Levy and Griver - Why not complete transparency? | TheChannel9Team

Boudewijn
VFP Die-hard

Well, I don't care about having those sources. In my daily work it is not that important. What would be nice though is complete transparancy in how they will market their secret weapon (VFP) in the foreseeable future. OK, OK, I know, doing absolutely nothing is quite clear as well but that is not what I talk about.
Something like "such and so is our plan , we will have management magazines writing about VFP in this and that manner ..." You will find more and intenser campaigns in country ABC etc etc...

HE3
oh.

This is great. I feel like I am able to talk to "The Microsoft."

Lechonsazo
Christian Romney

I'd scrap the argument that goes "people probably won't do anything with [insert whatever here]". I don't think it's fear of competition either. It's a revenue thing. Supposing MS released the source for Windows or VS.NET and the "community" actually contributed lots of bug fixes and new features -- how could MS then turn around and sell the OS or IDE to anyone?

yag
yag

I think it's both - yes, revenue is a component of this (as far as sources go), but I really do think that we can get to pretty complete transparency without making source openly available. For instance, bringing customers in on things like specs, bug tracking, enhancement requests, etc. is a great start. Having wider community tech previews should help as well.

FWIW, I'm also interested in seeing how this goes - I've subscribed to the threads about the videos that I've done - so I'll be keeping up (love that RSS)

Jim_Bendis

   As a c# developer coming from the java world. I have taught myself to be better at reading the code then documentation. The only way to be really sure what is going on is to go to the signature and read the code.

   From that stand point having the source for a lot of the .Net framework libraries, would really improve my understanding of what really is going on with the program. Especially in the case of obscure bugs where you're just not sure if the framework classes are holding up their end of the bargain.

  With the incomplete and often buggy nature of the framework libraries, this is not as trivial as it might appear at first glance.

teknologikl
Joe Duffy, www.bluebytesoftware.com

Competetive advantage is not created and sustained by semicolons and angle brackets, but rather through innovation and the ability to execute and maintain a strong vision.

I'm sick of hearing this argument... it's so 90's.

xmedar

I think you've maybe missed the Pink Elephant in the room. the transparency that would help most developers is the API, even the beaurocrats in the EU seem to grasp this singular point, sure some MBA will say that having hidden APIs for your own apps is a competitive advantage, the rest of the IT world looks at it and bells sound and people start exploring other software solutions, sure maybe you maximise some short term gains, but do you want to risk the medium and long term future of the corp?

gardenerd
Alan Stevens

Ken Levy and YAG are the right people to comment on transparency. Ken has created some truly awesome tools as part of VFP, and the code is all available. As for YAG: Codebook, 'nuf said.

VFP has a great community and the VFP development team is truly responsive to the requests of the community. That is the kind of transparancy that matters to me. Who are the people responsible for the tools that my livelihood depends on, and do they care about my needs?

VFP 8 rocks! It is full of developer driven features plus great innovations from Ken and his team. I haven't even begun to reach the limits of this tool ( if there are any).

It's a shame I fell I need to spend my evenings studying C# in order to insure my future marketability.

IceFreak2000
Retro Remaker

From my own personal perspective, I couldn't care less about the source code for tools such as VS.NET - however, I do feel that the full source code for the various System namespaces in .NET should be made available as with the JDK.

Moreover, they should be released under a completely non-restrictive license (possibly BSD style) so that projects like Mono and dotGNU could make full use of them.