David Ornstein (and Microsoft) have taken the FlexWiki project up a notch and moved it to SourceForge, making it available under the Common Public License. C|Net News.com and the rest of the tech press is making a big deal out of the open-source aspect of the news, but to me the more interesting aspect of the story is David's original intent for doing FlexWiki in the first place. He sees it as an open collaboration tool for workgroups -- his own experiment in team collaboration. Cool idea.
His vision for implementing wikis in a software development environment is perhaps a bit idealistic, but it certainly applies to almost any sort of group developing products or services. After my days in the engineering trenches, I think the potential for a wiki-based knowledge base for every aspect of the product development process is exciting. The fact that Microsoft took FlexWiki under its wing tells me they're serious about improving the collaboration process. After all, they could have simply ignored it in favor of their existing collaboration tools -- but they didn't.
There are lots of collaboration products out there, and each have their unique strengths and weaknesses. But to me, the more general the intended audience, the harder it is for the tool to match well with the unique aspects of the individual customer applications (software development, engineering, architecture, etc.). Likewise, tools developed for specific markets are structured so closely to those disciplines that they are usually impractical for any other need. Although wikis certainly have their shortcomings, they have none of the boundaries of the market-specific tools, and can therefore be as structured as each individual customer markets necessitate.
It will be interesting to see if and how wiki-like features eventually find their way into Microsoft products like SharePoint or Exchange.