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

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.