Jeff Wilcox is the Director of Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) and part of the Developer Division. Jeff lives in Seattle, Washington, USA. [ my public key: https://keybase.io/jeffwilcox; my proof: https://keybase.io/jeffwilcox/sigs/EKX7h7XL38T-MeBwvRMDjp5IaMa6YVUWGKebNUBxed4 ]
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Love it - was walking with a friend near Martin Place they pointed out the "Reflection" sculpture that was in the movie during the red dress training exercise.
I think it's a mix. We're learning a bit each time. I'm bummed in the rush to get this finally published we made a few errors. We first found what looked like the source back in September last year.
Having the source on GitHub feels like a nice way for some people to peek through it... but there's clear compromise between archival and sharing some source.
The binaries for the multi-tasking bits did come from an external source; however, the source code is from our corp source code archives team. Even that was a bit less formal back then...
The percentage structure - while I want to agree with you, we can then look to things like ... the struggle now of delivery food percentages and tipping. If I order a $15 pizza and tip $3, I'm tipping 20%, but that is seen as "cheap" for a tip in 2023... yet if I order a $4,000 bottle of wine at dinner, and tip 20%, the staff will enjoy an $800+ tip for that meal. Worth 20% to pop the cork, really?
Thanks for the suggestion. We do have a "MicrosoftArchive" organization that we could consider transferring this sort of thing to...
As far as games, and the broader collection of earlier closed source applications: it's incredibly difficult to clear rights if there's third-party intellectual property that was written without the intention of being open, or licensed content, etc. It also takes a bit of an army to clean/review code and comments to get them ready.
[Source: I run our open source office... we help advise internally, but aren't staffed to do nostalgia open sourcing and so need to partner with people and teams who can help]
Since this article was published, Washington State finally has a right-to-charge law, too, with the passing of HB 1793 - 2021-22, hopefully making things mildly better in Seattle.
While the article claims there is no money to be made in EV charging to incentivize and align with building owners, there's plenty of similar "amenities" that easily can help differentiate a "luxury" apartment building, hopefully they become more common.
Some of us have calculated it... and it is frightening! I have an Excel sheet of all the cars I've ever purchased or leased, and the cost per mile of them, and it is staggering. Thankful to have enjoyed some fun cars, I cannot imagine just how much of this economy is powered solely by this car dependency we have in the US.
I've also estimated my cost to commute to my tech job in the suburbs (thankfully full-time remote now), and it was staggering how much that was including insurance, maintenance, tolls, electricity, etc., compared to free options/transit/corporate bus/remote work/my daily mortgage cost.
With the exception of a specific engineers who we checked with, our process includes masking developer aliases, names, etc. It does seem that version control was a lot more basic back then. We're seeing comments on Twitter that it's likely this was under the SLM system, which includes holding an exclusive lock on specific files. (Some history here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...)
I feel like it's close... but it's pretty hard to take engineers off of modern day projects to go figure out what's needed to make an almost 30-year old set of source code to build. I imagine some folks will get this building soon that are smarter than we are!
The long tail of box office receipts, especially internationally, is always interesting, as are licensing deals. Maybe they find a way to protect those with other subsidiaries.
Don't get me started on my new Model Y that doesn't have the game controller-only games... or my Model S that doesn't let me actually play games in the back. Wait, it's a car, I'll be fine.