And Now, For My Next Act....

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

Jackson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:57:52 GMT

Jason - Congrats on the new gig! Best of luck. Hope you don't have to spend less time in Portland... ;)

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

Claire Giordano — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 12:41:46 GMT

Jason - The new job sounds like great fun. Enjoy the new challenges! I do hope we manage to cross paths, although between both of our new jobs I'm not sure where. Perhaps sometime when I'm up in Seattle meeting with Amazon folk... --ClaireG

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

James — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:58:16 GMT

Would love to know when MS will open source the .NET CLR. Simply making the spec available without a test kit isn't too valuable. While I am at it, would love to see MS turn it over to the folks at Azul Systems.

Noticed your groovy list, it really should list a couple of customers...

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

Simon Phipps — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 03:37:44 GMT

Congratulations Jason (I assume!) Hope you find the Machiavellian world of corporate standards satisfying - my experience is that it's a huge amount to travel, but I guess that's no change from now :-)

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

Wesley Parish — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 03:19:38 GMT

"Back in the early 1990s MS began sharing source code with development partners and OEM customers, but we lacked a strategy for broadly sharing code."

Interesting you should mention that detail about Microsoft deciding to share a bit more during the early nineties.

I'd heard about the Microsoft Academic Licenses before I went to University midway through the nineties and wondered if I should suggest to the University getting an (expensive) NT 4.0 source code license.

But then I'd already found and bought myself copies of the 4.4BSD Lite CDROM, a copy of the BSDisc (FreeBSD and NetBSD), and several copies of various versions of Linux distros with the Linux source code, so I figured out that if anyone did make such a suggestion to that University, it wouldn't be me, because I had most of the tools and the code I wanted. That University was already having financial problems, so as it happens I'm glad I didn't ... :-)

It sounds like you're diving into a piranha pool with the standards thingee - enjoy the experience! ;)

re: And Now, For My Next Act....

jasonmatusow — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:06:05 GMT

Always good to hear from you Wesley. Thanks for the well wishes with the new role.

The university program was one of a few ways we were licensing code. There were benefits to how things were set up back then, but clearly things have progressed a bit since then.

Of course, we never really think about the tens of millions of lines of sample code, components etc. that were shared via MSDN over the years. The results of that code sharing have been overwhelming if you think of the vibrancy of the development community that has grown around the MS platform and development languages.

Sorry to hear you weren't doing MS-based dev back then. I can always hold out hope for you though. :-)

As always, keep me honest. Good to hear from you.

Jason

re: And Now, For My Next Act.... Reprise

Wesley Parish — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 13:25:47 GMT

As it happens, I can quote you the license Microsoft used for a version of MS Windows 3.0 Notepad, released under the name Multipad and found on a 1995 CICA cdrom. It's a sample code release, and for all intents and purposes a MIT/X license. You might like to read it:

[...]
* PROGRAM : MultiPad.c *
* *
* PURPOSE : To give a multi-Notepad demonstration of the new MDI *
* API in Windows 3.0
[...]
// COPYRIGHT:
//
// (C) Copyright Microsoft Corp. 1992. All rights reserved.
//
// You have a royalty-free right to use, modify, reproduce and
// distribute the Sample Files (and/or any modified version) in
// any way you find useful, provided that you agree that
// Microsoft has no warranty obligations or liability for any
// Sample Application Files which are modified.
[...]

It's an interesting little app, runs under Win9x - I've tried it under both Win98 and WINE, and has very little current value beyond being a historic example of how the Win16 API worked.

And Windows development - I suppose I mustn't be averse to developing for it, since I've got Petzold's Fifth Edition sitting on my shelf and a app or three floating around in my head demanding to be let out. Onto the MS Win32 API. Ditto QT and some others ... ;)

When I get it seriously under way, I'll let you know.

Oh, and have fun with the standards experience!