Open Source at Microsoft?? WTF? | April 30th, 2006
This is an alcohol free event. So this is for real…I think.
Rob Mensching, 7yr MSFT Veteran. His topic is Open Source and Microsoft.
He started Wix a project he’s worked on for 5yrs now. It’s for building set up packages, for all that’s installed on Windows from MS, it outputs an MSI. Was trying to get support for an OSS license. Got some initial support. Legal didn’t really get it. Had the record for shortest meeting (8min) ever with senior VP for approval. Historic meeting with MSFT. First OS project within MS.
What license to pick? There’s about 60. They picked up the CPL. It was OSI so they could actually get on SourceForge. They go from their source depot to their CVS and then push it out to source forge.
A group of 5 MS people get together every Tuesday at Rob’s house and work on this. Generally with loud music until 3am… They don’t want to be on payroll for this because they’re afraid the team dynamic will change. They even have a 70 page tutorial that a developer from Hungary wrote.
Coolest thing at the end of build process is that the latest bits get pushed up to the website at the end of the session. They’re currently try to figure out what a “quality” release is.
Wix is an experiment. Trying to figure out what OS means and how it’s different. The development process is largely the same. Although timelines are harder to meet. The big difference is who can see what’s going on, external communities can see the communication and what’s going on. The one external developer who contributed a lot got hired by MS. The biggest win is getting immediate bug feedback, partly because they can release weekly. Sounds like a great community.
There’s a lot of MS people here. At least more than 10. Most seem to be involved with Vista in some form. But we are just a stone’s throw away from the camp us. Apparently, coming from an MS product manager, we’re going to be seeing some very surprising OSS releases from MS in the near future. Overally sounds really good.
We should likely be looking at Wix for our .Net version of our components.
NB. I’m writing this really fast so comment if I messed up the details and I’ll fix it;-)
Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0, oss, wix, cpl, sourceforge