Full disclosure is important

In last few months I started playing with idea that Microsoft products might be worth checking out again. The last time I used their stuff was in Windows 2000 era. After that it was just Linux and then with years more and more OS X until I also stopped bothering with Linux.

This effectively means that my perception of their stuff and experience is almost over a decade old. While we’re always happy to bash the people that haven’t tried alternatives like Linux and are dismissing open source as a viable business opportunity, I think we should be equally critical of our own insight.

In this regard two interesting things happened:

• I started wondering loudly if we should rethink some of our open source strategies in favor of new offerings from Microsoft. Maybe their featureset can actually battle the religion of open source?
• Microsoft Slovenia for some reason decided to reach out to me and enabled me to go to MIX’09.

The combined process of both things made a sell-out at the end of the day. Probably some stronger words were also used in the process. At least this is how it was perceived by the part of the community.

Lesson learned

Transparency and full disclosure are important when you’re trying to play an active role in community. While nobody says anything about my job @zemanta or things I say about blogging, I haven’t earned my reputation in regards to Microsoft related technology and it makes me suspicous.

When someone as big as Microsoft shows you some attention it’s important to talk to them what this actually means so it’s easier to do a full disclosure about your affiliation.

Oh .. the full disclosure

Right now there’s nothing much, they sponsored MIX’09 conference ticket and we’ve had some great talks about possible cooperation on a number of different projects. Hopefuly I’ll be able to bring some of their expertise and insight to the community with time, but everything is very much in brainstorming phase.

Now stop bashing and help me learn some new things! 🙂