Microsoft dumps Sandcastle, does right by open source
Posted by: admin in Business and PoliticsWhen 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I’ve directed the project to be unpublished from Codeplex immediately, including removal of the project’s use of the Ms-PL.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’ll remove all references to Sandcastle from Codeplex.
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