June 9th, 2008
How much will Microsoft's Sandcastle boo-boo hurt?
Microsoft admits it goofed. Posting a project under an open source license without including the code is bad form.
The question is how much this might hurt Microsot. In the open source community it’s already as popular as George W. Bush at an Obama rally. How much worse can things get?
There remain a large cohort of programmers, partners, and simple fans who will stay with Microsoft and what it chooses to call open source no matter what. You might think of it as the Republican Party of open source.
But for Microsoft to grow it must find a way to grow its developer base, and its application base. The company still dominates in PC market share, and has a strong position in servers. There’s considerable there there. It’s in developer relations where the problem lies, or at least the open source wing of that party.
But, sheesh. This went over like John McCain’s green screen speech. So maybe Microsoft needs to believe as Sen. McCain does, that there will be better days.
Will there? Can Microsoft mend its open source fences?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 06/09/08
