Richard Campbell Blogs Too

I'm not a huge Wiki fan, but Microsoft putting software into the Open Source domain is pretty cool.

If you've never heard of Wikis, you're not alone, they're kind of a weird concept (and product), a web site that's fully editable by virtually anyone, so that you get this sort of disorganized amorphous blob of potentially useful information that keeps moving and changing... wow, its just like the Internet!

Anyway, Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham, a terribly clever fellow who now works at Microsoft (which is, after all, the land of terribly clever people). FlexWiki was developed by David Ornstein, a Program Manager for Longhorn. Do these two facts have any relation? I dunno.

This is the third time Microsoft has posted software to SourceForge, the first, back in March of 2004 was the Windows Install XML (WiX) toolset. Second is the Windows Template Library, released in May. Both these projects are libraries, and so not of any interest to regular mortals, however, they are some of the most popular projects on SourceForge, with 103,000 and 22,000 downloads respectively - the page view counts are huge!

FlexWiki, as with WiX and WTL are released under the Common Public Licence and part of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.

FlexWiki represents the closest thing to a product released into the wilds of Open Source by Microsoft. It'll be interesting to see what comes next.