Open source in the Microsoft ecosystem is a new thing, and to be frank, it’s only gaining ground in some areas of Microsoft. We’ve all heard the news reports of Steve Ballmer saying Open Source is Microsoft’s primary threat, among other things. I’m not here to re-hash all that. You either side with Microsoft, Open Source, or you are somewhere in between.

But, I am here to take Microsoft to task on one specific area where it’s open source strategy is sorely lacking, and that is in the funding or sponsorship of open source products built for the .NET platform. To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft does not sponsor any open source projects, yet they fully reap the benefit of open source developers that build on the .NET platform. We help propagate and evangelize the platform. If you take a look at Sun, they are well entrenched in sponsoring and organizing the sponsorship of third-party open source initiatives. That is a huge win for Sun and the Java community.

Microsoft’s behavior on this front has been pretty sophomoric to this point. A good example of this was Oxite. I’m not up for re-hashing all of that, but suffice to say it flops, and instead of sponsoring the project via some third party (to begin with), they build it internally, and then ask the community to fix their mess. The result of that was a pretty quick backlash from the community that said, “Hey, we’ve got jobs, and bills to pay, we aren’t here to clean up your code.” I honestly believe that was a bit of a reality check for Microsoft and the few open source proponents inside of Microsoft. My guess is that they let their ego’s get ahead of them on that one and were taken off guard by the community’s response, which IMHO, was spot on.

The .NET open source community is maturing and they are beginning to see the gaps between Microsoft’s behavior and the behavior of other open source proponents, such as Sun, and they are recognizing that much of what they are seeing is business as usual at Microsoft. Their attention to open source, to this point, has been in an effort to either 1.) Evangelize their platform or 2.) Harness the power of the open source community in an effort to make their products better. Any open source .NET application is firmly in #1, and things like the Enterprise Library fall into #2.

Microsoft has hired a few open source developers from the .NET ecosystem, but I’ve got some pretty un-easy feelings on that. Most of them are heavy bloggers and over the last several months, those developers’ blogs / podcasts have now become an evangelism platform for Microsoft’s latest initiative. The MVC framework is a perfect example of Microsoft failing to sponsor the Castle framework. They make the argument that “our customers want products by us, and only us”, but what their clients really want is stable products by stable companies. A company that Microsoft could be helping to create by sponsoring them like Sun does.

Is it Microsoft’s job to sponsor open source initiatives? No, not really, but there is a huge upside that they are ignoring when deciding against sponsorship, and that is this: they are foregoing the opportunity to have significant growth engines “close to the vest”, ready to be cherry picked, or perhaps just as well is the community good will that would result from such sponsorships. Microsoft really shouldn’t ignore this, as it is their main Achilles heel – lack of goodwill from segments of the community. If they want their development tools to be the tools to develop with and they want Windows to be the platform to deploy solutions on (open source and otherwise), then they need to consider, very carefully, how they expect to achieve that. You’ve got to do more than release open source software, or engage the community in building some open source frameworks; you have to get out in the community and help build the ecosystem that is going to support you over the long term.

 

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