The CodePlex Foundation initiative translates resoundingly to one great thing: Opportunity.
History
In April of 2001, Microsoft released Beta 1 of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. At the same time, Jim Newkirk and a couple of industrious .NET early adopters with a track record in agile development in Java released NUnit
Whether NUnit was the first open source application in the .NET ecosystem, who knows? Nonetheless, NUnit was the first open source .NET software for many .NET developers who looked to open source for answers even before .NET itself was released. Jim is presently a CodePlex Foundation advisor and Product Unit Manager for Microsoft's CodePlex open source repository.
To say that the rest is history is a predictable cliche. Whatever has happened in open source in the Microsoft space up until now, as astonishing as many .NET open source accomplishments are, it may pale in the face of the opportunities that are available in light of the CodePlex Foundation initiative.
Of the time between April of 2001 and the present, the following can be said of open source in the Microsoft space: It was a constant battle. Open source was stigmatized. We had to fight to use open source software in our jobs. And when we weren't fighting to use open source, we were fighting to not have to use commercial clones of open source software that often weren't nearly as robust as the open source.
Certainly things have been getting better in the past few years. More organizations have opened up to open source - especially when open source solutions are the best-of-breed - but Microsoft's own lingering reticence toward open source remained the elephant in the room, and a significant influence over the customer community's perception of open source.
And even though Microsoft has been making some inroads into open source over the past few years, Microsoft's own open source has remained constrained. With a couple of exceptions, Microsoft did not accept contributions to its open source from contributors outside of Microsoft. And Microsoft developers were discouraged from or disallowed reviewing open source code for fear of infecting Microsoft products with potential "viral" effects of some open source licenses.
Imitation is the Sincerest Form
In the past eight years, Microsoft has learned a lot from open source software. A number of Microsoft product ideas were proven first by open source projects. However, because Microsoft itself has not been open to open source solutions, and because a good bit of Microsoft's customer community follows Microsoft's lead on many fronts, the only way that Microsoft could provide its customers with the value available to open source users was to develop new products from scratch.
Microsoft's efforts at duplicating the value offered by open source were fraught with problems. Microsoft employees can't look at the open source code, so Microsoft's competing offerings weren't often too terribly competitive. They would be adopted by Microsoft customers nonetheless on the basis of Microsoft's merit as the largest commercial software foundry.
All this leads to an oft-repeated heart-breaking scenario for .NET developers who are already well-versed in best-of-breed .NET solutions that have matured in the open source world: showing up for work one day to learn that the company you work for has chosen to go with an immature, inferior solution that Microsoft had been left with little commercial choice but to build. This sinking feeling is followed up quickly with the realization that a company the size of Microsoft can't release innovations and fixes as fast as an open source project. The Microsoft clones of open source projects progress slowly while the open source solutions drive ahead with innovative and often more productive solutions.
Ultimately, this cycle repeated year after year and often created an ever-deepening insularism in Microsoft that exasperated the problem even further.
Opportunity
The CodePlex Foundation will bring influential open source projects under its auspices. The details aren't clear yet, but it's reasonable to assume that the foundation will support its projects the way that other software foundations support their projects, with protection for these projects as they are used in corporate and commercial contexts and who knows, maybe even some financial support will be part of the deal.
The single greatest opportunity that the CodePlex Foundation represents is an end to orthodox resistance to open source by Microsoft, and its customer community by extension, and the dawn of a new day of .NET where open source can be openly embraced.
In a potential tomorrow, the best tools for the job aren't sources for intellectual property suspicion, talented software craftspeople have greater freedom to use the tools that they have built significant mastery of, methodologies and techniques aren't driven by tool limitations, and innovation is free to move it its own pace, and can do so as a cooperation between industry and community.
And most importantly, in a world where Microsoft begins to embrace open source, it begins to subject itself to the open competitive forces that will make its products better, and make Microsoft itself a leaner, more agile company.
In this world, .NET open source champions aren't relegated to a relatively small backwoods, but are granted the broad regard and respect that is common place in the Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP worlds, among others with rich open source culture and history.
Also consider that in this world, we're one-step closer to the level of comfort with open source for Microsoft where community contributions to Microsoft's MSPL projects can be possible. The arrival of the CodePlex Foundation doesn't provide for this, but it does provide for the next few significant steps on the way.
This effort will bring Microsoft staff into close encounters with open source software and open source software projects, breaking down the barriers that the community has descried for a long, frustrating time.
I understand that in concert with this effort, Microsoft is also changing its policy for open source contributions for its staff, allowing staff to make limited contributions to open source without the requirement of oversight from Microsoft legal staff! This is a significant shift in policy for Microsoft and points to some significant reconsideration of policies and philosophies of the past.
What Price Freedom?
The source of Microsoft's trepidation over open source hasn't changed. The central issue is still, and will remain for the foreseeable future, intellectual property risk. The source of the trepidation for many of Microsoft's customers remains intellectual property risk.
The solution to the problem is as obvious as it is genius, but the price of freedom isn't without some non-trivial compromise, and a challenging new paradigm for open source leaders to consider.
The intellectual property risks can be greatly (if not entirely) mitigated when intellectual property is assigned to an intermediary, and that, among other services, is what the CodePlex Foundation is for.
Put frankly and directly, the CodePlex Foundation is given ownership of the code.
Per the CodePlex Foundation Assignment Agreement:
"Assignor assigns to Foundation its entire right, title, and interest in any copyright rights that attach to the Code and any documentation delivered with the Code."
Per the terms of the agreement, the Foundation grants an irrevocable license to the code to the original owner. Again, from the CodePlex Foundation Assignment Agreement:
"Foundation grants Assignor and its affiliates a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free, irrevocable license, to reproduce, modify, create derivative works of, display, publicly perform, sublicense and distribute the Code (and derivative works thereof) as Assignor or its affiliates see fit, including the right for Assignor and its affiliates to sublicense the foregoing rights to third parties."
Ultimately, this means that it's business as usual for the open source projects, with the additions of the protections of the CodePlex Foundation, and greater opportunity for project adoption in spaces that were not previously open, and the chance to participate in what might be a more cohesive and cooperative open source community at large in the Microsoft space.
The Inevitable Distrust
There's no avoiding the issues of distrust that will surface from this. The usual suspicion is inevitable considering the history of Microsoft and open source, the invitation to open source projects to give ownership of their code to the CodePlex Foundation, the preponderance of Microsoft staff on the foundation's interim Board of Directors and Board of Advisors, and the branding of the foundation with an existing Microsoft brand: CodePlex (also the name of Microsoft's public open source repository and community site).
Microsoft has a habit of springing things on the community. But then, so does Apple, and so does Google. Love it or hate it, this is how product companies launch products and how they protect themselves. It doesn't always work out so well, and for my money, Microsoft is the least best of these companies when it comes to operating without early and continual customer feedback in product development, but, well, there you have it. That said, the CodePlex Foundation isn't exactly fully operational yet, and for all intents and purposes, this is the opportunity that the CodePlex Foundation has provided for community input, and the foundation staff has gone out of its way to make this point clear on the foundation's website.
The easiest way to staff up the foundation is to do what Microsoft did. It tapped the people who worked to make the CodePlex Foundation happen for interim positions in the leadership of the foundation. It also assigned some serious business acumen to the interim Board of Directors. Having Microsoft staff in-play on the Board of Directors is just a smart, immediately-sustainable thing for Microsoft to have done with the investment that has been set in motion. The Microsoft staff on the Board of Advisors include many people who are friendly to open source and who are personal friends of many people in the open source community.
And there are a few key names that should likely be on that list. Ayende Rahien and Jeremy Miller immediately come to mind - people who have brought a number of influential open source projects to life, and help to bring those projects into enterprises and ISV's around the world. But this thing is just getting started. It's a "soft launch", as one of the members of the Board of Advisors put it.
So why would Microsoft collude the namespace by naming this fledgling foundation after its CodePlex program? Sure, they're both about open source, and sure there's a healthy dose of Microsoft in the mix, but why not make the effort to disambiguate right off the bat?
John Peterson, a veteran software developer, former Microsoft MVP award winner, and attorney, has been helping me to understand the CodePlex Foundation agreements, and I like his take on the CodePlex naming, and why it's a good idea.
Microsoft has donated one million dollars to the foundation to get it up and running. It has an accountability to its stockholders for what it does with its cash. And while one million dollars might not seem to be much compared to Microsoft's bank balance, it's not exactly a trivial amount when it comes to charitable contributions to what appears to be a fairly radical cause.
The perpetuation of the CodePlex brand is just a good investment, and it likely helps this kind of move go down easier with folks in Microsoft's stockholder community who might not entirely understand what this open source kerfuffle is all about. Microsoft is making this thing happen. It's reasonable that it gets to pick the name, and to use a name that highlights other aspects of its open source efforts.
The Windup
I'm not usually the first person to extend unquestioning trust to Microsoft, and I started my day yesterday with the inevitable distrust and backlash, but I think there's something much more significant here that deserves more than just the usual distrust, and might likely be better served with an unusual trust.
Imagine for a moment if this effort had happened five years ago. Think of all of the often-frustrating pieces of the Microsoft stack that we've had to deal with - software influenced by open source, but missing the target because of Microsoft's policies on staff exposure to intellectual property risks - real or imagined.
Think of all the tools and all the libraries that have shipped from Microsoft over the past five years where your response was a despondent, "Oh no, not again." Part of the reason why we have to contend with these tools is that Microsoft, up until now, has not been able to truly learn from the many mature systems from the open source world that it is called to address with offerings of its own that cary Microsoft's implicit protection from intellectual property risks.
Microsoft isn't going to simply change its well-healed habits on a dime, but we're at a moment where turning in the right direction will set in motion the chain of events that will ultimately change Microsoft's culture in regards to it's ability to see, to leverage, and to participate in some of the incredible work that is being done outside of Microsoft's walls.
The Pitch
I'm hoping that the influential open source folks in the .NET community will consider the CodePlex Foundation's invitation, as odd as it may seem, to consider the possibilities for a future where the .NET community at large has the same common sense perspective on open source as the Java community, the Ruby community, and all of the other communities who's no-nonsense perspective on open source we often covet.
Sure there are lots of details to be ironed out with the CodePlex Foundation program, and the next few weeks will be telling in that regard, but it's with the participation of the open source community that the changes that we've been talking about for years can finally get underway.
I don't own an open source project that I've invested years of my life into, but I can guess what it must feel like to have it suggested that ownership of such a project be handed over to a foundation, and a foundation with very close ties to Microsoft at that. The open source community is being asked to meet the resistance half-way, and to hammer out a program that history will recognize as the turning point for Microsoft, it's customers, and almost every aspect of Microsoft community, culture, and product development.
If you're an open source project owner, think of the possibilities of having your framework or your product begin to reshape the expectations for craftsmanship of Microsoft staff and the greater Microsoft community at large. No one is in a position to require an open source leader to assign their copyright to an intermediary, but the first few influential open source leaders who do meet the CodePlex Foundation halfway will set in motion the kinds of pervasive, positive changes that will change all of our lives and careers for the better.
It's a relationship that starts with one hell of a compromise, but it could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Possibly even a historic one.
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