Dave Laribee

Wow. Thanks for posting these for those of us who could not attend.

One of the things I kept thinking after DevTeach Vancouver is how nice it would be to have videos of some of the sessions I attended, or even better, the hallway conversations just like this one.

Anyway, thanks again for the videos. Great stuff, keep it up!

I have to say, this is one of those topics that I know is hot with the Alt.Net folks, but I've never understood it.  Microsoft really is NOT hostile towards open source on their platform.  Yes, I understand the animosity when the bigwigs make hay about Linux, or when they attack the GPL (that one I agree with them on, though).  However, that truly isn't the entire story.

Just as an example, the question was raised in that video why MSDN doesn't have articles about open source libraries.  While the answer given was informative and useful, I think it also must be noted that THERE ARE such articles.  msdn2.microsoft.com/.../aa973811.aspx

The open source community seems to be making a couple of mistakes here. Microsoft is a business, and must follow a business model.  They have little ROI from supporting open source, beyond developer good will.  Further, that developer good will doesn't even account for all that much when Microsoft's core customer base shuns open source for various reasons (pointed out in the video), and they aren't in a services/support model.  Given that, you can't expect them to go to much of an effort to "support" you.  That does NOT mean they are against you.  Learn to work within that model.  Do the work of promoting open source yourself.  Evidence tells me that if you do that, Microsoft isn't going to stand in your way.  Write those articles and submit them to MSDN (magazine or web), and at that point the effort is likely to be small enough that Microsoft will provide "support" by publishing the article.  Again, look at the examples where this has already been done.

I see Microsoft drop names for all sorts of projects, open source and not, all over the place.

Thanks for posting these videos, I am getting to see sessions (and side conversations) that I missed at the event.  It was hard to decide where to be with so many good conversations going on at the same time :)

I don't think Microsoft is practicing isolationism.

Recently I worked with Frans Bouma and David Ebbo to connect LLBGen with Dynamic Data.  Microsoft opened there API to allow an outside company work with their bits.  

bryan.reynoldslive.com/.../LLBLGen-Pro-and-Microsoftrsquo3bs-Dynamic-Data-to-play-nice!.aspx

These are good signs.

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Hey Dave, who is the fourth individual in the conversation?  I recognize his face, but am blanking on the name.  I think you should include.  

YMMV. Thanks.

@wekempf

Oh, I agree, MS, at least in the .NET space, isn't "OSS Hostile" (though there have been a few questionable incidents that could've been handled better).

But there is, for the most part, a general unawareness or even maybe ignoring (no conspiracies, though) of some of the OSS projects that have built up around the .NET ecosystem (primarily bleed over from the Java space).  

There are some individuals who are quite the opposite and very interested in OSS, etc but they are usually not in any sufficient power to make anything really interesting happen.  But there is some hope ScottGu is interested (though overloaded with a million other things, I'm thinking), and many on his team and some in other teams are engaging and discussing but it's still not mainstream and we're still fighting an up-hill battle in many cases to get best of breed tools to be used instead of "Whatever Microsoft puts out" which is not always best-of-breed.

jdn,

I'm the fourth person. Mind you, I only had one question in that conversation.

Jeff