Post dated the check. Money must be tight since you left Vertigo.

Now that we can all forge his signature, money's going to get even tighter!

oops, damn. Typo. Ultimately irrelevant since the wire transfer is what matters, but you knew that :)

great news! i applaud your contribution. and i wholeheartedly agree as a .NET developer -- there needs to be more open source projects like that. Codeplex was a good starting point, i've found a few projects on there that i like, but .NET needs to be a first-class open source citizen, and i can see the development of Mono only helping that.

I replaced our use of SharePoint with ScrewTurn Wiki - which we now use for all our documentation, internal and external. I love that I just had to mark the folder as an application in IIS and it worked out of the box. A great project choice Jeff.

Not a typo--that was a write-o. :)

Great to see you make this contribution!

I know it won the poll, but did you officially decide on www.stackoverflow.com ? That as my vote!

I'm afraid .NET won't ever be a first-class open-source citizen while it is controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft has repeatedly threatened open-source projects with potential patent lawsuits and if any open-source project is a patent nightmare waiting to happen then Mono is.

Open-source projects are treated as second class in the Microsoft ecosystem because some of Microsoft's business methods are focused on vendor lock-in through closed protocols and lack of available interoperability documentation.

I'm not meaning to be a big naysayer, open-source is great and Microsoft make some good software too. However the advantages of one are pretty much the disadvantages the other so open-source on closed platforms just doesn't have the appeal as you can only see/control/change a certain amount of the "stack".

Microsoft could take a leaf from Apple's book on how to use open-source effectively without needing to have a "OSS or nothing" attitude.

> Microsoft could take a leaf from Apple's book on how to use open-source effectively without needing to have a "OSS or nothing" attitude.

Totally agree with this. There are so many internal Microsoft factors that make it difficult if not impossible for MS to do what Apple does (eg, ship OSS bundled with the OS).

Interesting to read this now, as I've been trying out a couple of different wikis here. For some reason I glossed over this one, but it actually looks pretty decent, so I think I'll give it a whirl.

I develop OSS in .NET (honest guv), can I have some cash? Also I need beer. Lots of beer...

Seriously though, nice one Jeff! It's good to see evidence of the community being self-sufficient in financial terms.

Awesome news, and I love the idea of helping OSS become more 'first class' on Microsoft.

> There are so many internal Microsoft factors that make it
> difficult if not impossible for MS to do what Apple does (eg, ship > OSS bundled with the OS).
And that is a really shame. I'm an active OSS developer for the KDE project and a full time software engineer mostly working on Linux-based applications but I still keep an eye on what MS and Apple are up to.

I've recently left a job at a large company to go work for a startup simply because their "internal factors" are effectively killing the business and the "suits" seem to make all the technical decisions now.

MS used to be the #1 place for CS grads to apply to. That crown has been nicked by Google partly I think as MS has a lot of good software engineers but the "word on the street" is that the management make it really hard for them to do their job...

>Microsoft could take a leaf from Apple's book on how to use open source effectively without needing to have a "OSS or nothing" attitude.

For that to happen, they'd have to be in the same position as Apple was in: They have to use OSS to survive.

Apple has been famously closed with everything they do, and the only reason they have now seemingly embraced the OSS system is because they didn't have the resources to build a kernel from scratch or a web browser from scratch, or whatever, so they had to use things with OSS roots. Doing that required them to abide by the licences they're under and 'give back'. MS would have to be forced into it if they're to do the same.

Great to see you following though with your promise jeff.

Good Work ,dude !!! But I would have rather that you would have donated the money to some more deserving open source projects which sun on open source OSes. But, oh well, I guess it's the thought that counts !!!

@Mike Arthur: "I'm afraid .NET won't ever be a first-class open-source citizen while it is controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft has repeatedly threatened open-source projects with potential patent lawsuits"

What has the visibility of the source-code got to do with whether or not Microsoft sues a project for patent violations?

Presumably Microsoft will (have) also sue closed and/or commercial products if they find patent violations in them (which they can do with or without source code, if they see a product that operates using certain technologies or protocols and decide to investigate its inner workings).

I don't see anything stopping people writing open-source code in .Net. You write some code; you stick it in SVN or on a webpage; you're done. If the code is legal then nobody can touch you for it.

> Apple has been famously closed with everything they do, and the only > reason they have now seemingly embraced the OSS system is because
> they didn't have the resources to build a kernel from scratch or a
> web browser from scratch, or whatever, so they had to use things with > OSS roots.

There is another difference between Apple and Microsoft, in that Microsoft *thinks* it has the resources to do all that stuff.

I don't think it does. It certainly doesn't have the management structure to do all that stuff competently.

Microsoft has the most serious of NIH syndrome I've seen in a modern software company. They take proven developer tools, like Nant, CrusieControl .NET and Subversion and build their own version of it: Microsoft Team System.

It is left as an exercise to the reader to think of other examples of this behaviour; there are many.

They have this compulsion to constantly reinvent the wheel at every turn and it is that will eventually end the Windows/Office monopoly.

All empires fall when the army is spread too thinly. No matter how many developer Microsoft hires, it can never produce as much quality software as the totality of OSS movement.

Although I applaud the work that OSS guys do on .NET, I think donating to a .NET project is flawed. Ultimately the platform is owned by Microsoft and they can obsolete it as soon it becomes convenient for them to do so.

Out of the four software freedoms, freedom zero is probably the most important: The value of a program is in being able to run. Even if yo With .NET, freedom zero may be guaranteed today but what about in 20 years time? When there's no JIT, C# compiler or any other .NET tools, how are you going compile and run your source?

This is why, in my view, this donation is sub-optimal. Linux based tools and software projects are a much better better. Many C programs written in the 80s still compile on these platforms.

Simon.

finally those developers will be able to buy a Mac and start working with a real computer.

/sarcasm

@Leo, you don't understand the reality of software patents. With copyright it's relatively easy for the programmer to know whether the code is "legal", but with patents I could write some code and only later discover that I'm using some method that Microsoft has patented. With Mono the problem is magnified because it's explicitly using Microsoft technology, but Microsoft hasn't explicitly granted a patent license on that technology.

> What has the visibility of the source-code got to do with whether
> or not Microsoft sues a project for patent violations?
The vast body of open-source development occurs on top of other open-source projects, be they the web server, language or operating system.

Mono doesn't have patent immunity from Microsoft. Therefore to run an open-source .NET application and avoid patent violations I need to purchase a copy of Windows, IIS and use MS's .NET rather than Mono. Surely you can see how this will affect .NET OSS being a first class citizen?

@Simon: Very much agreed about the NIH. I think donating is kinda up to those who donate, even if their reasons are, in your opinion, flawed. Jeff is a .NET developer so it is unsurprising that he will want to support the .NET ecosystem.

> When there's no JIT, C# compiler or any other .NET tools,
> how are you going compile and run your source?

Ever heard of Mono?
For web-applications Mono runs very well.

And another thing:
I checked it, i don't use any software that is older than a few years.
Older sources here exist, but i only look back at them for fun.
Software evolves over time, forgotten?

STW looks pretty much a commerical entity to me, and it doesn't seem to accept code from people outside it's organisation. Not what I would call opensource.

Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea

http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php

Wow, deleting comments now, eh? Nice, Jeff.

Hey Jeff,
I'm not a big fan of .net or IIS even (more of an Apache/Linux guy), but hey any contribution to an Open Source project gets a big ol' giant gold star in my book.

Your blog has benefited me so I'm glad to see that at least one other person/group will feel the same way.

Simon - Subversion, CruiseControl and Nant are great for my purposes in this little shop, but those tools don't scale well to large businesses. Microsoft didn't develop Team System due to NIH, they developed it because they were targeting an entirely different market.

I really wish people would at least try to understand what the hell they're talking about before piping up. Microsoft has to worry about i18n, backwards compatibility, patent and copyright issues, security issues, usability issues, and all of that fun stuff that's part of developing "commercial" software. It's not as if they can just pick up a copy of Subversion and deploy it with Visual Studio and have everything just work; and if they're going to have to tackle the mountains of work involved in bringing those tools up to snuff for everyone who uses VS, why the hell should they do it for free? Those translators and testers and lawyers and analysts all cost money.

I think it's wonderful to be donating real money to open source projects. But please, for the love of god, stop bitching about how Microsoft or Google or whoever is dragging its heels and refusing to accept the divine blessing of open-source software. Microsoft has millions of customers to worry about; CruiseControl or [insert your favourite FOSS project here] only has to worry about white English-speaking Americans and Europeans without any disabilities and with plenty of time on their hands to fix all the minor compatibility problems themselves.

Now that you make all of your money on the internet, why stay in CA? Move to Utah and hang out with Dooce while ogling her piles of cash.

@tittrat :

I agree with you about Mono and the availability of .NET development tools. However when you say :

> And another thing:
> I checked it, i don't use any software that is older than a few years.
> Older sources here exist, but i only look back at them for fun.
> Software evolves over time, forgotten?

Actually, I know of quite a few companies where the life expectancy of a program is around 20-30 years -- to the point where sometimes people lose the source code and can only try to find a faster machine to make it run faster.

Your website looks like it was printed on a laser printer that is running out of toner. All the letters are different shades of gray.

Jeff,

Thanks for doing this. The community appreciates it. What a fine thing you've done. Thanks so much.

-Judah

That's awesome, Jeff. Congratutions to ScrewTurn Wiki!

Good on you Jeff.

btw (non-related) how reliable are CafePress as my tee order has been 16 days since it was sent, I've emailed them and still nothing; still waiting :(

Lee

I thought you were donating $5,000 per month all this time. Oh, well.

Interesting way to choose a recipient. I would have probably donated to (a) the open source project I use the most,(b) the open source project that I really wish would get better, or (c) the open source project that I use but is in danger of going under.

Oh well. Your money, your decision. I just buy the occasional T-Shirt and mug. You're the better person.

You rock, man. Good for you.

So stackoverflow is what you're going with? Kinda dissapointed, it's the name I liked least I can't understand why so many people liked it. Oh well, I'll still be a part of whatever it is.

I'm glad you decided to give all the money to one project. I was reading this, thinking that you were still in the planning stage; I scroll down a line and _wham_, you've just handed out five thousand dollars.

should have been stacktrace.com

I remember awhile back you posting other (famous) people's home addresses in images on your blog and when people complained you said "there is no need to hide it, it is public information that you can look up."

If you were so unconcerned with that person's address, why did you gray your address out? I would have grayed out my signature before the address.

I too applaud your contribution, but just wonder if it couldn't have gone to an effort that 1) moved the tech bar a bit instead of repeating the same old been-there-done-that thing (e.g., wikis, blogs, content servers, etc.), and that 2) didn't have an $18,000 commercial license with which to fund their own activities?

http://www.screwturn.eu/Commercial.ashx

On a more positive note, thanks for donating to the community. I'll have to check out this screwturn wiki site.

So, there certainly are industries in which you write programs that are supposed to last for 20 years. (Although, of course, the singularity will obselete such considerations soon enough ;).) But I'm pretty sure that nobody uses .NET for those.

Certainly, none of the apps I'm writing in .NET have a life expectancy of more than a ten years at the outside. I guess my personal website has a longer one, but in that case I'm such an upgrade-junkie that it'll never be far behind the 'next big thing' curve. (Well, assuming my hosting provider stops being slow on the upgrade.)

I am shocked no one mentioned the picture of the check taken on the wooden table. No fans of http://thedailywtf.com/ here I suppose.

You mean this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx

Jeff - you should put up a temporary page at stackoverflow.com...

@lahser:
> Actually, I know of quite a few companies where the life
> expectancy of a program is around 20-30 years --
> to the point where sometimes people lose the source code
> and can only try to find a faster machine to make it run faster.

Code lives - some of my projects are older than 10 years - webapplications, by the way.
But they are refactored every few years, some are translated to C# over the time. Word or Linux live longer than 10 years - but they not the same as they have been 1998. Very different compilers translate them, where no single stone is on the other as before. Internally no single line looks exactly as they were 10 years before, i presume.
If a software is alive, it is under permanent change. That's the only way a project could survive.
But show me only one DOS-program, which is in use as it was 1994. I don't see any. Even on the big-iron the programs only survive, if they are constantly changed.
There simple is no software, that runs unchanged over 20 years. The law and needed functions change too fast for that.
It is an urban legend, the single software which was never changed, but is still in use.
No company has such, and i've seen many.
A single exception does not count, it would only be a shown big mistake, a living zombie.

Very nice gesture, Jeff.

Also, you mention that the comments are often more valuable than the original blog. I'd agree, but that's also why I wouldn't be able to operate a successful blog (that and I have nothing interesting to say). Here's an example where you mention that you're donating money to some OSS project, and some people can't resist the urge to be dicks. I would get fed up.

Jeff,

Will and Dan beat me to it...

You basically just posted your signature and your bank account number on the net...

I suggest changing opening a new bank account.

Oh, yeah, and kudos for supporting OSS. It's interesting to me that you have chosen to donate to a company that has a business model and makes money through commercial licensing of its opensource software, rather than a project that's being worked on without an obvious profit model. From the post it appears that you just went with the project that people nominated in the blog comments, but I wonder if this entered into your consideration.

I think he's going to blow the five grand on hookers.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel that the entity to send ultimate congratulations to for your donation is Microsoft.

Good stuff :) Congrats to the Screwturn Wiki project!

> Wow, deleting comments now, eh?

Rod, I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't deleted any comments from this post. I will occasionally delete comments that are wildly off topic, offensive, or that offered simple one-line spelling or grammar corrections to the post that I subsequently made. That's about it.

> I thought you were donating $5,000 per month all this time

LOL! I wish I had that kind of cash!

> STW looks pretty much a commerical entity to me, and it doesn't seem to accept code from people outside it's organisation. Not what I would call opensource.

svn://svn.wikileaf.com:5432/STW/

> I remember awhile back you posting other (famous) people's home addresses in images on your blog

The address on that check is out of date -- even if I did unblur it, it's not where I live. I actually posted my home address in the very thread you're referring to ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000934.html ). Also, Charles Petzold confirmed himself that his address is a matter of public record.

> Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea ( http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php )

I appreciate the concern, but I performed hand editing on the pixelated characters before posting them.

Quote:
"But show me only one DOS-program, which is in use as it was 1994. I don't see any. Even on the big-iron the programs only survive, if they are constantly changed.
There simple is no software, that runs unchanged over 20 years. The law and needed functions change too fast for that.
It is an urban legend, the single software which was never changed, but is still in use.
No company has such, and i've seen many."

Without pointing out the logical fallacies here: I've seen plenty of companies using software that hasn't changed in 20 or so years. Many of them are companies that still use DOS based shipping or inventory software. Heck, I even saw one instance where a company was still using the same 9 pin dot matrix printer that they bought with the software sometime in the late 70's - and this company still does good business (somewhere in the millions/year net earnings).

So just because "you" haven't seen it, doesn't mean it's an urban legend or that it doesn't exist.

That being said; even if it is .NET software, it can still be usable in 20 years if you have a copy of windows and the .NET framework that the app was written for. Some people don't realize that running software in 20 years does not mean running that software on whatever platforms are commonplace at that time.

Lots of companies are still running VAX mainframes and buying parts on ebay. Software (Especially in ERP) can live for 20-30 years.

Desktop software? Not so much.

Nice gesture, Microsoft and Open Source don't usually go together and there's no reason for that.

I've been talking about putting up a wiki at work for a few weeks now. Thanks for the post about screwturn wiki. I put it up today and it was really quite simple. Good group of folks to invest in I'd say.

Jeff you are a great ambassador for the .NET community.

Some people choose to help out financially and others if they cannot they can still contribte to open source projects by giving their time.

I'm just grateful that MS are being more transparent with source code and that's a start to doing what they can with being more open.

I love Srewturn Wiki. I hope they can put the money to good use. Very generous of you.

Nicely done Jeff. I always knew you were good for your word, no matter what everyone else said. ;)

Uhm... Jeff- if five thousand is only a portion of a money you make in blog advertising- no wonder you quit your job! Wow!

Jeff, you are an admirable saint. But we all know you chose ScrewTurn because it is called "ScrewTurn". You ain't gotta lie about all this voting and word counting crap to kick it!

That rocks! I look to this blog every day for insight on writing code, I bought Code Complete because of it, and now I'm reminded why I look up to you (and the other old timers here - no offense, geezers!). Thanks, Jeff!

I think this was generally a good idea. :-) I think the aspect of encouraging Microsoft to participate in a sensible way with the open source community is the best part of it. I could get extremely philosophical on this and type out about five paragraphs, but I'll just leave it at that. :-)

-Max

Jeff,

I agree with you wholeheartedly: the open source .NET community is not served very well by Microsoft. I'm glad you got them to match your contribution.

Thanks for putting your money where your mouth is!

-Esteban

Commentable!!!

Commendable!!!

rfunk and Mike Arthur:

So using Mono may have patent issues, but whether or not it does doesn't stop people writing open-source .Net software.

We seem to be talking cross purposes, confusing "writing open-source software" with "writing open-source software using only open-source tools and frameworks and operating systems." I was only talking about the former, i.e. writing a .Net program and allowing others to see the source code. There are no more patent issues with doing that than there are with writing a closed-source .Net program, or a program in any other language.

I guess the terms "open source" and "free software" are too vague to mean anything definite these days. Some apply more baggage/meaning to the terms than others, and "free" always has to be qualified with beer and/or speech. Perhaps new, more explicit phrases are needed, but I bet nobody could agree on them so we're stuck this way.

( Some people can't even agree that "hacker" has more than one perfectly valid and well-established (i.e. 20-30 years old) meaning because they want only their pet meaning to apply so that they can self-identify themselves using their pet word without worrying about other interpretations, apparently wanting to change English -- and the minds/memories of everyone who speak it -- instead of the word they choose to use. I suspect there would be the same problems substituting new phrases which clarify what people mean by "open source" and "free," with some refusing to use more clear labels because they belligerently refuse to acknowledge that the old ones are ambiguous (or that there could even *be* an alternative to their philosophy, it often seems). )

Woot, go Screwturn Wiki! I agree, its a great product - been using it recently, very impressed.

"That increasing sense of guilt over 'double dipping' was one of the reasons I felt compelled to quit."

Whaa--?? Isn't double-dipping the practice of getting paid by two entities for the same work, with neither entity knowing about such arrangement with the other?

Vertigo paid you for doing development, and your advertising paid you for eyeballs (and, by extension, interesting writing) -- different sets of work output. And I can only assume each of these revenue sources also knew about the other.

So how does that constitute guilt-inducing double-dipping?

"Out of the four software freedoms, freedom zero is probably the most important: The value of a program is in being able to run. Even if yo With .NET, freedom zero may be guaranteed today but what about in 20 years time? When there's no JIT, C# compiler or any other .NET tools, how are you going compile and run your source?"

There is no guarantee that any platform (or OS, or anything) today will be prevalent in 2028.

For others, Apple is the anti-thesis of Open in corporate philosophy. Despite their pretensions to the contrary, they are worse than Microsoft with their closed ecosystem. We can all build a legal computer that can run OS-X, right?

It is money for nothing. I am a win developer almost 20 years. Few years before I "found" Python and this was cultural shock: web services, web servers, desktop applications, easy GUIs, lightspeed development, all things that I tired waiting from .NET.

Inspiring

@Ivaylo:
> Few years before I "found" Python and this was cultural shock: web services, web servers, desktop applications, easy GUIs, lightspeed development, all things that I tired waiting from .NET.

You're mixin some things which shouldn't be mixed:
Phyton does exist for the .NET-Ecosystem, so nothing to complain here.

And I'm for sure you never seen .NET or used it really:
Serving or using web services, desktop applications, easy GUI, lightspeed development - all things that are found in .NET, and can be used as easy as never before. Phyton is nice, but not "the single language", which solves all problems or is factors better than C# or VB.NET. It's just another language, with some nice syntactical sugar - like some other modern languages, as C# 3.0 is.

No single language like Python solves all problems.

Take C

You might be forgiven for thinking you can solve all unix problems by being a C programmer, but this is simply not the case.

I've be a little more cautious about posting a blurred picture of your routing number on the intertubes...its not exactly secure. =)

http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php

Bravo.

I just hope they use the cash to upgrade their webserver so I can stop looking at the beautiful expanse of white pixels and find out how one more wiki is what the world needed most. ;)

Ms doesnt care about opensource? Look at the ad on the left hand side of the screen. Codeplex belongs to microsoft. I think wix is the first open source project by ms and the have been experimenting ever since. Microsoft contributes to a lot of the projects on codeplex too. For example the ajax toolkit is almost completely written by ms employees.

http://wix.sourceforge.net/

[ad] Use CodePlex to find open source software projects built by thousands of developers around the world.

I commend you for doing this Jeff. The only question I'd like to throw out is "why screwturn wiki?" Not that it's a bad project or anything. It just seems like an odd choice to me. There's a lot of opensource competition out there in the wiki arena, and I doubt anyone will be overtaking mediawiki any time soon. Just seems like there might be some other interesting projects out there that are more worthy of 10k.

A great gesture. I just hope the $10 000 will have enough benefit to be worth while.

dotnet problems
http://www.dotnetproblems.com

That's just great Jeff. All the best to screwturn and to you.

While we're on the subject of blurring the sensitive stuff, I would have blurred the signature, or taken the picture before signing it. Now bad bad guys know what it looks like. Maybe I'm paranoid.

Congratulations on raising and donating 5k to such a worthy project.

Way to go Jeff. I'll drink to your health this evening.

@rod that happened before. Seems that there are comments that are wanted, and some that are not wanted. If you would mention that something lieke MAME which was mentioned a few post before is not legal in most countrys the post will be deleted. If you put a one line "Bravo" or "Commentable" in this post it will stay here forever. You just don't have the freedom of speech here. The blog is owned by Jeff, so you must live with this drawback.

@atario hm.. if he is doing the blog in his worktime i would see a problem, if he would do it before or after, what the heck.

This is great. But I don't understand the concern over two sources of income. It's quite common.

@jeff davis
depends on the country were you are living. at our country there would be a problem if you would take a second job if you not have an explicit arrangement with your first entrepreneur. than you wuld pay more taxes for the second job and so on. Some posters do blogs while working. They didn't spend the time for the work they get paid for.

I noticed that on your spreadsheet, you have an "N" in the "Eligible?" column for ScrewTurn.

$5k is big money considering that it is coming from an individual. Congrats to ScrewTurn project. I should also think about donating my blog money to FOSS project.

Sweet! Now if only there were more people out there that are willing/want to help the community of programmers. We must all stick together if we are to advance the technology into something useful by everyone. Not just our consumers that use our products, but the other programmers that have to make the products.

great news !!!!!!