Why Codeplex Will Grow Away From Microsoft

The Codeplex Foundation has had a rough ride – and quite understandably so. It’s an open source promotion group, backed by Microsoft – the company which has, over the years, displayed most hostility for open source.

It now has a technical director on board, Stephen Walli, who makes no apologies for Codeplex – indeed he believes it has a mission which no other body could carry out: handling open source projects in a commerce-friendly way, without being tied to any one licence model.

High School Musical

When we interviewed Codeplex head Paula Hunter, we called Codeplex – tongue in cheek- “the High School Musical of open source“, for its mission to create a world where both Microsoft and open source code can help each other out.

Now the cast of the musical has extended, with the arrival of Walli, a sure-footed veteran of both the open source world and the Unix / open systems world which came before it. He’s been welcomed: it’s even been suggested he could be the man to make the Foundation properly independent of Microsoft.

It’s not hard to see why. In his time, he’s worked in various ways on opening up Microsoft products. At a small firm called  Softway Systems, he helped implement a standard Posix interface for Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system, which would effectively allow it to run Unix programs. The company was acquired by Microsoft, where Walli stayed for five years, working on standards and intellectual property within the giant.

And within an hour of meeting me, he set out the argument for why Codeplex can do something no one else can.”I’m very unapologetic about it,” he said.

First, though, he emphatically ruled out any discussion of “politics”. Debates about free software and free markets all too easily end up with peopple arguing points which are “incompatible and incvongruous”, he said.

Groups like the Free Software Foundation do good work in politics, but commerce is a value system that is simply “different”, he says (possibly, it’s “different in a good way”).

He quotes urban planner Jane Jacobs Systems of Survival, a book which argues that poltics and commerce are simply different frames of reference.

And it’s the commercial world, where Walli – and Codeplex – exist.