The process was surprisingly close to "hey could you do this" followed by "that would be tricky, let me see what I can do" followed by "it's up on GitHub." Many kudos to Scott Hanselman and others at Microsoft for making this happen (and happen quickly) in response to foone's request.

Yes, that’s what happened. They’ve been asking for a while, and I’ve tried a couple of times. But their last tweet got pretty good pick up, so I made another run at it. I asked the right Vice Presidents, found the right people to agree to the new license, retrieve the source from our company archivist, found two developers who worked on the actual project, and then worked with the Microsoft open source office to finalize everything, then released it. It took just about a month. I like doing things that people don’t think are possible. It’s literally as simple as that.

> retrieve the source from our company archivist

Is this position hiring? :D

(New career goals: become high up enough in the company that I can decree that the open-source office and company archivist positions get merged into the same team.)

It is also the person that has to hand repair corrupted Visual Source Safe databases with a hex editor.

Huh I stand corrected. Good news, either way :)