Microsoft Fully Engages Open Source?

Now this is really interesting. Michael Foord reports that a lead Microsoft developer has responded to an issue report by saying

One option might be a non-technical solution: Instead of you redistributing the library (or modified library) we distribute it w/ IronPython - and then you're just including the combined package. There's other reasons why it'd be good for us to do this (help, encodings, warnings, etc...).

Michael's understanding of this is in reference to the complete Python standard library rather than just the Decimal module. If so this is excellent news for all Python users, since it will broaden the common code base between CPython and IronPython and make portability between the two environments easier to achieve. It would be interesting to know whether the developers and maintainers of FePy, the open source IronPython distribution, would view such a move with apprehension or relief. Internationalization support can be a significant effort, and Microsoft have a lot of experience in that area.

My own hope is that this move might eventually broaden the support base for the standard library, which hasn't developed as much as I had hoped in 2.5. There will be some sort of reorganization of the library in (I think) 3.1, but I haven't heard much about that yet.

Michael Foord's blog post is amusingly prioritized from an industry perspective, which is one of the charms of the blog: he was reporting big things for Resolver, which I am sure will become a significant Python application in short order. But it's a little like "Three Hundred Japanese Killed in Earthquake: Ohio Man Breaks Ankle" with a different twist. Good luck in Barcelona, Michael (and in New York and Paris too, guys).

I suspect that we have just seen the magic of the Python license at work: there isn't much doubt in my mind that Python's explicit permission to redistribute for broad purposes without opening up your own code makes it easier for organizations with a large proprietary code base to incorporate the language into their own technologies. I know from reports at PyCon that Jim Hugunin has been surprising audiences inside and outside Microsoft at how easy it is to do things in the .NET environment with Python. Surely full IronPython support in Visual Studio must inevitably follow.

Open Source "Increasingly Used for Critical Applications"

The market research company Forrester has just issued a report saying (among many other things) that more than 75% of respondents "agreed that open source software was making an important or very important contribution to improving efficiency and concolidating IT infrastructure". Other highlights include the fact that concerns about intellectual property are fading (presumably as SCO's cases are seen more and more clearly to be the FUD of a desperate last-ditch bid for survival).

The closing advice for would-be adopters comes in two major chunks:

1. Lower Internal barriers to Open Source Adoption - clearly it's time for policies to be refined to give open source a level playing field against proprietary products; some organizations still have blanket bans on the evaluation, let alone use, of open source.

2. Identify Services Before You Commit - many corporate users appear to be concerned that appropriate support services don't exist for open source products. While this isn't universally true, the open source communities equally need to acknowledge that corporate users might not feel completely comfortable relying solely on volunteer newsgroups for support.

It would be good to start building international federations that can collectively offer 24/7 support for open source projects, with specified service levels. That's going to be a challenge for the open sourcerers, but if they can solve it then they might even manage to get on the gravy train before it leaves the station. While this may not be everyone's dream it would be nice to channel funds in directions that allow (or even encourage) the development more and better open source software.