And this criticism is an example of the misguided nature of most MS-bashing that I've seen lately. Some people who decided a long time ago that MS was "evil" and are unwilling to ever change their minds on that subject, despite the evidence.



This project is a perfect example of how MS is embracing the open source community and ideals in a positive way. It would make absolutely no sense for them to "use the leading projects and help build them", as you suggest, for a few obvious reasons:



1. Any given existing blog software development community (I'll use WP as an example since I'm most familiar with that) is NOT going to be "accepting" of that kind of help from MS. Most of these projects already have strong (or at least opinionated) leadership behind them, so MS would not be able to make the kind of "big" contributions that you might expect them to make, other than perhaps just throwing money at them.



This might not be a fair comparison (since they're totally different languages - PHP vs. C#), but the WP code honestly looks pretty sloppy compared to this. I highly doubt it would go over well if MS came in and submitted tons of patches to get WP up to this level of thoughtful design at a code level. It would be foolish of them to try, but then their only other option would be to severely limit their participation, and then what would be the point?



But all that's completely moot because....



2. The primary purpose for this particular app is not to compete with the likes of WP in any way. As stated on the project's home page, it is a sample / reference implementation of some of the new frameworks, language features, and design patterns that they have recently added to the .NET platform. So *of course* they did it using their own languages and tools. That's the *entire* point of this project.



From a strictly technical point of view (business and politics aside), C# / .NET has made huge strides in the last few years in the area of development languages, tools, etc. So much so that many consider them to be at the head of the pack in terms of a managed code platform for software development, when compared to the closest analogous choice - Java.



In fact, they have innovated so quickly in this space, that a lot of people's biggest complaint is that there's too much new (good) stuff to keep up with and learn it all. Yet another great reason for the real motivation behind this project - to give people an example of how some of these things should be used.



Are they infallible? No. Do they still have problems? Sure. Does this project (or any of the many other recent signs of openness) mean that they're now full fledged, flower-wearing hippie freedom lovers? No, but I don't think anyone is claiming that is their goal. But it's also not trying to damage or even directly compete with other alternatives.



MS can literally do nothing right in the eyes of some of their critics. According to this logic, if they released all of Windows source code and made it a completely free (GPLor similar) OS, that would be a bad thing because they would be stepping on Linux's toes.

hippies don't love freeedom

Or, "learn to take a joke"

If that works for you, great. My comment was just a silly little comment that hardly deserved a response. So if it saves me from the lecturing, great!

Maybe you just don't love hippies. :-)



But seriously, "love" and "freedom" can mean different things in different contexts (in this case, software), and different people can have varying opinions on how best to "love", preserve, value, etc. something like "freedom".

Classic. Hippies hate clarity.

Do you have a source for the claim that Microsoft employees have given "other code contributions" to moonlight?

I heard it in an interview with Miguel de Icaza, probably on some podcast. I don't remember which one off the top of my head, though, since I listen to a lot of them.



He was mostly talking about the testing code, but he mentioned in passing that they also gave them the codecs and "other contributions", or something to that effect. Those other contributions may or may not have been Moonlight specific (could be Mono in general).



Why?

Because it seems at least a little unlikely to me. And the codec and testing framework examples don't really convince me that Dan is considerably mistaken.

You can read up on Microsoft's recent support of the open source community; there's a lot of stuff out there if you're interested.



I'm not sure why you wouldn't think that the kind of help they've given to the Mono project is significant, if that's what you're implying. In this particular example, they may not have contributed any source code, but are you saying that only source code contributions are worth anything, and any other form of help is meaningless? Perhaps I just don't get where you're coming from there.



Like I said earlier, no one is suggesting that they're transforming into a free/freedom software based company, but I do think they're doing a lot to enable lots of good free software work, and they've also made huge advances in other areas of openness.



In addition to releasing open source stuff of their own (this project as an example), open APIs to their service based offerings (Live is widely regarded to have a better, more extensible and flexible API than similar offerings from Google and Yahoo), and helping out other people and projects with their platform, even to the extent of giving assistance to people who are making alternate (non-MS-only) implementations of their platform itself, they have also been much more open to community input, to the extent that they have changed direction in some of their implementation choices based on that community feedback.



Check into the ALT.NET community if you're interested in more on that front. They're a group that formed around being excited by the technical progress that MS was making in it's development tools and languages, but were vocally critical of some of the aspects that have traditionally been associated with the MS dev scene / culture.



Rather than ignoring or even trying to silence such criticism from their dev community groups (like some companies I could name with insane gag-order restrictions on their SDKs), MS has publicly embraced that negative feedback and changed their practices accordingly, to be supportive of people with different philosophies. The ASP.NET MVC framework (one of the things that this Oxite project is an example implementation of) is one example of that.

Perhaps I did react too strongly, and I apologize for that. I just didn't (and still don't) see the humor in "hippies don't love freedom", and the nature of the subsequent supplies just seemed to indicate that you were only trying to get a rise out of me and not actually contribute to the discussion, so that's what struck me as "trollish".

OK. Do you have the name of the ORM framework project? I am googling a bit but not getting a obvious quick hit.

Perhaps. Perhaps a 40 and 300 word response to 4 word jokes you don't think are funny is a little much.

Well, I'm not sure about that, but I do know one thing *I* hate: people making broadly generalized insults about a certain "type" or person, even if it's a stereotype. It's even less palatable when coupled with (what comes off as) an arrogant proclamation that "their" understanding of something like "freedom" doesn't measure up to your enlightened standards.



Any fool can easily recognize that the statement in my precious comment is completely true. There are many different senses of both those words ("love" and "freedom"). It's probably that way in every society, but it's most definitely true in our own.



Now, if you asked any random "hippie" whether they "love freedom", my bet is that an overwhelmingly high percentage of them would tell you that they do. To even attempt to argue with them on that, you'd have to first define the term. What sort of freedom are you referring to? The "free love" that made the original hippie culture famous? Civil liberty? Religious / spiritual, etc., etc. Only then could you attempt to make the claim (which I'm assuming is the point of your initial joke / comment) that they don't truly "love" it, based on philosophical differences you may have with them on how exactly freedom should be valued and preserved.



As a perfect illustration of the varying senses that some of these words (specifically "hippie" and "freedom" can take), my original reference to both was in the context of a point about the culture of free software. Perhaps it wasn't a clear enough reference, but RMS is arguably the most recognizable single person associated with the free software movement, and he is often jokingly referred to as a "hippie". Granted this may be mostly because of his personal appearance, but I think it probably also has a bit to do with his outlook on life and "freedom" issues (software and otherwise). My apologies for that not being direct enough in that regard.

I found this
http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/microsoft-subsonic-...