CoApp Summit May 2010

As you may or may not know, I attended the CoApp Design & Development Summit in Bellevue, Washington. Garrett Serack, the Microsoft project lead saw fit to call upon the skill set of myself and a dozen professional developers from around the world to discuss and design what it will take to bring Open Source Software to Windows.

It wasn't all fun and games, although I hardly suffered throughout.

Indeed we had a productive conversation about the current situation, and what we, as a global community of developers can do to have the enormous mountain of open source software build, work and fit into the Windows Universe.

I was astonished by the variety of perspectives at the discussion. We had PERL, Python and PHP committers along with library developers, GUI specialists, Driver writers, web people, and systems developers from a wide variety of specialties including myself with my platform porting focus.

And what was great was that we came to a common ground on where to go from here.

The greatest feat that was accomplished over the weekend has been the creation of a plan that will give everyone at the table at least a couple years of work and an entirely new world of software installation on windows.

For more information about CoApp, please visit CoApp.org