Microsoft P&P is going on a "real" open source journey with its CQRS Journey project [Insert "Don't stop believing" song clip here...]

Grigori Melnik: Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond - Microsoft's CQRS Journey project to take community contributions

"Almost 50 years ago, Marshall McLuhan coined and popularized the notion of a global village. And as a common adage goes, it takes a village to raise a child: our child is the CQRS Journey project. As many of you know, we’ve positioned the CQRS guidance project as a learning journey. We’ve formed a stellar advisory board and performed some public consultation that helped us scope the project initially. While this is good news, we recognize that for this project to be successful, we need to be not only open and transparent, but we also need to collaborate with the community (in its way a global village) more closely. That’s why I am extremely happy and proud to announce that for the first time in the history of the Microsoft patterns & practices team, the following: In the true spirit of open source, we will be taking community contributions on the CQRS Journey project. This means:

• The written guidance and the sample code will be developed in the open and with community involvement.
• We, Microsoft patterns & practices team, will review and accept contributions that meet our guidelines.
• The final deliverable will have an open source license (Apache 2.0).

The project will be hosted on GitHub. We will publish the contribution guidelines soon.

In the meantime, check out our company-wide openness initiative and brace yourself for a ride! ..."

Project "a CQRS Journey"

Who

The Microsoft patterns & practices team is a group of engineers (developers, testers, program managers), designers, and technical writers who produce guidance to help the larger community build solutions. With this project, we hope to provide you with a map that will help you to find your own way with the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and Event Sourcing (ES) patterns and related techniques.

What

There will be two, closely related, deliverables from this project: the source code for a complete, working reference implementation (an end-to-end sample app) that illustrates the key concepts, patterns, and approaches related to CQRS & ES, and a written guide to accompany the code, provide explanations, context, and references to other relevant material.

The reference implementation will be a conference management system that you will be able to easily deploy and run in your own environment. This will enable you to explore and experiment with a realistic application built following a CQRS-based approach.

Principles

• This project values open, standards-based development
• We value the great work already available from others and intend to thank existing thought-leaders through attribution
• This work should happen in the open so everyone is able to follow along
• We would like to help foster a community of practice and build consensus within the community
• This project represents a conversation not a dictation
• We would like to meet the community where it is - using what it’s using
• The guidance should be based on the best thinking available but also the scenarios customers care about

..."

Given all the recent "Open Source" discussions I found this move by Microsoft P&P interesting. What part? That got the legal/corporate/Big Co/etc okay to take contributions. They've released tons of source, under a number of OSS licenses, before. Now in taking contributions will this help turn down a little of the Microsoft and OSS noise? Or just turn it up to 11?