Microsoft Does the Right Thing for Sandcastle

by Mike Gunderloy - Jul. 02, 2008Comments (2)

A few weeks ago we reviewed the case of the Microsoft Sandcastle help file builder. At the time, you may recall, the project had been removed from Microsoft's CodePlex site because of a discrepancy between license and action: the license was the open-source MSPL, but the source code was nowhere to be found.

I'm happy to say that Microsoft did the right thing in this case: the project and the source code are now back on CodePlex. This meets the needs of both those developers who were depending on the functionality of SandCastle and those who wanted to learn from, or contribute to, the source code. Microsoft deserves recognition for holding itself to high standards here.

In fact, the company went above and beyond to try to proactively address similar issues with other projects. According to a blog posting from Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's Open Source Lab, the Sandcastle incident kicked off an exhaustive review of the code that Microsoft had shared on various sites. The review team

found other cases where Microsoft-led projects had been licensed under the Ms-PL but hadn’t shared the source. These have also been unpublished and will go through the same review process.

Let's hope that when all the dust clears, the result is more open source code than ever from Microsoft - and a company that demonstrates by its leadership how an open source governance process can be instituted in a large company.