when setup isn't just xcopy : oss@msft

Thoughts about the CodePlex Beta

robmen — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:15:00 GMT

I am back from a lovely long weekend with Jenny in Vancouver. It was great to get away from the day to day and recharge for a little longer than 48 hours. Of course, being gone when everyone else is working means there's a fair bit of catch-up reading to do.

One of the more interesting things I found was Mary Jo reported that CodePlex Beta went live Monday. Korby points at James Newkirk who seems to have the most official looking release notes. I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been wider pick up of the story but that just goes to show how little I understand about marketing. That said I really had hoped for a slashdotting of CodePlex for reasons I'll explain below.

I've been following CodePlex's development for a while now. After the first three Open Source projects were released from Microsoft (WiX, WTL, FlexWiki) there was a hiatus in releases while people digested what we were learning. One of the early decisions was that future community projects should be released on a site that showcased Microsoft technology. Historically, that was gotdotnet and IronPython actually released there.

However, somewhere along the line it was agreed that gotdotnet wasn't going to scale and something better should be built. Enter Visual Studio Team Server and what we now call CodePlex. Now we just need some content up there. It looks like IronPython is going to move.

Which leads me to the question that everyone always asks me first:

Will the WiX toolset move from SourceForge to CodePlex?

My immediate answer is always, "That isn't up to me. It is up to the community. If they believe that the WiX toolset will be better served by CodePlex me can investigate moving." In fact, if you had asked me two weeks ago I would have told you that I wasn't even considering moving off of SourceForge because things were working.

However, in the last couple weeks a few issues have popped up. First, there have been some very disturbing outages and poor communication from SourceForge. Benjamin Reed and the comments in this blog entry sum it up pretty well. Second, Frederik Carlier (our newly instated Release Manager) informed me that it doesn't appear possible to release a file with the same name in different releases. This bugs me because you really should keep your MSI filename consistent across a major release (see this old blog entry for more information why renaming your MSI is troublesome).

So, I've been thinking about what CodePlex would need to be before I would try to move the WiX toolset there. For example, the one question I was hoping would be answered today:

Can CodePlex take a pounding and keeping on running?

It would be very bad to move from one provider with problems to another provider with problems. This is why I was hoping to see CodePlex get slashdotted. I was curious to see how the site behaved under duress. If the site performed well even while in Beta then I had high hopes. For now, I'll just have to wait and see.

I guess "wait and see" pretty much describes everything about CodePlex right now. Some of the projects are starting to get releases posted and the rest of the details filled in. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.

Source code is an inanimate object.

robmen — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 07:19:16 GMT

Via Miguel de Icaza, I came across this summary of Google's Summer of Code Mozilla projects. Miguel posted a similar summary for the Mono projects. I encourage you to take a couple minutes and read through the summaries.

Notice a difference between the summaries? No, I'm not referring to the fact that the Mozilla summary is mostly crestfallen while the Mono summary is general upbeat. Instead, notice how much Miguel talks about the people behind the projects where the Mozilla summary only mentions the people in abstract.

I'm not saying that Miguel's focus on people is why the Mono projects were more successful than the Mozilla projects. I contrast the two summaries because they provide the perfect backdrop for a fundamental truth I believe about Open Source projects.

Source code is just an inanimate object. Community is what really makes it all work.

I bring this up now because I've had several people tell me that they have some source code that is "really cool". It does something that some people would probably find interesting. So, they were asking me if I thought it was a good idea to release the source code as "Open Source".

Invariably, I'd smile and say, "It depends."

It depends on what your goals are. If you want to release source code as the seed for getting a group of people to collaborate together then I say, "Go for it!" For example, I pushed for the WiX toolset to be released as an Open Source project because I wanted to build a community around solving software installation problems. Today the WiX toolset improves because there are thousands of people that use it, praise it, curse it, write about it, and some add more code to it. At the same time we make new friends, learn new things (about software installation and other happenings in the world) while, generally, having a good time.

On the other hand, if you just want to drop the source code where people can download it and walk away then I would ask, "Why bother?" Dropping off source code like this is no different than providing some sample code in an MSDN article. People may look at the code and admire its beauty but it certainly does not create a living "Open Source" project.

Of course, someone else may come along, download the source code and create a community without you. If this is your goal then I would encourage you to instead focus on finding a community leader for your source code. Without a community leader, your source code is likely to go as far as the Summer of Code Mozilla projects... nowhere.

Rob Mensching on Microsoft TechNet Radio

robmen — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:25:00 GMT

About a month ago, I wandered over to MS Studios to have a chat with Mike Ward who hosts Microsoft TechNet Radio. Well, actually I was invited over by Mike Ward because he was looking for someone to talk to about the Open Source end of Microsoft's Shared Source Program and Bill Hilf gave him my name.

Those of you that follow my blog and the WiX toolset regularly probably won't hear anything new in the interview but if you're curious, you can find the audio downloads at the TechNet site (I'll update this link when the interview eventually moves to the archive). I can barely listen to it... it is so weird hearing my own voice.

Random fact you won't learn anywhere else: The intro that Mike gives at the beginning of the interview was actually recorded after I left. Like you today is the first day that I've heard that introduction... and he used my favorite quote from Time magazine. Sweet. <smile/>

SugarCRM uses Ms-CL and the WiX toolset.

robmen — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:48:07 GMT

A few months ago, Bill Hilf asked if I would attend a meeting to discuss the Windows Installer and Windows Installer XML toolset with an external vendor, SugarCRM. Robert Flaming, a Windows Installer PM, came along and we had a great discussion with John Roberts, Client Oram, and Jacob Taylor (all pictured here in suits!). The five us discussed topics like about SugarCRM's current installation needs, how the Windows Installer worked and how the WiX toolset fit into the world. After all the technical discussion was done, we had a couple shorter but really interesting discussions about assignment agreements (SugarCRM has one just like the WiX toolset does) and interacting with the project's community. It was a lot of fun talking to those guys.

I always wondered what happened after those talks. In fact, Robert pinged me late last week asking if I had heard anything. Was SugarCRM going to use WiX?

Well, thanks to Mary Jo Foley, I came across SugarCRM announcement today at OSBC. SugarCRM is going to collaborate with Microsoft to release a new Windows-based distribution. A few things came out in this announcement.

First, SugarCRM plans to integrate with more Microsoft technologies, such as Active Directory and SQL Server. This is great news for those who use SugarCRM in a homogenous Windows environment. In fact, there are customer quotes at the end of SugarCRM's announcement that state just this.

Second, SugarCRM is going to license a new Sugar Suite under the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL). I find this part interesting for two reasons. One, it appears that an external vendor will be the first to use the Ms-CL. Two, SugarCRM's announcement echoes what I like about the Ms-CL. The Ms-CL is easy to read and is very straightforward. If the Ms-CL was ever approved by OSI then I'd be tempted to suggest that the WiX community switch to the Ms-CL away from the CPL.

Finally, my favorite part, there is this quote from the SugarCRM announcement:

In addition, SugarCRM plans to use the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset to build its forthcoming product installation as a Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) package for Windows Server 2003.

Sweet! (pun intended) <smile/>

Questioning the concerns about the state of Open Source tools.

robmen — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 21:37:41 GMT

Thomas Tomiczek has a blog entry about a number of Open Source tools. In it he has some complaints about the WiX toolset.

I could add Wix to the list of things I am not really satisfied with, but then this would be unjustified - my complaints with Wix are more along the line that their nice Wiki simply has no serious content, their download links are crap (you have to go do sourceforge to find that ClickThrough IS actually released) and their discussions at the moment about whether or not to have their own bootstrap (hello? Visual Studio 2005 has a VERY nice standardized bootstrap) are really more a sign of a process in progress, unlike what I see especially at Ndoc.

First, Thomas, I am very curious if you have any complaints about the core toolset itself? If so, those are the issues that I believe are the most important for me to address (since the core of the toolset is the primary thing that I work on).

Second, about the web site (which I assume is http://wix.sourceforge.net) with no serious content, I totally agree. However, the documentation for the WiX toolset is still not "good enough", IMHO. So, spending a lot of time to get the website populated with "propaganda" type information seems far less useful for actual users of the toolset. That said Gabor has done an incredible job since the beginning with the WiX tutorial and Fredrik is quietly working on a tool to convert the information in the WiX.chm to web pages that can be hosted on http://wix.sourceforge.net (and thus searched by all of the powerful search engines on the web).

Third, I don't understand why going to SourceForge to download the WiX toolset binaries is such a problem. We could (and currently do) maintain a separate list of downloads but that is overhead that we're more likely to mess up than keep accurate (as is true right now). Again, Fredrik (who created all of the web pages) and I have discussed ways to improve the Latest Releases page but haven't come up with anything really smart yet. Of course, this isn't a high priority for either of us so someone with great ideas here could lead the way for the WiX community here.

As for ClickThrough, well, as I tried to point out in my blog entry introducing ClickThrough, ClickThrough is still very much underdevelopment. It works for most basic cases but still needs a fair bit of functionality and polish before I'd call it quality work. That's why it doesn't get advertised a lot right now except to try to illicit feedback (which there hasn't been much).

Fifth, the discussion on bootstrappers was just that, a discussion. I learned a couple things in that discussion and the person that asked the initial question seemed very appreciative for all the information. Thomas, I don't understand your comment that the discussion is "really more a sign of process in progress" but the WiX toolset has a bootstrapper (it's a part of ClickThrough today) because no other bootstrapper today handles all of the scenarios that ClickThrough needs. In fact, I looked around before starting the bootstrapper for the WiX toolset and there were no projects out there that I could contribute to such that ClickThrough would have the bootstrapper it needed. Now, the WiX toolset has a free, Open Source, not-yet-completely functional bootstrapper that everyone in the WiX community can take advantage of and use when the other alternatives for bootstrappers do not.

What is funny, is that I don't remember anyone pointing out that VS2005 provides a bootstrapper.

Which brings me to my point (yeah, yeah, I know it only took me seven paragraphs to get the point). Successful Open Source projects are made up of a community of people that work together to keep the project moving forward. There is a place for those who provide constructive criticism about what the community needs to improve, just like there is a place for people who provide code and content. However, if you really want the community to improve then you have to participate in the community. Throwing criticism from the sidelines is a great way to frustrate the people actually working on the Open Source project and alienate yourself.

So, Thomas, thank you for the comments that we need to improve the WiX web site, investigate if there is a better way to make the binary downloads available, and finish ClickThrough. I look forward to any other feedback you might have to improve the Windows Installer XML toolset and I hope that in the future you will join the discussion and participate in the community to help us improve it for everyone. It sounds like the NAnt and NDoc communities could use some participation as well. <smile/>

Linuxworld 2005 Pictures, Microsoft in costume and Linux under commercialization.

robmen — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:56:08 GMT

A number of people asked for pictures of me at the Linuxworld 2005 Golden Penguin Bowl. Well, a couple people posted albums with plenty of pictures. Marc Merlin who was on the Google team (and whose name I think I misspelled in my last post) has a bunch of pictures that start backstage and work to the conclusion of the show. Looking at those pictures still makes me chuckle.

Someone else posted pictures of the multiple floors of Linuxworld. I have to say, I agree with all of the captions. The images are a nice visual summation of the event.

Anyway, there you go. Lots of pictures that I think capture how much fun was had by everyone involved...

Linuxworld 2005, 1:00 PM - 6:00 PM, The Evil Empire and the Golden Penguin.

robmen — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:50:02 GMT

[conclusion of previous blog entry]

From 1:00 PM until 3:30 PM, I wandered the halls of Linuxworld. I tripped across the huge expo on the first floor (until now I had ignored the first floor). Tons of vendors were there showing off their wares. I walked around all the colorful and noisy booths trying to figure out why anyone would bother going to these things? Rarely is there anything more to learn at a booth that you couldn't learn directly from the company's website. I guess you can network and meet people but that wasn't why I was here. I was walking off the nerves of the upcoming Golden Penguin Bowl.

I did end up walking past the Macrovision booth at Linuxworld. Macrovision, in case you missed the announcements, is the company that recently bought both InstallShield and ZeroG. The guy I was talking to (I totally lost his name) was from ZeroG. I have met plenty of guys from InstallShield but never anyone from ZeroG. We chatted a little about the merger and how the products were (or were not) coming together and all the exciting times they have to look forward to as two previously competing companies that now report to the same parent. Very interesting indeed.

The rest of the time was really just a blur. I did stop and talk to the guys manning the Gentoo booth. Daniel Robbins asked me to stop by and say, "Hi." A couple of the guys were happy to talk, so we discussed portage and how they build Gentoo and other such stuff. It was a great way to pass the minutes by.

But really it was all building up for the main event, the Golden Penguin Bowl. I showed up at 3:30 PM as requested and started donning my costume.

"Costume?" you might ask. Yeah, it gets better. But instead of talking about the prep, let me talk about the actual Golden Penguin Bowl.

Jeremy Allison, the host of the Golden Penguin Bowl, first introduced the Google team, member by member. There was Chris DiBona (Google), Marc Marlin (Google), and Brian Aker (MySql). After the Google team was comfortable, Jeremy kicked off the "Darth Vader's March" and Bill Hilf, Rob Curran, and I walked on stage as two Star Wars Storm Troopers (Bill and I) and Darth Vader (Rob Curran). What I remember was a shocked hush then quite a few laughs in the audience when Jeremy introduced each of us. As our profiles were read, we each took off our costume's helmet and settled in for our "battle vs. Google". <grin/>

I won't bore you with a question by question detail because quite honestly, I don't remember all the details. It was great fun being up there in a crazy costume having Jeremy poking fun at us, and poking back a bit ourselves. One example, I remember fondly. Jeremy had posed the question, "How many of the 10 super computers today are running Linux?" The answer was apparently 8 (nobody got it) and Jeremy pointed out to us (the Microsoft team) that "Sorry, guys the other two super computers are running some Unix." Bill Hilf quickly responded, "That's okay, Jeremy, you can have the 10 super computers. We'll settle for the 3 million desktops..." Everyone laughed. It was a funny joke with each side poking a little fun back at the other guys.

Alas, in the end, we did not return victorious. We actually trailed the entire game by a question or two, except for a short period where we were tied. Personally, I think we did pretty well. I got most if not all of the Windows questions correct like, "What operating system was Win32s for?" (although I did not get the bonus question that asked what the "s" stood for... hey, I think I was still in high school when this stuff came out! <grin/>) and Rob Curran was an absolute terror on the sci-fi questions.

In the end, while tons of people were taking pictures (everyone wanted a picture of the Microsoft guys in Star Wars outfits), Jeremy walked over to us and said he had a great time and that we were great sports. Then he made a quip that I found particularly amusing, "You know guys you'll just have to keep coming back until version 3... when you'll win."

Personally, I think that comment sums up today. Microsoft is still learning how to best interact with the Open Source community as a whole. It may take us a while (version 1, 2 and 3) but we're going to keep working at the relationship. I think that being able to laugh at ourselves in Star Wars outfits and have a general good time at things like the Golden Penguin Bowl are all small steps toward a better relationship. I also believe that Bill Hilf's presentation at Linuxworld tomorrow will be another example.

This is fun.

Linuxworld 2005, 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM, Midday Keynote.

robmen — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:48:23 GMT

[continued from previous blog entry]

The midday keynote was presented by Martin Fink, Vice President of Linux at HP. He started by showing a professional video that compared the growth of the aerospace industry to the growth of Open Source. The analogies were kinda' interesting but the whole thing felt extremely strained. It was almost like some marketing types said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could compare writing source code to flying?" I don't think the analogy ever got off the ground (sorry, couldn't resist). <smile/>

Anyway, Mr. Fink has spent the last 20 minutes talking about all the companies that use Linux. It seems to me that a lot of the major commercial companies (Oracle, now HP) are still trying to convince everyone that Linux is a real operating system that can solve real problems. Again, it seemed very strange to be telling people at Linuxworld, "Hey, did you know you can use Linux to run our software?" or "Hey, did you know you can buy our hardware and get Linux on it?"

Mr. Fink had another video about the Ellis Island Foundation. In the video employees of Ellis Island foundation noted that they had great success translating their systems from Unix-variant (I think AIX on AS400) to Linux on HP. There were lots of general statements about how memory utilization and speed on some set of there servers was really good (I'm not paraphrasing with different words, "good" "memory utilization" and "speed" were all major points). Sitting here I'm now beginning to believe that all keynotes presented by high level personalities of any company are essentially pointless. I want more people to do keynotes like r0ml. He presented a keynote that made you think and, more importantly, had a point. Once again OSCON was fundamentally cooler than Linuxworld.

That said Mr. Fink did introduce Reatrix. Reatrix did a really cool demo of their software on stage. What I found particularly interesting is that the presenter from Reatrix (I missed his name) noted that the original system was developed on Windows. Then, for reasons that weren't particularly clear in his presentation they switched to Linux. I would have been interested to hear more about the reason they switched. Alas we're back to Mr. Fink talking.

Actually, this part of the presentation is more interesting because Mr. Fink as has started talking about licenses. First, he praised the OSI for taking steps to reduce the proliferation of OSS licenses and planning to categorize the current 54 licenses. Then Mr. Fink noted that Intel has re-licensed all of their OSS code under GPL and removing their "vanity license". That was interesting. Then he put out a "challenge" that he recast as a "trade" instead. First, he proposed that IBM should deprecate the IPL and re-license all of their IPL code (what about CPL and EPL code?) under the GPL. In exchange for that, Mr. Fink offered HP laptops loaded with Linux on them for the top IBM executives. There were some chuckles in the crowd. Second, Mr. Fink asked Sun to remove their license (CDDL, I think) and re-license Java under GPL. That request got some cheers. Then he offered HP laptops to the top executives at Sun, but these would be loaded with Windows. That got quite a few laughs. Again, everyone seems to need to take a shot at Microsoft.

The last part of his presentation was about NonStop (which appears to backed by ASP.NET, heh). I knew some guys that worked at Tandem so I had a basic understanding of NonStop but Mr. Fink did a nice walk through with pretty graphics backing him up. What was more interesting was how Mr. Fink talked about fixing the Open Source applications (Linux, Apache, Perl, Python, JBoss, others) that didn't run properly under NonStop and then giving the code back to the community. This, IMHO, is an extremely powerful facet of Open Source. HP fixes the code because the more applications that support NonStop then the more likely customers will be interested in buying it. That makes simple business sense to me.

Finally, Mr. Fink mentioned near the end of his keynote that Linuxworld was for IT people. Really? Hmm, I guessed I missed that disclaimer. Maybe OSCON really is the developers hang out and Linuxworld is the IT people's place to hang out. That would explain what I've seen so far.

Linuxworld 2005, 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, RPM Package Management.

robmen — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:47:00 GMT

[continued from previous blog entry]

Okay, I found a free wireless base station. It is down at the end of one corridor on floor two but doesn't reach most of the conference rooms. The connection also seems slightly flaky (but that could just be my internal wireless, it's been acting up on me lately). I'll just post all my blog entries tonight.

While wandering after the opening Linuxworld keynote around I found a book that said what was been presenting where. One session at 10:15 immediately caught my eye, "RPM Package Management I." My understanding of RPM is less than rudimentary so I thought I'd drop in for a bit more than an hour and see how much I could pick up from the almost 3 hour class.

The presenter, Joshua Jensen (if I caught his name correctly) from Cisco, started by asking everyone if they've experienced the problem where you install one package on Windows and that causes another program on Windows to stop working. Those of us in setup know the problem as our age old nemesis "DLL Hell". A number of people were nodding.

Mr. Jensen used that story to launch into a discussion about what RPM is. For those of you who know less about RPM than me, RPM is an installation technology used by several Linux distributions and originally developed by Redhat (RPM stands for Redhat Package Manager). Mr. Jensen also implied that the dependencies in RPM solve the "DLL Hell" (or I suppose on UNIX it would be "so Hell") problem. Personally, I think that he oversimplified the problem and that dependencies, while a big part of the solution, are not the complete solution ("DLL Hell" is not a trivial problem). In any case, I do wish that the Windows Installer natively provided support for tracking dependencies. That has been an ask of mine since the beginning (you'll note that Merge Modules have dependencies).

Anyway, Mr. Jensen then went on to talk about a few other Linux distributions that use different technologies. Gentoo uses portage. Debian, and thus Xandros, uses apt-get (.deb files) for its installation technology. The he said, "And I guess Windows has InstallShield." That was an interesting comment. It made me wonder how many people think that the Windows Installer is really just InstallShield. I'll have to think about this topic more.

Anyway, after the color commentary was done (it seems common for each presentation to begin by bashing something about Microsoft), we got into some technical details about RPM. Here are the things I wrote down as Mr. Jensen spoke.

During an upgrade, RPM first installs the new package and then uninstalls the old package. That's different from what I would expect. I wondered why this decision was made but Mr. Jensen offered no further insight. He did note that you have to think very carefully about your uninstall actions with this model.
RPM overwrites configuration files unless the configuration files have been modified. If a configuration file was modified then a backed up is created (the with an .rpmsave extension) before the new configuration is installed. This behavior makes sense to me. The Windows Installer does part of this (it doesn't replace files that are modified). However, in RPM configuration files must be marked specially ("noreplace").
In any case, configuration file changes must be made by hand after upgrade (although I expect there is post-processing that can be done by scripts inside a package). All of this behavior is kinda' what I expected but it was nice to see someone knowledgeable present the data.
RPM actions should not be executed in parallel. In his demonstrations it wasn't exactly clear if RPM prevent multiple transactions from occurring at the same time but it seemed like it might. Again, this behavior makes perfect sense. In fact, the Windows Installer enforces the exact same restriction by preventing multiple installations from executing the InstallExecuteSequence at the same time.
RPM supports queries for many useful pieces of data. The functionality reminded me very much of what data is available in the Windows Installer. The difference is that rpm is a command line tool and probably more discoverable and certainly easier to use than a bunch of APIs.

Overall, the presentation jived with what I little I understood about RPM and added a lot more depth. Based off my last bullet point, I'm seriously considering creating a simple little command line tool that displays the same sort of installation information (minus dependencies,) that RPM provides for Windows Installer packages. With my current understanding the technologies really appear to be more similar than different. Obviously, RPM has dependencies natively and the Windows Installer does not but the rest seems similar. Anyway, maybe it'll be something I'll start next year (I can't believe I have coding projects planned that are going to take me through the end of 2005).

Oh, by the way, I still didn't find any geeks. In this presentation, I got closer to programmer-types but this audience really felt more like IT-types than real code geeks. Again, I felt far more at home at OSCON than here.

Linuxworld 2005, 4:45 AM - 10:00 AM, Opening Keynote.

robmen — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:45:15 GMT

I started this morning at 4:45 AM to catch my plane by 6:10 from SEA to SFO. Why the heck did I get up that early and why was I flying to San Francisco on a "school day"? Well, I meant to blog this earlier (Saturday slipped into Sunday and that suddenly turned into Monday) but I'm one of the participants in this year's Linuxworld's Golden Penguin Bowl. Yep, this year it is Microsoft vs. Google and I'm here with Bill Hilf and Rob Curran hoping to bring home the Golden Penguin award.

Anyway, I got up early this morning to make the most of my time at Linuxworld. In fact, at the time of this writing I'm sitting in the keynote presented by Charles Phillips, President at Oracle Corporation. I didn't really know what to expect but I find myself comparing Linuxworld 2005 to my experience last year at OSCON 2004. Two things are notably different.

1. This isn't a conference for geeks. Business people seem to run the show here. The grand majority of people in the audience and most of the people I've passed in the hallways are all dressed up in at least business casual. In fact, most of the people around me are wearing shoes that look more expensive than my whole wardrobe (my old Vans, "code monkey" T-shirt, and khaki pants [I'm dressed up <wink/>]). Everyone seems to have a collar on their shirt.

2. There is no free wireless access here. At OSCON, there was wireless everywhere. There were even power strips running up and down the rows of chairs. Maybe Linuxworld couldn't convince the Moscone Convention Center West to allow them to have free wireless access points for all the conference rooms but it still seems lame for a tech conference to not have wireless everywhere. It also makes blogging the conference blow by blow impossible... I guess I'll just have to upload all my blog entries tonight.

My first impression: OSCON 2004 started out fundamentally cooler than Linuxworld 2005.

Anyway, the keynote is almost over. I can honestly report that nothing interesting was presented. Mr. Phillips noted that Oracle was first commercial database for Linux (Close Source on Open Source, nothing to original there) and they are happy to support a single stable Linux distribution (at the moment, their favorite seems to be Redhat).

Actually, Mr. Phillips's last comment here is interesting. He closed his keynote with, "And thank you for your work on Linux." That comment feels very weird to me because it doesn't seem like there are many (any?) people in the hall that had anything to do with actually making Linux work. Who was he thanking?

Interview with JDN|developer about the WiX toolset (and thus Open Source at Microsoft).

robmen — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:24:51 GMT

I thought the one year anniversary of the WiX toolset's release was going to go by quietly. Well, turns out late last week an analyst from JDN in wanted to do an interview about the WiX toolset. Anyway, he informed me this morning that the interview was posted on the front page (at least it is right now) today. For those of you that can read French, the article is here. I can't read (or speak) French so here is the non-translated text that I originally sent on Friday.

Q1. You are one of the core developers of the very first Microsoft project released under the CPL, a recognized license. What led to such a decision, how did you convince people, and how well was it received (in & out of MS)?

A. Two things came together to make the WiX toolset the first project from Microsoft released under a recognized Open Source license. First, senior leadership at Microsoft was looking for a project that could be released as Open Source. Second, I was developing the WiX toolset using many Open Source methodologies internally and wanted to release the toolset publicly. After talking to some legal staff trying to find an appropriate license to do what I wanted with the WiX toolset, I was put in contact with several individuals from the Shared Source Initiative who were responsible for finding the project to Open Source from Microsoft. It was immediately clear that the WiX toolset was a perfect project to release as Open Source. So, it didn't take much for me to convince people that we should release the WiX toolset as Open Source. I just had to find the right people. <smile/>

Internally there has been nothing but support and congratulations for releasing the WiX toolset as Open Source. The internal support and excitement about the WiX toolset has remained constant over the last year. Externally the initial release was met with a mix of excitement, disbelief, and criticism that Microsoft could never release a project that would operate like other Open Source projects. Over the last year, I've seen the external disbelief and criticism change to recognition that the WiX toolset is a typical Open Source project.

These days the reaction to the WiX toolset seems to be completely based on how well the WiX toolset solves people's problems. People praise the toolset when it solves their problems and other people are critical when it doesn't. We try to fix the issues so that the WiX toolset works well for everyone.

Q2. MS is known for having a host of very good engineers at hand. What was expected from an open source release comparatively to what could have happened with the existing resources?

A. Well, you have to know that the WiX toolset does not and never has had an official Microsoft development team. The WiX toolset was originally written in my free time. Because I made the source code freely available internally other Microsoft developers joined in and helped fix bugs and provided feature suggestions and supported new users as we had time. Like I said, the WiX toolset was operating as an Open Source project internal to Microsoft for a few years before it was released externally. Releasing the WiX toolset externally as an Open Source project from Microsoft was a natural progression.

Q3. One year after the fact, has the project really benefited from being open-sourced?

A. Absolutely and in two different ways. First, new users of the WiX toolset provide more coverage of the existing toolset which helps us find and fix bugs. The new users also provide insight into new opportunities and scenarios that the WiX toolset can grow to support. Fundamentally, the WiX toolset improves as more people use it.

Second, the WiX toolset is recognized internally at Microsoft as a successful Open Source project. Remember, one of the goals of the WiX toolset was to get a better understanding how Open Source can work at Microsoft. Success in the WiX toolset may encourage others to consider releasing other Microsoft projects as Open Source.

Q4. This project launched a handful of other releases from Microsoft to the OS crowd. Could this become a trend from smaller MS projects? What other MS projects could benefit from such a license, or are actually target for such a release?

A. The Shared Source Initiative team is always looking for new projects like the WiX toolset, Windows Template Library, and FlexWiki to release as Open Source. I don't have a lot of insight into the list of projects that Shared Source Initiative team wants to release nor the relative size of any of those projects. I'm pretty busy participating in my own community.

Q5. Is the Shared Source Initiative team willing to take further risks by releasing more important codes?

A. I'm not actually on the Shared Source Initiative team but as I understand their goal it is not about risk management but sharing code. The Shared Source Initiative already releases the source code to over 70 different Microsoft projects (including Windows and Office) under a variety of licenses. You can see more here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx

Q6. Would you see yourself as an advocate of open-sourcing, or just someone using the right license for the right project?

A. This is a great question. I think I would consider myself an advocate for building communities. The license ("open source" or "shared source" or "closed source" or "whatever source") is just one part of declaring the rules the community will live by.

For example, releasing the source code to a project for developers under an Open Source license is a great way to build a community of developers. However, this does not mean that you have to release source code to build a developer community. Fundamentally, the WiX toolset community is really just a bunch of developers (a community) working together on tools that make their lives better. We don't get together simply because the code is licensed under the CPL.

So I believe communities are what are important and Open Source is just one way to build a developer community.

Q7. Has the success of the WiX project, and the publicity it generated, changed anything to the MS view on open-sourcing?

A. I would like to think it has. I'm not sure there is anything I can point to and say, "See Microsoft did that because the WiX toolset was released as Open Source." However, I think that by being successful with the WiX toolset we can demonstrate that Open Source is yet another way for Microsoft to participate in the community.

Q8. You've written a step-by-step guide to getting a project on SourceForge. What would you also consider to be bulletproof tools or websites for open-source development?

A. To build a community you need a place to communicate. I personally prefer email. You'll see notice most of the communication about the WiX toolset happens on our users and developers mailing list. But I've seen other projects be successful with web forums and/or wikis. I'm still experimenting with how to best utilize my blog for communication but that is a new and interesting medium. Oh and something I haven't done a great job with in the WiX toolset yet is that I think an informative and attractive website for the "front page" of the project is a good idea.

Developer communities also need ways to track the source code, bugs, feature requests, and binary releases. Then you need a build system to build your code. These are the core features of any development project. I'm not telling you anything special here.

I also don't believe that building Open Source software is different from building software under any other license. Find tools that do the above well and go from there.

Q9. What do you yourself use for your projects (languages, methods, tools...)?

A. The WiX toolset is a mix of C# and C++ code. We use SDKs that are freely available from Microsoft like the Platform SDK, and the .NET Framework SDK. Currently our build system is based on NMAKE.EXE (which is part of the Microsoft Platform SDK) and we are investigating other alternatives right now. Fundamentally, I like to keep the build systems as simple as possible

As for programming methodologies, I don't think we do anything exciting here, certainly nothing "buzzword worthy". I do subscribe to the idea of "release early, release often". We do a peer review of all of the code that gets checked in and have some rudimentary unit tests.

Finally, we use SourceForge for the tracking and communication needs for the WiX toolset. SourceForge provides the mailing lists, CVS for source control, trackers for bugs and feature requests, and a file release mechanism for our binary releases. That all works pretty well, although I'm not a fan of web forms for data entry so the bug management and releasing binaries on SourceForge can be tedious processes sometimes.

QA. What could be the future of open-source inside Microsoft?

A. I'm personally focused on improving the WiX toolset and maintaining the community that supports it. Beyond that? Anything is possible. <smile/>

WiX on Slashdot, why is OSS@MS part of Shared Source?

robmen — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:36:00 GMT

It doesn't surprise me that Stephen's article "Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative" was picked up by Slashdot. Stephen writes really well and Open Source at Microsoft is a fun topic. People always seem to like to peer into what they believe are paradoxes to try and puzzle out a solution. Anyway, two things caught my attention.

First, the main text of the Slashdot article had a string of words that just made me smile.

there actually are some projects under the OSI-approved licenses, for example the WiX Toolset, which is a good example of a successful open source project by Microsoft.

I'm not sure how many people agree with the comment but, at least, there were no Slashdot comments (that I saw) arguing that the WiX toolset is not a successful Open Source project. That made me happy. After getting beat up for quite a while that the WiX toolset could never be a real Open Source project because it started inside Microsoft, it is nice to see that perceptions can change.

Second, there is a comment on my previous blog entry (I saw some echoes of it in the Slashdot comments) that Open Source at Microsoft is "diluted by the whole Shared Source confusion." I thought about that comment for a bit and realized that I really didn't have a good answer. But I do know who would be able to answer the question, Jason Matusow. I'm certain Jason has an answer for this question, so here's an attempt to get him to answer it either in my comments or in his blog.

Stephen Walli on the inside from the outside

robmen — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 04:07:00 GMT

When Stephen Walli left Microsoft a few months ago I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Stephen was the best mentor, guide and support system that I could have ever asked for when the WiX toolset was released publicly. Without Stephen the WiX toolset would not be where it is today. I always look forward to our meetings over coffee/hot chocolate (he gets coffee, I get hot chocolate). In fact, Stephen, it's been a while we should catch up after Easter.

But I really want highlight Stephen's writing ability. A couple months ago he pointed me at his first blog entry where he linked to his essay "When are you going to sue your customers?" As usual, Stephen had captured in a very approachable and entertaining way the ideas that I tried to touch on in the "Patents and Participation in Microsoft Shared Source" section of this blog entry.

Tonight I noticed that O'Reilly published this article where Stephen captures what I feel is the essence of the issues facing Open Source at Microsoft. I was a bit surprised to see that he used the WiX toolset as an example in the latter half of the article. But once again, Stephen has captured in a very approachable and entertaining way the essence behind the release of the WiX toolset as Open Source software.

Highly recommend reading "Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative" by Stephen Walli.

Jason Matusow starts his blog.

robmen — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:53:00 GMT

A while ago Robert Scoble "called out" Martin Taylor and Jason Matusow. Now, I've only spoke with Martin Taylor once and certainly wouldn't say that I know him well but Jason. well, Jason and I are on a first name basis. You see, Jason is the Director of the Shared Source Initiative (SSI) for Microsoft. Since the WiX toolset was the first project to be released under an OSI approved license from SSI, Jason and I got to know each other pretty well. Not to mention the good times we had at OSCON last year.

Anyway, back to my original story. As soon as I saw Scoble's post about James Governor wanting to see Martin and Jason blog, I fired off an email to Jason letting him know that he had just been "called out" and if there was anything I could do to help Jason get a blog rolling that he should let me know.

I just got off the phone with Jason. He's posted his first blog entry. Jason is a great orator and really knows his stuff about open/shared source and how it can work for customers.

I've subscribed.

MySQL 4.1 setup built with the WiX toolset.

robmen — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 23:08:00 GMT

I was just sent this link to an article about the new features in MySQL 4.1. To quote the part of the article I personally found most interesting:

Microsoft has included an improved version of their Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) in the recent versions of Windows. Using the MSI has become the de-facto standard for application installations on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The new MySQL server installer now also makes use of this technology to provide a smoother and more flexible installation progress.

Further, Microsoft has introduced the WiX (Windows Installer XML) toolset recently. It is the first, highly acknowledged Open Source project from Microsoft. We switched to WiX for two reasons. First, it is an Open Source project and second, it allows us to handle the complete Windows engineering process in a flexible way with scripts.

I have a lot of respect for the MySQL team. They always seemed to be smart about building what their customers needed then added necessary features over time. I really enjoyed working with MySQL back in university on a couple class projects. I can't tell you how happy I am that the MySQL team picked the Windows Installer XML toolset. I'm especially happy they picked the WiX toolset for the two reasons they list.

Finally, I just wanted to comment that even though I'm not big on UI during installation, the screenshots they provide are particularly snazzy looking. Just goes to prove that you can do really nice UI with the WiX toolset if you're willing to put the effort in. Again, fundamentally very cool.