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It's great to hear that VsVim is finally accepting contributions from outside of Microsoft.

During my internship at Microsoft last summer, there was one day where the interns in STB got into groups of about 5 and presented on topics of strategic importance to Microsoft. My group presented on how Microsoft could better embrace open source, and during my part of the presentation I focused heavily on how many of Microsoft's "OSS" projects don't accept outside contributions.

I used VsVim to showcase how Microsoft was doing open source wrong. It was a great example, because Jared Parsons seemed to be doing everything he could to be a good OSS citizen and reach out to those who typically use an OSS stack (by putting his project on github instead of codeplex for example), but he had to turn down contributors outside of Microsoft as a matter of policy. I also didn't suspect that Microsoft would be repurposing a Vim emulator plugin written in F# for any of its closed source projects, so it didn't make sense to stop outsiders from contributing out of fear of losing complete ownership of the codebase.

Several high-level execs in STB including Satya Nadella were there, so I would like to believe that my presentation played some small part in Microsoft now allowing outside contributions to VsVim. A discussion of VsVim's contribution policy ate up a lot of the question and answer session after my group's presentation, so it was pretty clear that I wasn't the only there who thought it was messed up.