A new Microsoft blog is giving employees a way to tell their stories about taking products to open source. It’s called Microsoft Open Source Stories, of course.

“We’re enabling teams to tell their ‘open source journey’ stories at Microsoft using our new Medium publication,” Microsoft’s Dmitry Lyalin told me. “So far, three stories are live … We hope to tell over 20 stories through this process as we have had a lot of great stuff hidden behind the firewall.”

The three stories available so far are:

How Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler in C# and made it open source

“Roslyn is the codename-that-stuck for the open-source compiler for C# and Visual Basic.NET. Here’s how it started in the deepest darkness of last decade’s corporate Microsoft, and became an open source, cross-platform, public language engine for all things C# (and VB).”

Building an Open Source .NET Foundation

“It was April, 3rd 2014 when Anders Hejlsberg, father of the C# language, got on stage during the keynote at the Build conference in San Francisco and released the .NET Compiler Platform (‘Roslyn’) as open source and made the first pull request. That same keynote, Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud & Enterprise group and one of the original creators of the ASP.NET web stack, announced the creation of the .NET Foundation. This was a pivotal point in .NET’s open source journey which spawned the avalanche of releasing software as open source at Microsoft. This is the story of the .NET Foundation.”

Python at Microsoft: flying under the radar

“Python is an important piece of Microsoft’s future in the cloud, being one of the essential languages for services and teams to support, as well as the most popular choice for the rapidly growing field of data science and analytics both inside and outside of the company. But Python hasn’t always had such a prestigious position around Microsoft.”

Great reading! I can’t wait to see more.