Archer Web Solutions - Hit the target every time!

The latest news on the Joomla front is that Microsoft has signed the contributor license for Joomla, allowing its employees to contribute to the code base of this Open Source, widely-used and PHP-based content management system. 

Now, I try not to be a blind devotee of the open source movement, and I'm not anti-corporate, but there's something about this that gives me the heeby-geebies. On one hand, Microsoft programmers are some of the best in the world (seriously, no jokes about Windows), and for the mothership to allow for open source contribution on the company dime, this is a new page in the Redmond book. On the other hand, perhaps they are trying to insinuate themselves into the second largest PHP program in the world just so they can try to steer the ship from within. 

We've seen corporate involvement with open source projects before (such as Oracle and IBM with Linux), and there are pros and cons to the arrangement. But, at the end of the day, programmers have to get paid, and to have some paid resources dedicated to making the Joomla stack run more smoothly is never a bad thing, overall. 

Let's just hope they don't try to insert any code that isn't needed, or wanted. I guess that's what the community board is for. Still, they must smell money in the water somewhere, or they'd be ignoring the opportunity.

This choice won't affect our decision to use Joomla as our primary CMS platform, however I will be keeping an eye on the developments from Washington state.