Matusow's Blog

You have to be a resident of Oregon to understand true mania for berries. I know the Swedes love their lingonberries, and the folks in California think they have good strawberries – but you need to spend a summer in Oregon to understand how far people...

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols expressed his desire to see fewer OSI-approved licenses a couple of days ago. He applauds the decisions of Intel and Sun to retire certain licenses and then chastises CA, IBM, Lucent, and Nokia for not getting rid of their "vanity...

Bill Thompson , a technology analyst for the BBC, has an intelligent and entertaining column, and I recently stumbled across this entry . It is a wonderfully concise daydream about what it would mean for Microsoft to adopt, consume, digest, and release...

John Carroll had an interesting posting over at ZDNET today. He certainly hit a nerve given the talkback section. He was responding to posting by Paul Murphy , another ZDNET writer, in which the assertion was made that Linux needs to embrace its Unix...

Stephen O'Grady posted a great response to my earlier posting on integration issues for OSS projects. (There are also a few strong comments to his posting as well.) Apparently, I should have bought a beer or two for Stephen at OSCON rather than a bad...

Here is the article that got me thinking today . The community of devs working on Mambo have split off to create Joomla - the same product on a forked code base with a different future direction. The big beef was over the control of the project being...

Summer has been hard on my blogging. The sun seems to draw me away from my laptop and onto my mountain bike. Breaking my finger seems to have given me a boost back into the blogging chair (slower typing though) and away from the bike. I have a suggestion...

Once again, Tim and company have put on a solid show. I liked the keynotes this year, but they tended more towards the staid and predictable. Both sit-down plenary interviews (Jonathan Schwartz and Mitchell Baker) were candid and enjoyable. In years...

So it has been a long while since I last blogged. I have been buried under a project and am just now lifting my head back above the water. In the interim, the ASP.NET team has just released the first of a set of providers for ASP.NET 2.0 . The first one...

In his comment to my last posting Wesley Parish pointed out something worth talking about. "One thing that irritates me quite a bit is the "non-commercial/anti-commercial" clause in a number of the Shared Source Licenses I've looked at. Microsoft has...

There are groups all over Microsoft that are posting source for interesting little bits and pieces. These are all licensed for commerical or non-commercial modification and distribution. These came to me courtesy of Josh Ledgard . Check them out and enjoy...

Last week I hosted the guys from Redmonk , Stephen OGrady and James Governor . Other than noting Stephen’s obvious character flaw (he is a Red Sox fan) and James’s steadfast belief that the airlines will provide you with the luggage you checked through...

During my blogging hiatus in May there was a cool release from our embedded folks. Here is the description and a link or two: Windows Embedded Source Tools for Bluetooth Technology Developing for Bluetooth technology (exposing Bluetooth services...

Kudos to Rob Mensching and his great Shared Source project, Windows Installer XML - otherwise known as WiX. SourceForge.net statistics came back online recently and it turns out that more than 145,000 folks have found WiX to be interesting. Even more...

Here is the Visual Basic Power Pack which consists of seven custom controls written in Visual Basic .NET 2003 and licensed under a Shared Source license. The controls provide enhanced user interface elements and enable you to create more interesting and...

I've been meaning to blog this for a while. Josh Ledgard has been doing some great work with the developer community. He hosts the Developer Powertoys blog which is really worth checking out if you haven't seen it (and if you are a developer of course...

I recently became aware of a bunch of Shared Source licensed projects that are available through Microsoft Research. There are over 50 projects listed and many have been available for a few years. Games, tools, graphics...good stuff. http://research...

I’m on the road in Asia this week and am having some great conversations about source licensing issues. I’ll try to be a good blogger and post some interesting stuff based on this trip. The first thing that came up today was a long exchange about...

Last week I spent two very worthwhile days in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference . Once again Matt Asay and friends put on a stellar conference. The speakers Matt was able to assemble were impressive and the halls were filled with many...

Over the past week there have been a few common questions about the IronPython Shared Source license that need to be addressed. Here are the answers but a critical disclaimer first. I am not a lawyer and thus, this blog entry does not constitute legal...

I've had a few inquiries on the relationship of IronPython to Mono. Technically, IronPython is designed to run on any platform that implements the CLI specification v2.0. We would consider it a bug in IronPython if it didn’t run on a correct implementation...

At PyCon (a conference for Python developers) last week, Microsoft made an announcement regarding the project code named IronPython . Python is an open source dynamic language – for non-developers like me – dynamic languages enable developers to produce...

On Thursday last week I met with a delegation representing Eastern European members of the press (about 40 of them) at our facilities in Redmond . We talked through issues of source licensing and how they are perceived in their respective countries. One...

In Eastern Europe today, we announced the expansion of the Windows and Windows CE Premium Shared Source programs to Cyprus , Estonia , Latvia , Lithuania , Malta , Slovakia , and Slovenia . The addition of these seven means that all European Union member...

Thanks for the feedback on the first posting with meat on the bones. I’m moderating the comments in an attempt to keep the spammers at bay – but I’m posting all comments, positive or negative to keep this a space of “open” thought. Sorry, couldn’t help...