A month ago, Microsoft was called out on releasing Sandcastle as open source...without the source. Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft and one of its key open-source advocates, immediately pulled the project from Microsoft's CodePlex open-source hosting site.
One month later, Sandcastle is back up, and is fully "dressed" in open-source code. What might have passed as a simple mistake for another company was pounced on by me and others. Sam, for his part, explains that Microsoft can't afford to be treated like "another company" when it comes to open source:
Some people felt it was draconian to pull the project from CodePlex, others thought that didn't go far enough; some were upset because they loved the project and couldn't find it; some thought we were holding ourselves to a higher standard than necessary. I believe that as we continue to build our practices across the company to participate in open source development, we must strive to achieve the highest possible standards.
Some won't believe Sam on this, but I do. He, Bill Hilf, Robert Duffner, and others at Microsoft are actively trying to help the company do right by open source. I'm not naive enough to think that they'll achieve their goals anytime soon, but it's important to recognize that they're not attempting to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. These guys believe the open-source ethos.
The question is, will it be enough?
When I texted Sam Ramji to let him know about Sandcastle, and he quickly texted back that he would look into it, I figured that a) it hadn't yet hit anyone's radar at Microsoft and b) that he'd fix it.
Fix it, he did. As Mary Jo Foley notes, it was "doubtful [that] Microsoft was willing to risk the wrath of the OSI over a documentation compiler." I'd go one step further. Once alerted to Sandcastle's violation and to the importance thereof, it was doubtful that Microsoft's Sam Ramji and Co. would be interested in the code, however important/non-important it might be.
Sam gets open source. He's not always supported in this understanding by the larger Microsoft entity, but Sam gets it. His apology to the OSI is direct, concise, and appropriate:
This is unacceptable and represents a violation of Microsoft's Open Source policy. I take it extremely seriously.
I have directed the project to be unpublished from Codeplex immediately, including removal of the project's use of the Ms-PL. If the team chooses to publish the source code and follow Microsoft policy, then the project may be re-published in the future. If not, we will remove all references to Sandcastle from Codeplex.
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