Microsoft Corp. has lost one of its high-profile hires to an open-source consortium.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, announced on Monday that Ward Cunningham is leaving Microsoft to join the staff of the open-source tool consortium. Cunninghams new title is Director of Committer Community Development.
Cunningham, the father of the Wiki concept, joined Microsoft about two years ago. At Microsoft, he was not involved directly in social-networking-software development.
/zimages/6/28571.gifClick hereto read more about Eclipse and its rivalry with Microsofts Visual Studio.
Instead, Cunningham worked as an architect with the companys Patterns & Practices Team. Before joining Microsoft, Cunningham already had dabbled in all kinds of programming, including object-oriented-, extreme- and agile-programming ventures.
According to his profile on Wikipedia, “Cunningham is also well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming: in particular, the use of pattern languages and CRC cards.”
The Eclipse Foundation is the group charged with promoting Eclipse, an open-source platform for tool integration built by a community of tool providers.
Members of the foundation include BEA, Borland, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SAP and SuSE, among others.
The Eclipse platform competes head-to-head with Microsofts Visual Studio tool suite.
/zimages/6/28571.gifRead the full story on Microsoft Watch:Father of Wiki Quits Microsoft; Moves to Open-Source Foundation
/zimages/6/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms for Microsoft and Windows news, views and analysis.