Everyone seems to think the Microsoft Open Specification Promise is a good next step for the company. It sounds good to me too.
However, I would really, really like to see Microsoft support several.NET open source projects. Why didn't Microsoft lend some financial or other support to NDoc, for example, instead of letting NDoc die while creating the similar (but not yet as good) closed source SandCastle tool?
Today's News.com article quotes Gerald Beuchelt as saying,
The best thing about this is the fundamental mind shift at Microsoft. A couple of years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Now it is real. This is really a major change in the way Microsoft deals with the open-source community.
That sounds good but at the same time it also shows how far Microsoft still needs to go. After all, they didn't announce any major support for open source. They simply promised not to do a certain type of harm.
And the people who said things like this:
are all still very influential at Microsoft.
Will we ever see Microsoft financially support a true open source project that is managed by the community?