Openness - the way things should be

GNU is all about openness, freedom of thinking, of using products, of modifying those to suit you best and all about sharing with the world. GNU took the hacker's way to the next level: learn/experience - engineer - share. "Open <*>" must manifest itself in a community. If the community is healthy, the product will be healthy too. We saw this in GNU products (GNOME, GIMP, and GCC), Linux (core and all the distros), KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla (Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) and all those great/successful product that benefit from a cool community (a ton of those products).

Google started with openness in mind. Google is free. Gmail is free. Google-Maps is free. GDS is free. Google-Talk is free. They also bought great commercial products and shared them for free: Picasa, Blogger, Hello, Keyhole/Google Earth. They have great, free products and the company image benefits from this large users community.

Now, the biggest software company (aka Micro$oft) decides that closed doors is not in fashion today. Those days are over. It started about 1.5-1 year ago with MSDN TV (videos taken to developers in Redmond about some of the products Microsoft is working on). Now they have blogs for every product, blogs of the employees, they have Channel9 (great site), they have pages for the products in beta stage, they share a lot of resources for the new technologies introduced... No accounts, no passwords, no passports. Just information.

In the last few months I've experienced an explosion of info originating at msdn.com or microsoft.com, all aimed at creating a real community. In the past years PDC was covered by few general articles, which gave us a bulrush image about what's going on. Now, great videos exposing featuring APIs, SDKs, Frameworks, products or technologies are posted on Channel9.

Great job Microsoft. Keep it up. Open even more.