Losing the Alpha Geeks: It is not about OSS
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Scott Hanselman has a post titled: Is Microsoft losing the Alpha Geeks?

The collective group in the discussion at RailsConf seemed to agree that Microsoft should make not just the DLR source available, but actually create a non-profit organization, ala Mozilla, and transfer the developers over to that company. They should allow commits to the code from the outside, which should help get around some of the vagaries of the GPL/LGPL licensed Ruby Test Suites. "IronRuby" should be collectively owned by the community.

In general, I would think that such an organization would be a Good Thing, but it is completely irrelevant to bring the OSS issue into the discussion.

The reason that the "Alpha Geeks" are moving (moved?) from the Microsoft's stuff is very simple. Microsoft's stuff doesn't scale. It doesn't scale for development, it doesn't scale for ease of use, it doesn't scale for elegance.

Microsoft is very focused on the creation of software, but much less focused on working with software. This means that a lot of the issues that arise from working with a large code base over a long period of time have no answer from Microsoft except starting anew. Putting stuff out as OSS wouldn't change that as long as this is the overruling mindset at Microsoft.

Most of the OSS project has a very different mindset than that, but Microsoft is basically just making the source repository public, not OSSing projects. (To be rather exact, they don't work on OSS with the same mindset that other OSS project has, which is highly constrained resources).

I think that part of the problem is that MS is listening to Big customers, which may want what they are supplying, lot of wizards == cheap programmers. By doing so, they are losing the entire Long Tail, and almost by definition, the Alpha Geeks are at the head of the long tail.

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