Creator of 'wiki' alters course, exits Microsoft

The creator of the wiki, a kind of Web site built and maintained by anyone wanting to participate, has left Microsoft Corp. after two years for a position more philosophically aligned with his invention.

On Friday, Ward Cunningham left the company to join The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit organization in Ottawa, Ontario, that develops open-source software -- software collaborated on by many and then given away or sold at low cost.


	Cunningham

Monday was Cunningham's first day as the foundation's director of Committer Community Development, reporting to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich.

Cunningham has a history of innovation in community-oriented computing. He is the highly regarded inventor of the wiki, a type of Web site that lets visitors create, read, edit, add to and reorganize the site's contents. The best known example is the Wikipedia, a community-written online encyclopedia that claims to have 770,000 English-language articles.

Cunningham is charged with helping to expand the number of developers -- now standing at about 540 -- who have committed to jointly writing and polishing the foundation's software.

That software, referred to as development tools, is used by corporate or solo programmers to create applications, which perform useful work.

For example, a tool called a compiler could help a developer write a word processor application.

Those applications, which may lawfully be given away or sold, can run on a wide variety of operating systems, most of which compete with Microsoft's Windows. They include Unix and Linux, though some also run on Windows.

Founded as a consortium by IBM in 2001, the foundation became a not-for-profit corporation in February 2004. It has more than 50 member companies, including major players such as Borland, IBM, Rational Software and Red Hat, an original popularizer of Linux.

"We're very happy to have Ward join the staff, and we think he'll be a big help in growing the overall community at Eclipse," Milinkovich said in an interview Tuesday.

"The objective is to get people passionate about supporting the Eclipse projects."

"Passion" is also a word heard often at Microsoft.

There, Cunningham had worked as an architect in the Patterns and Practices division.

But at Microsoft, the passion is mainly to get developers to adopt Microsoft's own tools, such as its .NET and Visual Studio suite, to write PC programs that run on Windows.

In a famous video circulated on the Internet, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer works himself into a sweat over the importance of this mission, rhythmically chanting, "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" until he is hoarse.

Milinkovich said supporters of the Eclipse Foundation are essentially rivals to Microsoft.

Cunningham, who couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday, probably will work from his home near Portland, Milinkovich said.

Like all companies, Microsoft has lost key employees over the years. Most recently, it lost China research director Kai-Fu Lee to Google Inc.

But generally, its employees don't move from one ideological pole to the other -- from making software that's for sale and is specifically designed to run on only one operating system to making software that's free and runs on a variety of operating systems -- according to Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service newsletter.

"That kind of move is pretty unusual," he said.

At least one other executive has made a similar move. Cornelius Willis left after 10 years at Microsoft to become vice president of sales and marketing for Seattle's SourceLabs Inc. [Note: Willis' last name has been corrected in the online version of this article]

But Anderson noted there's a growing momentum behind open source, especially in South America, Russia and China -- "maybe everywhere but North America and Europe," he said.

"Open source's successes are numerous. I think it must look pretty sexy to a programmer."

P-I reporter Dan Richman can be reached at 206-448-8032 or danrichman@seattlepi.com. P-I reporter John Cook contributed to this report.

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