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Stephen Walli used to work at Microsoft on their Shared Source Initiative for several years. Now he is vice president of open source development strategy at Optaros, Inc, and has come out to talk to us about the way of the shared source world at Microsoft.

He gets across the concept that Microsoft has a spectrum of code out there:

• MCS (consulting) practice code
• MSDN sample code
• Software Development and Device Drive Kits
• Internal-tool code
• Experiments that may never see the light of day
• Research from MSR

An interesting point is made about the WiX experiment.

Microsoft released WiX available to all interested parties on SourceForge under the Common Public License in April 2004. WiX is actually an awesome example of exactly what open source projects can bring to Microsoft. WiX is (as Time magazine called it) " a relatively insignificant geekware tool." It is a command-line tool set allowing developers to reliably and repeatably generate a Microsoft Windows Installer package for their software deployment needs. It fits the professional developer's need for a recipe-driven, batch-oriented build tool. Many internal Microsoft teams used it.

After 328 days on SourceForge, the WiX project has on the order of 120,000 downloads. About two-thirds of the bugs logged have been fixed. A reasonable number of people have joined the project's community and assigned their property rights for their contributions to Microsoft as the legal sponsor and defender of the project. (I designed the original assignment process along the lines of the FSF policy. If it worked for them, it would likely work for Microsoft.) There has been a steady stream of email from Windows developers in the community that are simply happy users of the technology because it allows them to deliver better Windows packages. The transparency of the code and examples means they can see exactly how to accomplish installation tasks that previously were mysterious.

The core of the WiX community however is Rob Mensching and a half a dozen developers working predominantly on their own time. Windows development customers are happy and directly involved in the conversation with Microsoft employees. One stunning submission came from a developer that built a considerable tutorial on WiX. I did a quick page estimate and it looks like this developer gave the WiX project at least a month of his life.