I was pretty hard on Microsoft with it's open source and standards messaging the other day, and deservedly so if we're talking about their public messages and actions. But in the background we continue to have great examples for Microsoft to learn from. I wasn't paying attention to the date (or the blog world enough of late). Wix is two years old. (Wix is the Windows Installer XML project published on SourceForge under the Common Public License — so yes, Microsoft DOES open source — even if they insist on shades-of-grey marketing calling it shared source.)
Rob Mensching's entry tells the whole story:
- 30+ Releases
- 215,000+ Downloads
- 630,000+ Project Web Page Views
- 600+ wix-users mailing list members
- 530+ Bugs (480+ Fixed)
And it is essentially a group of Microsoft employees on their own time, with an engaged community of happy Windows developers. Not only do internal teams use WiX, along with a healthy set of customers, but so do a number of open source products (MySQL first, and now SugarCRM) for their Windows packaging.
Read his blog entry and see why Rob is a great example of a community leader. As he says in closing, "I stop and think about where we are at today and I can't help but smile. This is so much fun and I'm definitely looking forward to the next two years."
Excellent work, Rob!
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