Microsoft Releases Source Code on SourceForge
From Neowin.net:
On Monday, Microsoft released some of its code under an open-source license, and posted it on SourceForge, the open-source code repository. To date, Microsoft has made its source code available under a variety of licensing mechanisms, all under its "shared source" umbrella. But until today, the company had not released code under what is commonly considered a true open-source license. Microsoft made available an internally developed product called the Windows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge. The code is downloadable here. WiX is a toolset for building Windows installation packages from XML source code. It runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000. "We've been learning from open source about the importance of sharing code with developers," said Jason Matusow, manager of Microsoft's shared source initiative. "We know it's important to have a full-spectrum approach" to licensing software under shared source, he added.
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2 Comments
Actually, neowin is very close to correct. Rob started the project on his own back when MSI was first coming into existence, and then it grew over time. Eventually, it became a very complete MSI authoring solution, and lots of groups were using it. At that point, Rob wanted to release it, and met up with some Business Development folks to make it happen. The code is very much owned by Microsoft, and it had to get signed off on by legal and management. It is most definitely Rob's project, but that doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't have anything to do with it. I'd keep an eye on Rob's blog... I suspect more details about the history will be forthcoming: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen
Comment by Reid Gustin at April 7, 2004 10:23 AM | Permalink
This is certainly not how I heard the story, perhaps neowin shines it up a bit. As far as I know, an employee at microsoft has cooded this in his spare time, and he has personally open sourced it. Microsoft as a business has nothing to do with it. At least thats how newz.dk reports it
Comment by Henrik Lynggaard at April 6, 2004 09:15 PM | Permalink