The “Break it Down” Blog

Chris Hunkele sent over a link from TechCrunch that discusses the new buzz-bunny from Scoble… I’ll call it “Microsoft Forge”… or “Microsoft Superhero”… or something.

The rumor is that on February 27th Microsoft is releasing a new technology/platform to the open source community. The teaser page is:

http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/heroes/default.mspx

What we do know so far is:

• It’s probably based on Silverlight, unless they are shit-canning that as fast as Vista?
• It uses braces in it’s syntax
• Scoble quoted to TC that it couldn’t have been released as a startup company technology because VCs wouldn’t fund it… which means it’s a library/platform

And most importantly:

• Microsoft has never shied away from making money and down plays Open Source every chance they get… whatever they are releasing wasn’t worth it to them to keep as their own
• Given Microsoft’s inability to execute… anything well? (Vista, Xbox 360, Zune) I’m going to guess there is going to be some fucked up clause in the EULA and we shouldn’t expect an Apache 2.0 compliant platform here… or it has some proprietary binding that becomes a big cloud of “are we fucked?” questions, just like .NET/Mono.

Am I jumping the gun here? You bet… do I have 20 years of historical behavior to guess from? Absolutely!