The new foundations Board of Directors has some influential players in the OSS realm. One of the directors is Miguel de Icaza, creator of GNOME and currently the project leader in both Mono and Moonlight. Miguel has his own enlightening comments on the new foundation. Another member of the board is Shaun Walker, the original creator of the DotNetNuke project, an incredibly popular OSS web platform.

The goal of the foundation is to bring commercial and OSS communities closer together (e.g. get commercial developers working in OSS projects). The Advisory Panel has some interesting members including Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, and Larry Augustin. Larry is now CEO of SugarCRM, a popular non-microsoft based OSS web platform. Hanselman also shares some insights into the new foundation.

It’s great to see Microsoft attempting to bridge the gap that exists between developers of OSS and commercial software, but only time will tell if this investment pays off. Software will continue to get better, especially with the OSS community involvement that Microsoft is slowly embracing.