How Software Is Built - Open Source and Closed Source

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How is software built in the real world? How are open source and closed source development projects different? How are they the same? How do companies leverage different development styles and ecosystems?

Chances are these are questions that come up in a lot of classrooms. I know they come up in professional development shops all the time. So where does one look for answers? Well one possible place is a new blog called How Software Is Built.

The blog is sponsored by Microsoft but includes interviews with people from a wide range of development organizations and companies. Open source, closed source and organizations that use a mix are included. There are a bunch of interviews from both sides of the open source/closed source side of the world posted already including:

  • Ryan Waite, Group Program Manager for High-Performance Computing at Microsoft.
  • Mark Gross,  Engineer Open Source Technology center Intel Corporation
  • Shawn Burke, Director, Microsoft’s .NET Developer Platform group
  • Stormy Peters, Director Community and Partner Programs OpenLogic
  • Michael Howard, Senior Security Program manager at Microsoft
  • Phil Costa, Director of Product Management for Flex and ColdFusion at Adobe
  • Marc Miller, Open Source Software Evangelist in the AMD Developer Outreach Organization
  • Patrick Hogan, NASA World Wind
  • Jay Pipes, North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL
  • John McCreesh - Marketing Program Lead – OpenOffice
  • James Reinders - Chief Evangelist - Software Products Division - Intel

This is one to bookmark or subscribe to as it promises to be an interesting source of real information to fuel debate, discussion and mutual learning and understanding.

BTW here are a few more links regarding Microsoft's ongoing dialoge with the open source community:

  • Port 25 – Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft (with blog posts by members of Microsoft's Open Source lab)
  • Codeplex – Microsoft’s open source project hosting site (I linked to one of the education related projects there last week.)
  • Shared Source – Microsoft’s set of programs for sharing source code with customers, partners, governments, researchers, etc.
  • John Lam’s Blog – John is a Microsoft blogger who blogs on IronRuby, Dynamic Language Runtime, Silverlight, and related projects. (IronRuby was released recently)
  • Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum –  Microsoft Partner Program through with offers for OSS ISVs