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The Microsoftie Who Embraced the Dark Side (Open Source)

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 4 comments
Datamation; By Keith Curtis 		Mail this story
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Keith Curtis spent years as a Microsoft programmer. Then he quit and became deeply enthusiastic about source development. This is his story..."A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."

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Comments (4)

tuxchick ·
What an odd article. He doesn't sound very much like an ex-Microsoftie, but still misses being part of the Borg. Well, deprogramming does take time.
tracyanne ·
I'e been chatting to him by email, seems like a top bloke to me.
number6x ·
Microsoft really did try to recruit the best and the brightest.

There are a lot of very good coders there, but many have left over the years.
keithcu ·
Hi all!

I miss the camaraderie, and some of the very great people I had a chance to work with. It never felt like a big company to me -- I worked in groups of 20-80, and we were felt like our own company, except for during the company meeting and the Christmas parties. ;-)

Also it was my first job, so I went from green as grass to understanding computers and software quite a bit better. I will always have fond memories of that decade.

I think MS is in very deep trouble, but my personal experiences are generally postiive. It is complicated, like all relationships ;-)



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