Open Source at Microsoft? You bet.
As Scoble points out, sometimes it takes a couple of employees like Stephen Walli and Rob Mensching to “break the rules. Get stuff done. Take on a culture. Change the world.”
If you had your choice, what one product do you think the Tablet team should make Open Source? Keep in mind, it probably should be something that doesn’t generate revenue directly and in addition is something that the Tabosphere [sorry for the new word 🙂 ] could enhance and grow with. What do you think? The TIP? Journal?
Hmm, I think they should add standard, direct SVG export support to Journal and OneNote and Stickies (!)… That would be as effective as open sourcing them in many ways (and easier) of course we know they’ll never do it.
As I think I’ve acquired the role of MS pundit when I commment here, I think I read a quote somewhere in which BillG said something to MS staff to the effect of– adopt XML but not standards or don’t follow other people’s standards, microsoft makes standards. Anyway too vague to do any good. But it makes it difficult to do a lot of the fun things with ink. The whole Journal Viewer app is totally and utterly redundant. SVG is a standard, use it!!
OTOH, this open source Journal, Gournal (http://www.adebenham.com/gournal/) is very nice having had the opportunity to try it recently. Written in GTK2-perl it is crossplatform too so it is theoretically possible to bring it to windows if one can get the libraries installed. I’m idly considering trying that. OneNote-esque Collaboration, fast, clean, and with SVG output.
It really shows that a thick ink SDK isn’t totally necessary to do something like standard notetaking well, SVG canvasses will do very well. And these are evidently being worked on fairly fervently by several active projects.
I’d imagine this would be a solid base for an Open ink-to-text engine too. It does neat things that show that each stroke is just independant as Ink–highlight when delete cursor is over them, clear them stroke by stroke, etc.