And it all began with WIX .... MS and Open Source

So this is a little off topic from most of my normal ISV focused posts, but I felt the need to point users over to our Shared Source site and pontificate a bit, ( btw we now have over 80 projects up) :

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx 

In my previous lifetime, I existed primarily in the world of Open Source and UNIX, often sneaking open source code into large development projects for large enterprises seeking permission only after I'd solved the issue at hand.  More often than not, I was successful getting around most squeamish PM's or the like because I had just solved a business need. 

The reasoning is that when something is new and compelling, supported and hardened code just doesn't exist.  To prove my point, it may sound strange today, but in 1999, I actually used Perl to connect to a Teradata warehouse so that I could query the warehouse real-time.  Now this wasn't exactly an optimal solution, but it allowed us to launch the very large BAM website in a reasonable amount of time.  Without an Open Source avenue, we would have been waiting for NCR to release the code we needed and they were giving us a 6 month estimate for beta code at best.... 

In the marketplace at large, we are seeing a trend where often individuals and companies are releasing code to the general public without significant due diligence toward code hardening to guarantee their code will play well in the environments in which they are being adopted and used.  This can have disastrous results or it can be impactful with fantastic results to a positive end. 

I put myself squarely in the camp of the latter and laud our efforts to be more open.  As for yourself, you decide: Is it better to provide hardened supported code or to release beta bits with an open license and provide only community support.