Once More unto the Breach

Visual Studio Ships the WiX Toolset

The title says it all. Rob Mensching blogged today that the Visual Studio team will be shipping the WiX toolset as product in the CTP release of Visual Studio Team System, code-named Rosario.

WiX is the toolkit for building better Windows installer packages. Rob released it as an open source software project almost four years ago on SourceForge using the IBM Common Public License, which was in and of itself a significant event in the history of Microsoft's open source flirtation.

The significance of this product release is that Microsoft is going the distance of creating an open source project community, then incorporating community work back into a shipping supported product. This is an enormous step. This is very different from how, for example, Services for UNIX ships a large collection of free and open source software as part of the product. All that software came into Microsoft via the Softway Systems acquisition.

Rob's post provides all the details. Congratulations to Rob and the rest of the WiX development community!

II Open Innovation, Zaragoza, Spain

The City of Zaragoza, Spain is hosting the second Open Innovation event on 20 November, 2007, in the Roman Theatre (Español). I'm honoured to be one of the presenters in the evening.

This is the second in a series of events designed to provide a learning and networking opportunity for business and technical people involved in businesses and organizations using open source software in Spain. The events bring together people to explore the business models and economic sustainability of free and open source software.

Spain is home to some of the most interesting start-up companies developing businesses with open source that I've seen. Bitrock is delivering huge value to its customers (other open source companies) through its packaging and distribution technology. (And Bitnami stands to set a lot of other organizations on their collective head.) eBox is in a position to change the small business server market. OpenBravo is going to do to the ERP business model what MySQL is doing to databases and Alfresco is doing to content management.

This promises to be an exciting event!

Disclaimer: I'm on the board of eBox.

My China FOO Presentation (一起建桥梁)

Update [2007-11-11, 21:14]: The slides are here (PDF 416.8K)

This Friday (9 November) marks the first China FOO event in Beijing. O'Reilly Media is gearing up for the event and I've confidence it will be a huge success. I was invited, but unfortunately I'm not able to go. I was even going to be brave and attempt to give a lightening talk demonstrating how poor my Chinese is! But then I realized I could contribute regardless.

Lightening talks are constrained to five minutes, but I've cheated here. I worry that when you deal with a multilingual environment, one has to allow for people's internal translation rates. And I've of course tried to cover too much ground. In English AND Chinese. To whit:

• Free and open source software is important to China's future growth. (开放代码软件对中国未来的发展很重要)
• It will allow China to deliver better software faster.
• It will allow China to build better companies more quickly.

BUT ...

• Language defines culture. (语言创造文化)
• Our community cultures are different, and we need to understand each other's cultures to build the relationships to allow us to build a bigger community.

All in eight minutes. With examples.

I'm not entirely happy with the audio over the slides. (My apologies.) This was a first exploration with Keynote, iMovie, my old G4 laptop and a video camera. I have some ideas for next time. Heart felt thanks to Jethro Cramp in Beijing for all his help with the Chinese translation. I've been learning Chinese, but the vocabulary needed was a little beyond my current state. All mispronunciations are obviously mine.

If you prefer Google Video to YouTube, you can find the presentation here.

谢谢你