In this interview, we talk with Doug Look, who’s a strategic designer for Autodesk Labs. The labs are interesting because they’ve built a strong, engaged, community around closed-source software. In this interview, we specifically cover:
· Using an online “Lab” to engage the community in closed-source development.
· Does open-source tackle interdisciplinary problems well?
The OSI has approved the two Microsoft software licenses, the Microsoft Reciprocal License, and the Microsoft Public License. This makes all the code on Microsoft’s CodePlex site (Microsoft’s equivalent of SourceForge) official open-source software, as much of it is licensed under the Microsoft Public License (formerly the Microsoft Permissive License). It also means that things like Microsoft’s Ajax Control Toolkit is open-source (with the inherent ability to fork, etc.)
You would have to be living under a rock to not notice Apple’s ascendancy as of late.
And one of the clear elements of their ascendancy is that they have a clear vision for usability and peak customer experiences. Notice I didn’t say “peak corporate experiences” but that is a topic for another post I’ve got planned…
Most people seem to point to this focus on peak customer experiences as being driven and shaped by one person – Steve Jobs.
So here is the question.
Do you need a Benevolent Dictator to create great out of the box experiences that extend for the lifetime of the product’s use by an end user?
And is this true for both OpenSource and Closed Source projects.
The folks at the humanized blog had a great post up about this that motivated me in part to put up a post on our blog.
But in addition this is a question that has come up quite frequently in our interviews and is the highlight topic of an upcoming one soon to arrive on the blog.
So what are your thoughts?
I’ve got my own two cents on this which is that you do need one regardless of whether it’s an OpenSource project or Closed Source.
But I’m curious what other folks think as well…
There’s a good article on LinuxWorld about the security debate between open-source and Windows. My first question is, does it need to be a debate? In this day and age, isn’t it easy enough to quantify vulnerabilities?
If you are looking for subjective opinion, I recommend looking through the interviews we’ve done here. At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan-boy, the Microsoft interviews (in my opinion) demonstrate a company where secure coding is “in the water”. Code goes through threat modeling, risky function calls have simply been banned, code goes through automated and human inspection, and vulnerabilities that do slip through feedback into the process to determine how to prevent them in the future.
I simply don’t get the same feeling from the open-source people we’ve talked to. When we’ve brought the subject up, the response is almost universally “many eyeballs,” and faith (without data) that “many eyeballs” is effective.
Am I completely off base? Do things like the Linux kernel and Apache go through rigorous security reviews? Is there proof that “many eyeballs” in open source is at least as good as something like the Security Development Lifecycle in Microsoft? If you’re in a position to know, let’s chat!
According to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft will make the source for the upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 available under the Microsoft Reference License. This isn’t an open-source license (i.e. you couldn’t fork the code), but it is still a “good thing” in that developers can learn from the source and have an improved debugging experience with the ability to step-into the framework code.
Update: It seems that this isn’t seen as happy news by all. There’s an article on eWeek that’s just too irrational and frothing to pass up, claiming that this is all a ploy by Microsoft to kill Mono. As Microsoft is officially supporting Novell’s efforts in porting Silverlight to Linux (on top of Mono), the evidence would indicate that Microsoft is doing this to support .NET developers, and not as some clever conspiracy to kill off Mono.
A while back, we did an in-depth interview with Michael Howard about Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle, which has been one of our most popular interviews to date. It seems there’s a lot of interest in pulling back the covers and looking at how Microsoft is approaching building secure code.
ComputerWorld just did an interview with Microsoft’s Scott Charney, which provides more insight into their efforts to produce secure products.
