Howdy folks, Quick e-mail at 34,000ft (aren't wifi-enabled flights great?) to mention a new initiative that's been started by Microsoft called CoApp (Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform). The aim is simple: make open source software rock on Windows ;-) It's probably easiest to think of it as a Microsoft-endorsed-but-community-run open source distribution for Windows, akin to all the various package managers for Linux distributions and ports/packages for the *BSDs. There are specific user and developer experiences we'll be addressing -- like making it easy to install and use open source software, or use it within your own project (open source or not). CoApp will affect Python in one of two ways. Once there's a clear-cut specification for open source projects to follow, Python can either decide to follow it, or not. The same applies to all open source packages, actually. For those that follow it, great! If not, no problem -- the plan is to shallow-fork such projects via launchpad and the CoApp community will take responsibility for getting releases of open source projects into CoApp shape. It's in its infancy at the moment -- it took the chap (Garrett Serack) who's spearheading it at Microsoft about six months to get it all signed off by the lawyers and platform/server VPs. So, for those of you out there who are Windows-inclined, now's a perfect time to get involved to help shape the direction of CoApp going forward. The website/wiki is http://coapp.org/ and the launchpad project site is http://launchpad.net/coapp (which is where the mailing list is hosted). We're actually having a 'CoApp Development Summit' tomorrow and Friday in Seattle (that Microsoft's graciously sponsored). The event will be accessible via Live Meeting for those that are interested: http://coapp.org/Project_Planning/CoApp_Design_and_Development_Summit Regards, Trent.