Ward Cunningham, one of Microsoft's high-profile hires, is leaving the Redmond software company to join the open-source tool group, The Eclipse Foundation.Microsoft 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. Cunningham's 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. Instead, Cunningham worked as an architect with the company's 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 Microsoft's Visual Studio tool suite.
"If we execute, we will, excuse the pun, Eclipse the Microsoft environment," Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse said in a recent interview with eWEEK. "Microsoft is worried about the passion of what open-source software."
Some Microsoft bloggers noted that Cunningham was leaving the company but failed to mention where he was going.
"I'm sad to say Ward Cunningham is leaving patterns & practices and Microsoft. Ward was an incredible mentor and friend during his stay here," posted Microsoft blogger "EdJez."
Microsoft officials did not respond to a request for more details on Cunningham's departure.
Read the full story on Microsoft Watch: Father of Wiki Quits Microsoft; Moves to Open-Source Foundation
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