Microsoft at OSCON

I’ve arrived in Portland for OSCON, what has become the annual Woodstock (or perhaps Coachella) of the open source crowd. I managed to make it to the convention center just a few minutes before my panel session started. The panel was part of Microsoft’s one day Participate08 summit held in conjunction with OSCON.

Although it sounds odd, I don’t know what the name of the panel was. But according to the web site, it featured a “panel of experts“. That’s good, but even in retrospect, I still can’t help but wondering what the focus was. Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School moderated the session through various themes related to open source including Hybrid models, Inclusion, Motivation, Intellectual Property etc. Meanwhile in the background some ladies from Collective Next created an interesting visual flow of the conversation which David Duncan managed to capture and post to Flickr. (I’ll see if I can post more photos later on.)

While there were some good comments here or there from the audience, overall, it felt a bit like a committee examining open source from the outside looking in. We spent two hours talking about various themes and models and sociological implications but when the moderator asked the panelists to comment on what they learned, there wasn’t much to say. It felt like an academic discussion to me.

I still think it’s good that Microsoft chooses to participate at events like OSCON, and even better that it has a dialog with developers. But at the end of the day, open source is about publishing source code, and that’s one area where Microsoft could do a better job. Brian Kirschner pointed out that Microsoft has 400 open source projects. Most people would struggle to name even a handful. (Ok, at MySQL we use WiX, the Windows Intaller, so I know about that one, and also IronPython sounds cool.) Kirschner, Sam Ramji and others are helping Microsoft develop a better understanding of open source, but Microsoft still has a long way to go towards putting it into action.

One skeptic remarked to me after the panel session that for Microsoft this is just a “photo op.” That is, it’s more about the appearances than anything else. I’m not sure whether that’s the case or not, but it’s still a question in many people’s minds. And as Brad Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center pointed out, many people still remember when Microsoft was trying to kill open source.

The irony of all this is that I think Microsoft is at risk of missing out on the next generation of developers. What’s in use at the hot startups these days? Hint: it’s not about VB, C# and .Net. Even startups by ex-Microsoft folks at companies like iLike are using the LAMP stack. I think for a lot of developers, Microsoft is less and less relevant. Which is a shame.

Are you familiar with Microsoft’s open source projects? Do you think Microsoft is taking the right actions in open source? Does it matter?