Why Codeplex Will Grow Away From Microsoft

How Walli convinced Microsoft about open source

As a preamble, he launched into the story – and it is a good one – of how, in 2003,  he convinced Microsoft that open source was real and its tactics are viable. Apparently, it only took one Powerpoint slide… but it was quite a slide.

Called to explain open source to Jim Allchin (then responsible for Microsoft’s server products) in June 2003, he summed the arguments up – as Microsoft culture required – on one slide, which he has preserved on his blog. “The slide worked,” said Walli. “Jim understood why Microsoft needed to adopt its own open source practices, and how we might start.”

If this was in 2003, how comes we then had years of Microsoft frittering around with its “shared source” initiative, (allowing some users limited access to Windows source code as a way to head off real open source), and then threatening to sue the Linux world for patent infringement?

Microsoft simply wasn’t set up to make the changes it would have to go through to properly take part in open source, said Walli, even if the senior executives understood how open source worked. It had no alternative but to continue as it was.

Codeplex today – no apologies

Ultimately, open source did not go away, though Walli left Microsoft. Fast forward a few years, and Microsoft needed to engage with open source developers because, like it or not, open source code interfaces with Microsoft.

The company set up first a forge, called Codeplex. Then it set up a completely separate idea, a Foundation (also confusingly called Codeplex), designed to foster open source projects.

The Foundation started with one backer, Microsoft, and a bunch of people all of whom came from Microsoft. That didn’t go down well – particularly with the politically-oriented Free Software Foundation.

But the Foundation has been changing, appointing new directors from outside Microsoft, including the well-respected Hunter and Walli – and it is making no apologies for its existence. Essentially, companies working around Microsoft need a foundation to work with that does not specify any particular open source model – but keeps them free of being actually inside the Microsoft world.

Codeplex was formed, by a bunch of Microsoft people who “got” open source and set out to explain it to the rest of the world…  which went down very poorly because the open source community already understood it. Walli doesn’t say much about that time, but is aware that there’s a public relations effort required to move Codeplex on.

“The need I see is for companies in the software industries that are not contributing the way they might,” he said. There are companies that share the kind of issues problems Microsoft has had with open source, he said “They have been so careful for so long around open source, that they are really not sure how to get involved.”