There must be a feeling in the CNET newsroom by now that if there’s a quiet news day, you can always go find a mid-level Microsoft manager who will give you some bozo quotes that’ll get your article Slashdotted. We see it roughly once a month. It must be great for CNET’s business, not to mention an easy win for the journalists.
Every once in a while you hear a different tune. The conventional explanation is that Microsoft are conflicted: there are people who want engagement and people who want open war, and whoever happens to get column inches that week is perceived as “speaking for Microsoft”. If that’s the case, I can safely say that the story will be different in the week of August 1.
That’s because Jason Matusow will be at OSCON. I had lunch with him in a coffee shop in Portland, OR a month or two ago, and really enjoyed our conversation. He gets open source, even free software. That’s good, because he runs the Shared Source Initiative that is the channel for Microsoft to release open source.
“Open source?” you say. “Shared Source isn’t Open Source”. Actually, both “open source” and “shared source” are names for groups of licenses. And they do overlap. The Windows Installer XML (WiX) project, is both Shared Source and Open Source (the Common Public License having been blessed by the Open Source Initiative. WiX is one of the most successul Shared Source projects, and don’t think this hasn’t attracted attention within Microsoft.
Shared Source has acquired a bad rap over the years because some of the golden jewels of Microsoft are released under a less-than-open shared source license. For example, the Windows source isn’t GPL’d (big surprise). But Shared Source is more than that. A LinuxWorld conversation with Stephen Walli opened my eyes.
It was a real treat to talk to Jason. He has great plans for the Shared Source Program, and has a lot of respect for open source. He’ll be hosting a panel at OSCON, but will be around during the conference. I strongly recommend taking the time to talk to him about Shared Source. It makes a pleasant change from CNET’s bozoquote of the day.