Last week I attended BlogHer Business in New York City, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with questions for a couple minutes about the work she’s doing with CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site.
Sara Ford in NYC
The Geek in question: Sara Ford
The job title: Program Manager,
CodePlex.com
Obviously, open source + Microsoft = touchy subject with a lot of history. I’m curious how you approach that. Do you put on your special
kid gloves before work every day?
We want to create a site that provides a great user experience for open source development on the Microsoft platform. We want people to be able to collaborate in an online world by giving them project management tools and a source code repository. And, they can track bugs, features, and have discussion boards — all the things that you need for an open, collaborative environment.
When I’m engaging with the open source community, I say, “Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college — I’ve only seen how proprietary software is built, so I’m curious about how open source projects work. Come and show me how it works.”
Continue reading →
The Shared Source Initiative makes publicly available the source code for many of Microsoft’s core products, including Windows and Office. And the company’s okay with that.
By Steve Birge
“I know customers are super excited to get access to source,” said Shawn Burke, a director in DevDiv’s .NET Development Platform. “It’s something they’ve wanted for a long time.”
Believe it or not, there are non-Microsoft people digging into the kernel source code for Windows, Office, and other prized corporate assets.
Before you start to worry too much, the company knows about it and, in fact, encourages it. Don’t think the company has gone all open source on you. It’s part of the Shared Source Initiative (SSI), whereby almost anyone – including customers, partners, developers, academics, and governments worldwide – can access and work with actual source code of many Microsoft technologies.
Since 2002, more than 80 technologies have been made available through the SSI, including a set of .NET framework libraries just released for sharing in mid-January. Additionally, more than 600 non-Microsoft technologies have been released under a Shared Source license.
Continue reading →
