Pete Brown

Yes, Windows is normally closed-source. I and many others are changing that for pieces that we can. But there is a LOT of proper open source throughout the rest of the company (including contributions to many other open source projects). There have been many changes in the company over the past decades, but for sure, most of Windows is and will remain closed source. Craig, thanks for the shout, and thanks for helping to make the MIDI Association what it is today. Theo, thanks for joining the MIDI Association Pete

Ok. It appears you didn't actually read anything but just made some assumptions and commented. In the interest of clearing things up, here's some summary info: The MIDI 2.0 specification is at MIDI.org. First paragraph of the blog post. Anyone can implement the spec. It's not controlled by any one company. The MIDI Association is a standards body, similar to USB-IF, W3C, etc. The Linux implementation of the spec is by the ALSA folks (primarily Takashi Iwai) The Android implementation of the spec is by Google and may eventually include some ALSA work. The macOS implementation is by Apple and is closed source. The Windows implementation is by Microsoft, and is open source so that it can grow over time, be seen and debugged (if appropriate) by others, let others learn from it, etc. The repo isn't sample code. It's our Windows MIDI 2.0 and updated MIDI 1.0 stack. "Dependencies that are not actually there". See "how open is this project, really" in the blog post. I address that specific point. "the code isn't in a certain style". Not sure what you mean by that. "run Linux under Windows but only using a MS compiled kernel". You're talking about WSL2, which has nothing to do with MIDI or this repo or my team. Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/wsl/compare-versions WSL also doesn't prevent you from using another kernel as a regular VM, or dual-booting. It's an affordance for developers who want to run some Linux workloads and dev tools on Windows as part of their day-to-day work. But again, nothing to do with this discussion. Anyway, if you're determined to only see negative in this, there's nothing I can do about that. But I encourage you to have an informed opinion, not just make assumptions. Pete

Yes. You overlooked the linked blog post and the actual code in the repo. Only the client tools (currently the settings app and its related plugins) are C#. The blog post has a big table in the middle which calls out the language and dev approach for each component in the project. Most of it is C++. But, FWIW, C# and .NET run on all the major operating systems anyway, and are controlled by the .NET foundation. They have no real ties to Windows. In fact, they removed the Windows-specific things like WinRT projection support several versions back because they are much more interested in x-plat support. So even if the project were all C#, that wouldn't cause "windozefication", so I'm still curious what you were concerned about there. I'm assuming you were just looking to poke at Microsoft here, which makes me sad, because we're really trying to do the right things with this project. Pete

I found this post confusing. Did you look at the post referenced in this thread? There were a few contributions by others, but they were towards prototypes of technology in unreleased specifications, so had to be removed before the repo became public. For the general public: the repo opened just this week. Of *course* there are no other external contributions. The blog post and repo also explain why it is open source. What "windozefication" are you concerned about? FWIW, I brought the Linux/ALSA folks into the MIDI Association and also gave them access to my repo very early on. I also requested the creation of an OS working group, chaired by someone other than me, to ensure that Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, and Linux all do things in a similar way. There's a specification. The blog post links to it and calls it out. Microsoft doesn't control the specification, but we contributed to it, as did many others. The MIDI Association is made up of member companies including all the major operating systems, device manufacturers, and more. Each company, no matter what they pay in dues, has a single vote. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on the new Windows MIDI Services, and am the Chair of the Executive Board at the MIDI Association. Pete PS: Hi Craig!