel "tainted" when they involve themselves with MS and its products. You'll have to overcome that feeling. It's a religious thing with some folks. There are practical issues as well.

Little things come to mind, like would you allow developers to collaborate via IRC/jabber/etc, or is MSN the only avenue possible? Stuff like this matters.

The license you mention sounds great until one wonders what would happen if MS decides to change libraries, API, file formats, network protocol, etc. a couple years after a fork.

Similarly, how would any software patent notions shake out? If I work on something with MS, and then am allowed to "use it for [my] own purposes commercially", how do I know MS won't patent what I've helped with and then lock me out? If MS intends to grant me royalty-free use of whatever I've worked on in perpetuity, what if I decide to transfer ownership? Many OS developers don't have cadres of lawyers. MS does, and is never afraid to do business with them first.

Would MS have any rights to say what I did with my version of the forked code? Even if I intend to compete commercially directly against MS? Or if I intend to collaborate with one of MS's competitors?

One last word: Open Source is, at its core, about liberty. That means there are never interoperability issues, because everything is open. Products and projects stand or fall on their own merit, not because of vendor lock-in, marketing budgets, or scare mongering amongst the users. Can MicroSoft square with that? Really? Deep down? That's what it means to eat your own Open Source dog food.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Things i'd love to see:

Once longhorn comes out, MS releases the source code to all the obsolete and unsupported versions of windows.

Some work towards a BSD/Linux/Unix backing towards windows (yeah... i like OSX) at least enough so that I wouldn't need to dual boot in order to be able to run certain apps that I require. (Colinux for example is moving towards a good direction.)

Opening up explorer.exe, and allowing for more customization would also be a great addition. shell replacement can only go so far.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
An important part in any plan to promote open source or better community of code sharing requires good infrastructure. SourceForge.NET is years ahead of GotDotNet.com.

For some time I have felt the major shortcoming in Microsoft's strategy has not been to bolster GDN and advertise it. GDN is a great tool, but is notoriously slow and it's not a surprise to find it unavailable.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
All the accessories that come with windows. e.g. Notepad, Paint, Calc, Wordpad

And possibly the Games as well.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Microsoft would do the whole world a boon if they would hand Internet Explorer over to a Mozilla Foundation like organization. Competition in the browser arena is healthy. The only browser that has a chance of really competing with Firefox right now is IE (mainly because of user base), but IE grows more discredited every day. Hand it over to an organization that's unencumbered by the usual MS distrust and the emerging browser war will be far more constructive then it would otherwise be.

Open file formats would also be good. My understanding of the way some versions of office applications save to disk make me beleive this may be difficult (and the poor quality of some of Office's file filters for use with older Office file formats leads me to beleive even the MS developers don't have a full grasp of the Office file formats), but any attempt to improve the detail and accuracy of the published file formats would improve Microsofts credibility.

Omar
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Everything that needed to be said has been said. To summarize:

1) Support OASIS file formats in your products. This is how you were able to beat Lotus and Wordperfect before.

2) Allow others to read your file protocols and show that you have faith in your own products by letting customers see that you compete on the merits of the Office suite. In other words, don't lock customers.

3) Enhance interoperability at every layer of the software stack. Microsoft has the technology how-to and the money to change how we experience computing, but they will only be able to do so by opening up so that we can all work on a common set of standard file protocols and APIs.

Open sourcing .NET would be a huge boom to Microsoft as it would alter computing history creating the single most unified computing platform in history.

Do it. Be relentless, be the voice of reason and change within Microsoft. Lead and educate others and make it known to management that the world has changed and thus Microsoft must too change.

Good luck
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Switch to a linux/bsd based OS and you might have a chance.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
great to see this. the walls between open and closed source are coming down. software companies need to do both. i noticed you quoted my business partner and it was interesting because we've spent a lot of time on this:
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000045.html
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
What would be extremely groovy, would be a free(speech and beer) framework that work beautifully on both platforms. (java still needs work) For instance, .Net is great for App development in Windows. Qt is equally great for Linux (I'm a KDE man.. Sorry Gnome folks) I understand that Qt works on Windows too ($2500 is a bit pricey though.) What would be great, is a project to make ANY application run as well on either platform as it would with it's own APIs would. Or an API translator so You could take a .Net app and have it "traslated" to Qt/C++. This way, applications can be released for either platform and can reach 100% of the market.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
One way to get some traction on this is to determine were the true "value add" is in various pieces of software.

For example, Solitare and Write add very little value (if any), so make the source code available. Things start to get tricker with things like windows Movie Maker or Internet Explorer, but I think both are relatively unimportant compared to Word (the blather about IE being "integrated" into Windows aside).

Large parts of .NET are already open-sourced, and there are projects that provide Visual-Studio like tools. So maybe VS could be tweaked to separate out the "free" stuff from the "pay" stuff (perhaps pushing the "Express" concept a bit further).
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Provide a stable socket-capable port of Perl to the Pocket PC, along with a developer price on wifi-equipped Pocket PCs. You'll find some pretty cool mobile p2p apps come out, most of which will be open source.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
How about providing support for Visual Basic (e.g. vs. 6) for all those users who are unwilling to move to VB .Net?
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I would like to see Microsoft start releasing the source to older versions of Windows such as Windows 95. I would suggest a 10 year cycle. In 2005 you BSD license what you can from Win95 and in 2008 you do the same for Win98.

Windows NT is another case as the NT kernel is still a big cash cow for Microsoft as with our little friend ReactOS I doubt Microsoft would want to release it right away. I would suggest doing it that same way. Release the souce for it in 2008 and then service pack 6 in 2009.

I doubt this will ever happen as the community could then adopt a Free version of Windows and improve it rather than buying the latest and greatest. I mean look at Unix, its lasted 30 years.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I would like to see COM/DCOM open sourced
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I would like to see Microsoft adopt open formats. Specifically, I would like to see MS Office support the new OASIS file format.

OASIS is a standards organization that includes several corporations (Sun, Corel, Boeing, etc), non-profig troups (KDE Leagues) and individuals.

The OASIS file format is intended as an open standard for office applications. It will be the default file format of OpenOffice.org starting at version 2.0 and KOffice starting at version 1.4.

I expect future versions of Corel Office will at least support the format (since Corel is in the OASIS committie and helped design the format).

I would be much less wary to work with Microsoft if I had the confort and security that the OASIS format brings.

If you are interested in talking about this, feel free to contact me. My name is Daniel Carrera and I am an OpenOffice.org volunteer.

I can be reached at dcarrera@openoffice.org

Cheers,
Daniel.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Over on his blog, Josh Ledgard (the program manager for visual studio) is looking for feedback on which projects Microsoft should open source next. Ears down to the track and you can hear the train a'coming.......
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Quite simple: take IE into that route. Let the IE development go through a community. The biggest lack for IE are the security bugs and the standards (W3C) no-compliance. Particulary bad is the latter, even for non-IE users (such as me). Letting a community drive or help IE development would definitely help everyone, approaching standards faster and not ever stalling development again.

Unless Microsoft removes IE from the Windows OS, of course.

By the way, a good choice of license that allows what you are looking for is clearly BSD.

Good luck!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
This is OT but I was reading your "When Penguins Attack" and you made mention not understanding MS Licensing and didn't like losing customers this way. Here is a link that breaks down some legal terms in the MS EULA for home users and explains things.

http://www.cybersource.com.au/cyber/about/comparing_the_gpl_to_eula.pdf

The MS EULA is what keeps me from using Windows! For me, the MS EULA is totally unacceptable. And I don't see how anyone can accept these terms. It is control-freak city. Of course, no one reads it and just clicks "I Accept". And if you did read it, you'd need to be a lawyer to understand what rights you are surrendering. The terms in the EULA need to be negotiable.

Sorry for being OT but comments for that post are closed.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I am quite interested to see if any of the ideas and suggestions on this blog will be seen by microsoft developers to put together some sort of suite for the programmer to establish standards and protocals for all to follow....and to be able to quickly deploy feedbacks and benchmarks for the community...what Sun and Helix have over microsoft...i would gladly help with this if there was an actual interaction within the community and the company. Sun and Helix
listen to their communities and actually give them feddback for their evolving developments!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Hey everybody...would it not be cool if microsoft where to start a community for this project and set them up with a message board
and actual adminsitrators/developers that could monitor that blogs and forums and post some helpful comments to those individuals developing "their" software.....but that means they would have to actually pay a few of these "microsoft professionals" some money for administrating these forums. That would mean it would cost them money...and we know this won't happen.....because the whole reason they are going "open source" is that they want to cash in on the "free" development that everyone does for all these other companies/projects.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
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Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I think the one program Microsoft desperately NEEDS to open source is Internet Explorer. IE generates negative revenue as well as negative publicity for Microsoft and apparently Microsoft lacks the motivation to spend resources on getting IE fixed adequately fast. If IE were released as open source under an acceptable license (i.e OSI approved), I have no doubts that IE would quickly develop into a secure and standards-compliant browser. Microsoft would benefit from this as would end users as would web designers. Everyone would win.

Aside from releasing its own software as open source I think Microsoft should start distributing open source. There are lots of open source packages for Windows. Why doesn't Microsoft ship a selection of software comparable to what you get with a Linux distro? They could do so at almost no additional cost.
Windows should ship with standard Unix tools by default.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Josh, above you wrote: (quote) "I cringe when I see the news headlines like "<Random Microsoft Executive> Rails Against Open Source". (/quote)

Start cringing again. :-) This is why most people hesitate to trust MS. The article is on http://www.groklaw.net/ and the original article from the New York Times.

"The New York Times' John Markoff has the story that Microsoft has pulled out of a UN software standards body (United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, or U.N./Cefac) for "business reasons", after a dispute over "a set of thorny issues over control of intellectual property that is being contributed to the standards-setting effort":

"Earlier this year, Microsoft's participation had created controversy within the group, which is attempting to define standards for creating a new generation of Internet services to automate buying and selling through networks of computers."

In an email to the group, Microsoft made clear that any prior contributions it has made are "not bound by the negotiations taking place over the control of intellectual property." The group wishes corporations who contribute technology to indemnify the United Nations against IP claims. In May, SAP also withdrew from the group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/24/technology/24soft.html

Oops....or maybe this: "Microsoft published today a new license and FAQ for Sender-ID anti-spam standard being developed by the IETF's MARID WG (based on SPF). To use the license, a signed agreement with MSFT is required. Compatability with the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the GPL/LGPL licenses is already in question."

http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg03496.html

http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg03514.html

And of course you can't have a post without a slashdot link. :-)

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=119211&threshold=5&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I suggest Microsoft open sources their localization tools. LocStudio, Helium, you name it. They are all better than the competition's and it would be so great if everybody could use them and not only Microsoft's employees and localization vendors.

Also the likelihood of bugs in these tools being fixed would most likely be higher than it is now. ;)

~Tommi
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Heres another cool idea.

Support GCC on windows.
Help out MingW to be better at windows.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
and, in case it hasnt been said enough yet, Open Source Internet Explorer.

Its probobly actually costing you money to maintain it (fix security holes etc). Several experts (including the US government CERT I believe) have said to stop using it.

Release it under an OSI licence and I am sure there are a fair few people out there who are willing to make (and let you guys use/ship) genuine improvements to IE to make it a better browser. Better PNG support. Better W3C HTML standards complience. Better W3C CSS standards complience. Better security when it comes to ActiveX and VBScript. And so on.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Probably the simpler is to turn into open source support for MS hardware devices that MS is no longer producing.

I think specifically about the wifi broadband routers and cards (MN-100/500/700, etc). MS has announced that is getting out the business of selling these devices, and is not upgrading the firmware for several of them.

It would be great if these can be supported through an open source effort. This wouldn't impact MS business <read not competing>, and in fact would improve the value of an MS product for customers <read increased trust in future MS products>.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
M$ is a nocive company and you should be ashamed of work for Bill Gate's company.

Long live to true free (as freedom, not like freeware) software and linux !
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
dragon bringers » Josh Ledgard for Microsoft CEO!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Why I don't trust any of what is being done... Well how about this one.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,775,781.WKU.&OS=PN/6,775,781&RS=PN/6,775,781

This patent application patents the SU and Sudo commands Which for those who don't know are commands that have been around since before M$ released thier first OS of any kind. In short. What is the missing link. Trust. I don't really think M$ will ever have that. Not even from their partners (Oracle, IBM, Nvidia, Adobe etc.) past and present.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Seems at least one <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/jledgard/archive/2004/08/20/217992.aspx">person</a> at Microsoft would see them do a little more in the Open Source arena. On ...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Not so long ago RMS wrote a piece about the Java trap. That is to say that even if a developer writes Java software and licenses it in a free software manner unless it can be used with free software Java VMs like gcj it does not help the community. It's much the same with .NET, unless it works with Mono or DotGNU it isn't that useful should the commercial system suddenly be yanked out from under you. And this can be extended to your example of a developer writing a plugin for Visual Studio.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
OFFICE PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
If instead of utter stupidity and incompetency it can be proven that they are applying for the patent as part of a FUD campaign then they their managers and the CEO of the company should be imprisoned and the company fined 10% of its net worth and prevented from operating for 30 days. Punitive penalties such as this are the only way to stop companies like Microsoft, Monsanto, IBM, Disney and Roche from stealing on a regular basis.

Tobacco company execs got punished for destroying lungs MS should be punished for stealing and attempting to PATENT a concept so general and self-evident that it is an affront to human decency.

<blockquote>
Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff
Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at
SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated
version, credited to Phil Betchel, Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips,
John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to the net.sources newsgroup
in December of 1985.

In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released and enhanced version
of sudo. For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful
of folks at CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and
Trent Hein.
</blockquote>
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
After that administrative tools, accessories.

Open sourcing old horrid MAPI code.
Specifically PST client code:

I really would like a outlook to read a readonly PST file to put on archived mail CD.
That should not be difficult with source
access.

I am sure this would make a lot of people happy.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
DirectX.

At university, we had the choice between OpenGL and DirectX (among other choices). I chose OpenGL because it is portable hence more free. If i want to develop an application (for free or for profit) i write it with portability in mind because that leads to a more wide usage.
After i got graduated i'd love to program games and although i'm not sure if that'll be some open or closed source game it'll be in OpenGL because of its portability. When MS would allow other platforms to implement a working DirectX API, i'd reconsider my point, but currently i don't even have much choice except to go OpenGL. We're currently working on a modeller as a proof-of-concept of some theory we have and so far it runs on Solaris, IRIX, Linux and FreeBSD. Nobody of our group has tried to port it over to Windows yet although it should be trivial. When we decided to develop a our program using DirectX API however it wouldn't be portable to those other platforms hence 2 of our 4 developers (who don't run Windows) couldn't even test the software!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I think the "passion" for Microsoft

died a few years ago.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2004/08/20/217992.aspx...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
From my reading, what Microsoft has patented is not SUDO, but SUDO-over-RPC. Now this might still be a problematical patent (it's similar to what just about any database admin utility does), but it's not what's been presented on /.

On the other hand, it's kind of scary. I can't help but expect it to be a fertile source of security holes if they ever implement anything using it.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Well, for starters, Microsoft needs to quit hindering technology development through the use of its patent portfolio.

The Sender-ID standardization process comes to mind...
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Although it seems like next to impossible, Microsoft should do something on the Mono project this way a wider base can be covered.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Hey Josh, when's your last day?
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
hey, what about memphis? (the interfaces to the upcomming universal back-end)

i work in compilers and i'd like to see at least the memphis interface definitions... i see absolutely no problem with publishing the entire back-end source code... just think about it, how many people are that low-level... on the other hand, how many developers (MS developers would actually benefit from a more open memphis)???

the msvc++ product managers seam to have a different oppinion, which is quite easy to understand, given their background... :-)

isn't just about time for a change???

regards,
Daniel // theverylittleone@hotmail.com
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
You're fired.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
I commend your efforts as well; being slashdotted isn't goign to help your cause. I remember the feeling of getting called down to the principal's office and I think you're in for something similar. I wish you luck, you seem like a good guy.

Anyway, how about open sourcing the MS shell? It would be really nice to have a [bkctc]sh-like shell for use with Windows systems. You've got the GUI down for all those right mouse clickers but the CLI needs some serious work.

Pz!
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
This can be a win/win situation for both Microsoft and the open source community. Cost of entry is always going to cause open source developers to USE and DEVELOP free and open software and tools instead of to application suites like microsoft office, and visual studio. Microsoft may be able to gain the communities support however by accepting source code contributions from the open source community and in turn funding and sponsoring, a project of the open source community's choice, perhaps by popular vote or the like. Microsoft would benefit by extending functionality and be a staunch supporter of open source. The open source community would benefit by having more choice and a better relationship with an industry giant.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Two suggestions:
- Support NHibernate
- Once the Microsoft Business Framework has been released, give the source to developers so they can suggest and contribute changes.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Also, something else I would like to see is a version of vcbuild.exe that is compatible with the Visual C++ Compiler Toolkit 2003
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
Well, if MS needs a tool for software structural dependencies analyses (I know there is no such plan for VS2005), I would be glad to cooperate with the basis of my tool NDepend (which is for now, involved mainly with code metrics):
http://smacchia.chez.tiscali.fr/NDepend.html

By the way, IBM has releases the tool SA4J (Structural Analysis for Java)
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sa4j
Authors (Alex Iskold and Daniel Kogan) were previously developping and selling an equivalent product called Small Worlds.
Anonymous
August 24, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
Personally, I'd like to see InfoPath as an OSS project or at least open the file format and allow the client to be freely downloaded or packaged with Windows like IE is today. (e.g. HTML is the open file format for IE and the client is a free download.)
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
The main mindshare problem with Microsoft is lack of standardization, a lack of information, and a lack of interoperation. I think that the most important thing probably would be the Windows API code under an LGPL-compatible licence. There are layers between the Windows API and the kernel proper that make up a lot of the idiosyncrasies of Windows. Making those available for free would make it possible to improve layers like Wine to a degree where they can be used to successfully run most Windows applications natively.

This would serve to establish the Windows API and Windows applications on Free Operating systems, at the cost of reducing the market for preloaded consumer Windows. It would also help to make free software run better under Windows: offerings like SFU are still largely met with distrust.

Certainly not a run of the mill kind of decision to be thinking about.
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
Some of the web-service related utilities. For example, xsd.exe, wsdl.exe (& wsewsdl2.exe) and WebServiceStudio. This would allow developers to modify them to meet their specific needs and would also allow the tools to become more robust.
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
Josh Ledgard Program Manager working with the Visual Studio - Community Team at MSFT has a great post regarding the broader collaboration between Microsoft and the vast open source community (via /.). "It should be easy for teams here at...
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
in light of what is said here
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=119328&cid=10072588

How about Opening the Microsoft ACPI code
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
There are lots of mentions of opening the file formats in the previous comments, and I second these.
I'd like to add the Ink binary format on the Tablet PC. I think it would help the Tablet PC market and allow more cool apps to be developped.

Keep the reco algos closed, since I would think that's were most of the IP is... File formats are not the core of intellectual property and they should not be means of protecting a business!
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
I second on the proposal for opening the file formats. OpenOffice.org is already on the way for putting their file formats as open standards. MS Office itself can be closed with widgets / tools / wizards etc - but user files should be transparent / portable.

I have 1 client, whose Excel file was corrupted. Excel refused to open it. OOo managed to read it in text form so that we could still rebuild a new file. Would have been better if the file format was on open standards, so that the affected lines can be patched to get the whole file back.

Thanks for taking note.
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
I proposal for opening the file formats, Doc (word), xls (excel), ...
Anonymous
August 25, 2004
This is my list.
1) File formats
2) File system NTFS.
3) VS.NET 2005 Express ;)
Anonymous
August 26, 2004
I'd like more of MS's internal or nearly abandonware tools to be open-sourced. For instance, there is a tool called CDIMAGE that leaked out of Microsoft a while ago. It was an internal-use tool for composing ISO images for burning on CDs. It has many useful features that I haven't seen elsewhere, but I can't see it succeeding commercially, so why not open-source it?

There must be many tools like that in Microsoft, install tools like WiX, build tools, development tools. Distributing them as open-source would generate a lot of good will.
Anonymous
August 30, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
August 30, 2004
Microsoft and open source
Anonymous
September 13, 2004
bla
Anonymous
September 26, 2004
Imagine a blog entry where I discuss Open Source at Microsoft via posts on Josh Ledgard's blog.
Anonymous
June 04, 2005
Very cool,
thanks for taking the time to make this.
Anonymous
July 26, 2005
It started with the thinkweek paper, then Dare and Adam dissected it, and Mini encouraged us all to post...
Anonymous
July 26, 2005
It started with the thinkweek paper, then Dare and Adam dissected it, and Mini encouraged us all to post...
Anonymous
December 31, 2005
hello and have 365 happy days this year.

could be cool to open source of dirextx the one thing that shows that microsoft seems to want to keep away from open source.
OpenGL is a technology for all gamers. Could it be the same for directx ????
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