Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Shared Source

all software...

jcannon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:39:00 GMT

Earlier this month, I was reading the Open Solutions Alliance's top predictions for 2008....this was based on polling they conducted within their membership base. It's a good read and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys that kind of fodder (there's no shortage of "predictions," it seems, this time of year.) The full report is here (PDF). One in particular caught my eye: The CEO of Adaptive Planning, William Soward, echoed the 451 Group in his assertion that '...open source is becoming a fundamental element of all software...'

To a great or lesser extent, open source or open source-inspired development approaches and the increasingly related fields of "open" collaboration and innovation are undeniably spreading to many fields of software conception, design and development. One could look at this horizontally, or where open source development is happening at the fundamental stacks within computer science (operating systems, compilers, editors, programming languages)- and we see this all the time: Linux, Java, Haskell, Ruby, Python; or, one could look at vertical development, as in ESB, CRM, Retail or Healthcare applications...and this is happening as well: MuleSource, Iona and LedgerSMB are a few examples. In each case, the classic struggle to advance software usefulness is being addressed by open collaboration, where certain fundamentals are being shared within a larger group to allow for greater concentration on, say, bigger issues.

In the same vein of Soward's prediction, there have always been & always will be certain aspects of technology that cut across all software. One obvious example that comes to mind is security. No matter what the software size or complexity, purpose or reason, security has a home among the fundamental considerations made by programmers, on behalf of the end-user. Privacy is another aspect of the software (and data) lifecycle that is increasingly core – but still not quite there...

Open source will have a similar home, I imagine, in the minds of developers. Where does open source have a home in my software's lifecycle? What components will galvanize and excite a community? What components will not? Much like security, the industry will expect these considerations as a part of all software development.

This is something our team has recognized and - recently, something that was recognized by the Engineering Excellence folks. In a nutshell, Engineering Excellence is about ensuring code quality and best practices are part of the fabric of software development. If anything, it represents Microsoft's view of excellence in software engineering practices. And yes, we even have an internal handbook....

I can’t think of a better reflection of open source growing into all software –including at Microsoft--than sharing a glimpse from that handbook. (As you may have noticed, I'm keen on the screenshots.....). Among many considerations, we expect all of our developers to understand core elements, such as Privacy, Security, Code Integrity, etc. We have - as of December 2007, added “Shared Source Code."

This section adds to an established set of practices: “exchanging source code with external parties for development and testing” for sharing source code outside of Microsoft and inside of Microsoft. This is now a core component to our fundamental practices across Microsoft development. This is significant as the considerations for sharing original inventions outside any company is always difficult - including at Microsoft.

If this is any indication, I agree with Mr. Soward's prediction... In 2008, the world will see more organizations evaluate where open sources makes sense as part of their fundamental product development considerations....and it will increasingly appear across horizontal and vertical software development, or "all software."

Here's to an exciting year together.

New Horizons

jonrosenberg — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Those of you who’ve read my little bio at the bottom of this blog may have guessed that I have a life-long passion for helping kids learn and a strong belief that technology can be a great educational tool. Next month I will be moving to a new position at Microsoft that will allow me to indulge this passion full-time as Director of Education Solutions, helping Microsoft to innovate around technology, delivery models and partnerships to reach the majority of the world’s student population that don’t have access to technology and its benefits today.

Many families today take technology for granted. I know mine does. We all assume that a computer will always be on, connected to the Internet, available to help with studying, problem solving, productivity, and finding the answer to just about any question that we can think of, including how well Junior is doing in Spanish class :) While I appreciate what technology has done to enrich my children’s education, I am also aware that the majority of people in the world do not have access to a computer. My new job is, quite simply, to get to work on this problem and I can’t wait to get started.

After all the OSCONs, OSBCs and other interactions with the Open Source community, I’m quite sure that the list of things I’ve learned and people I have to thank for it is longer than your reading endurance. So I’ll just say that it’s been great, I will never forget the cooperative spirit in which many of you engaged with me as Microsoft made its first forays into the world of Open Source, and I’m sure that many of our paths will cross again as we endeavor to improve education in the developing world.

Microsoft Out in the Open

jonrosenberg — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:37:00 GMT

This morning, we were excited to learn that two of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses have been approved by the OSI. It’s been an interesting and educational couple of months since we submitted these licenses (we announced our intent in July, and submitted on August 10th.) I personally enjoyed hearing the wide diversity of opinions from the community, including the legal professionals who weighed in on the discussion.

During the discussion period, we were pleased to respond to the communities requests for additional clarity in the licenses by renaming them to the Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License. In the process of the license discussion, we also heard additional calls for more clarity in our communication regarding the wide range of Shared Source licensing options available from Microsoft. Some Shared Source licenses clearly meet the open source definition and others do not. In the future, we will continue to solicit feedback from the community to ensure crisp delineation of these different license types on our website.

As we continue to work with the open source community, we look forward to ongoing feedback on how to improve our participation and provide greater transparency to all of our customers and partners. I’d like to thank Russ Nelson and Michael Tiemann for their guidance throughout this process and I would like to thank all the members of the community who contributed to this discussion on the license-discuss alias. I think you’re going to see a lot of great code come out under these two open source licenses and we are happy to be able to call them, “OSI Approved.”

I look forward to continued vibrant discussion with the Open Source community,
Jon

OSI Submission Update

jonrosenberg — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:45:00 GMT

Just a brief update to my OSCON blog post. Today we started the ball rolling on the submission of our Shared Source licenses to the OSI approval process. We are submitting two licenses, the Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) and Microsoft Community License (MS-CL). Thank you to both Russ Nelson and Michael Tiemann for the guidance and informed opinions as we worked through this process.

The first step in the submission process was to post the licenses in HTML format on a web site. We’ve done that and you can see them here. We’ve also provided the license approval committee with our analysis of how these new submissions contribute to the body of OSI approved licenses. In addition we’ve sent an e-mail to the license-discuss alias, describing the submission.

We look forward to some lively discussion on license-discuss over the next week. After that, I personally look forward to two weeks of vacation, during which time any activity involving a computer will be considered by my family to be a serious infringement of vacation terms. I will be picking up the discussion thread again after Labor Day and look forward to continuing the journey.

Intelligent Design, the OSI and Microsoft

jonrosenberg — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:00:00 GMT

This is my first blog post on Port 25, and timely as my team and I are attending OSCON with the folks from Bill Hilf’s team.

I have some thoughts regarding the future of open source and how an organization matures along with the movement it helped to create. As Director of Source Programs at Microsoft I can attest to the value of keeping up with your own growth. We started on a journey, over three years ago, with the release of Windows Installer XML on SourceForge. At the time, the project required the approval of our Group Vice President and a herd of lawyers. The reactions of our colleagues were mixed, although as far as we know, none of our kids were beaten up at school as a result of what we were doing. Today, Microsoft has published 175 projects on CodePlex, we have written a pair of open licenses that are under a page in length and over the 500-project mark in adoption as others in the community have decided to use them. I also run a training class that teaches people around the company how to engage in open source projects and make them successful. The volume of projects over the past year has forced us to develop processes for approving and publishing projects that are easy to understand and administer.

As Microsoft’s engagement with open source grows, we have to move from being trailblazers to being road-builders. When you’re blazing a trail, organization, bureaucracy, and majority rule are a burden. In the beginning, a passionate group of people with strongly held beliefs and the will to persevere in the face of doubts and doubters is what it’s all about. When the trail is blazed and you’re keeping a four-lane road open, the challenges are very different. Traffic laws, driver’s licenses, public works, and law enforcement are all necessary and these things require the broad support of the people who use the road and live on the adjacent property. There’s nothing quite as effective in gaining this support as giving people a voice in how things are run. As we look forward to the next three years, we already see the needs of our constituents driving our priorities for licensing, infrastructure, and process. Although open source at Microsoft and the OSI are two different animals, I would submit to you that both are at a point in their maturity where their constituencies need to become more involved to maintain growth.

While it’s important to focus on the needs of a growing community membership, it’s also important to remember why you started it in the first place. In Microsoft’s case, the reason is simple: Customers. IT professionals told us they wanted both platform choices and platform interoperability. Developers told us that they wanted more open collaboration and that the language of that collaboration is code. In response, Microsoft has reached interoperability agreements with several key vendors of open source software, CodePlex is now supporting 2,000 collaborative development projects, and the features of CodePlex itself are largely driven by the votes of the community.

Today, we reached another milestone with the decision to submit our open licenses to the OSI approval process, which, if the licenses are approved, should give the community additional confidence that the code we’re sharing is truly Open Source. I believe that the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.

So what about the flip side of the OSI becoming a membership organization? Could they really be voted out of existence or rendered ineffective? It doesn’t seem likely to me. Participation in the OSI and adherence to OSI licensing guidelines and Open Source definitions is entirely voluntary. If it isn’t serving the best interests of the community, the community will go elsewhere. Anyone considering an effort to “vote the organization into the ground” would surely realize that such heavy handedness would be self-defeating. That’s not to say that a new membership structure wouldn’t lead to change, but I believe that these changes would have to be the result of vigorous consensus building and that’s probably not a bad thing.

I look forward to the submission process and welcome feedback from the community as we continue to grow together.

Influencing the Microsoft culture one open source presentation at a time

jcannon — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:38:00 GMT

Today, a lighter post and link to Sara Ford's blog which talks about her recent presentation to Microsoft employees entitled, "Embracing Open Source on Codeplex." Sara, a developer/evangelist with Microsoft on the Visual Studio Powertoys team, has been a tireless supporter and advocate of change internally on identifying when & where it makes sense to embrace open source collaboration and licensing styles through offerings like Codeplex and Shared Source.

Sara's post (and some great pictures of grassroots marketing here on campus can be found here.

ASP.NET AJAX Released!

MichaelF — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 21:34:00 GMT

I wanted to take a moment to let the Port 25 community that Microsoft has officially released ASP.NET AJAX to the web under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL). Under this release developers are free to modify the Microsoft AJAX Library Scripts and can distribute derivative works per the terms of the Ms-PL.

As part of the release some improvements have been made:

Performance and scalability have been improved for shared hosting scenarios
Globalization fixes to ScriptManager and ScriptResource handler to support date and number parsing and UI culture fallback

This week we also released the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions source code under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). This release was intended to help the community with debugging, maintenance and interoperability challenges with the additional hope that the transparency helps establish better coding patterns and guidelines.

You can find ASP.NET AJAX here.

Check back tomorrow when we'll post an interview with Steve Marx, Technical Evangelist for ASP.NET AJAX who talks about the release and shows us a demonstration of the technology.

Shared Source Contest Results

MichaelF — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:30:00 GMT

We wanted to follow up on this post from June 14th: Shared Source Development Contest and share the results of this contest.

Results can be found here: http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS8278694574.html

Congratulations to Port 25 readers: Marcelo Van Kampen and his teammates: Lucas Berinotti, Evandro Rezende and Rafael Teixeira who took third place with their Street Blog project!

From left to right: Marcelo, Lucas, Evandro (Rafael is behind the camera so you'll have to use your imagination)

Nice work guys!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Licenses

jcannon — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 15:30:00 GMT

When I first started writing software, my only understanding of the term ‘license’ was that it was something I needed to drive a car or to catch fish. As my career progressed, I learned that software also has licenses that describe – ideally - how the author of the software wants his or her creation to be used (terms, conditions, permissions, etc.). Of course, there are many types of software licenses today. You may not follow this topic that closely, but you certainly have seen things such as End User License Agreements – that little agreement you can choose to click ‘I Accept’ or ‘I Do Not Accept’ after you read in infinite detail all the terms, conditions and restrictions (right?). Early in my career, I typically just used a) whatever license the company I worked for used or b) whatever licenses other developers seemed to use. It was a combination of laziness, naïveté, and general indifference to all things legal. This perspective of course changed as I began to understand that licenses were indeed quite important and powerful in determining how I could control the thing that I wrote – or how I could lose control.

Thus began my entrée into the legal world of software licensing. I’m generally not one for bureaucracy or unnecessary complexity, so, to be frank, some software licenses seemed ridiculous to me. Many still do. But again, I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV) and I do have a high degree of respect for all my friends in this discipline, so I understand it’s not always as simple as one may desire it to be. That said, it doesn’t hurt to try to strive for simplicity. Programmers and IT professionals learn early on that the K.I.S.S. rule is the only true path to technical enlightenment, so I try to apply this same thinking to software licenses.

Licensing is a broad field, so I’m going to focus in on what we’re doing with our community software licenses. It’s worth noting that there is an important difference between binary and source licensing. The fact of the matter is binary licensing governs the vast majority of revenue-generating activities in commercial software. Source code licensing is about the use (and re-use) of the underlying intellectual property in terms of copyright, trademark, and patent. I’m focusing on what source licensing programs we are doing for our community projects.

Around a year ago, we rewrote our software licenses that we will use for many of our community programs in our Shared Source Initiative. If you’re not familiar with Shared Source, this is a program we have where we share source code with customers, partners, developers, academics, and governments worldwide. There is a variety of software we have in this program, such as wikis, Atlas/Ajax toolkits, IronPython (Python in .NET , click here for an interview with with IronPython Architect Jim Huginen ), drivers, installers, and so on. Jason Matusow announced these new community licenses on his blog last October.

There were four main goals for writing these new licenses:

Short and easy to understand - The new licenses are typically shorter than a typewritten page and are easy to read and understand.
Effective and modern - Although simple, the licenses are designed to be effective and to reflect modern best practices in source code licensing.
Efficient - By using three simplified licenses, Microsoft will be able to streamline its own internal source code release process, which will allow for more rapid Microsoft source code releases.
Ecosystem-friendly - Using three simple and well-understood licenses help to simplify source code sharing throughout Microsoft’s various software ecosystems, and help to avoid excessive license proliferation.

(To be clear, I was just a cheerleader and supporter of these efforts, smarter people than me did the actual work to meet these goals in each license .)

The result was something we were quite happy with. But it’s not just for Microsoft’s Shared Source projects – SugarCRM, the leading Open Source CRM solution, has chosen to use one of these new licenses, the Microsoft Community license. As John Roberts, CEO and founder of SugarCRM commented:

"We were really impressed by the Microsoft Shared Source Community License and like it a lot. We think it is a license that represents the ideals of our community and is one that they want to use, especially those customers who already run on the Windows platform.”

You can read more about this news here.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about Shared Source in the future. As this blog entry’s title suggests, I’m a Kubrick fan and although I’m not worried about fluoridation conspiracy theories, I did want to share a snapshot into how we think about community source licensing. Regardless if you write code, manage an IT environment, or just install applications on your desktop or server, understanding software licensing is an important aspect of the software world we live in. It is my hope that the future of software licensing gets simpler, more pragmatic, and more empowering for the world’s software authors.

And since I’m so lazy in writing my blogs, I now have to add in a bunch of post scripts…

P.S.: In the same theme, we have also recently announced some interesting work with Office, giving authors the option to create Creative Commons licensed work using a plug-in within Office. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has written licenses that allow content creators to share information while retaining some rights. Creative Commons was founded by Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor I've come to respect and read often – Larry blogs about this news here. We’ve worked with Creative Commons in the past, on a spec for RSS extensions and the PatternShare wiki site (using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and the Creative Commons Attribution license, respectively).

Stephen McGibbon's has a great blog about the Creative Commons Office plug-in here, with screenshots and commentary.

Speaking of Office, you may have caught the recent news about the new community project building an Open Document Format (ODF) converter for Word 2007 (up on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter). If you are a spectator in the Open XML vs. ODF debates (a very en vogue topic for Open Source pundits), I suggest reading Chris Capossela’s letter about the differences between Open XML and ODF. Chris is one of the key leaders of our Office organization and this letter helps clarify a lot of the FUD spread by Microsoft competitors around Open XML and ODF.

P.S.S: On licensing, CIO Magazine Technology Editor Christopher Lindquist just wrote an article on OSS licensing that is worth reading.