13 ms·

Microsoft Joins the Eclipse Foundation

204 points by dstaheli 11y ago

junto 11y ago
I swear I just saw a pig flying across the sky. What is going on in Microsoft? Have they finally seen the light? First today comes SQL Server on Linux and now this. It makes a refreshing change. Long may it continue.
- nwah1 11y ago
  First SQL Server on Linux? More like a continuing strategy going back for years, since they began opening up bits of the .NET framework, compiler, ASP.NET and MVC, etc etc. Now the great majority of the .NET development stack is completely open, aside from Visual Studio itself. But there's always Visual Studio Code, the lightweight, open source alternative. Runs on linux too.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  This shift occurred some time back when MS started the process of open-sourcing .NET and porting it to Linux.
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  Where do you want to go today? Open source, apparently.
- qihqi 11y ago
  MS realized that Windows as a platform is not attractive to developers. So it is desperately to win those developers back. On the consumer land, Windows is quite happy being the de-facto platform OS, so it doesn't bother to release anything in other OS (DirectX, Office, just killed Skype in linux etc).
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > so it doesn't bother to release anything in other OS (DirectX, Office, just killed Skype in linux etc). Office is available on other platforms, and they've been adding new platforms in the last couple of years. Currently supports: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Mac, and PC. Not including their in-browser suite which runs on Chromebooks and your smart fridge. They also haven't killed Skype for Linux. Skype for Linux was terrible before Microsoft purchased Skype. If anything Skype for Linux hasn't been improved while the Skype for Windows client has become progressively worse.
- usrusr 11y ago
  Before Linux made the GNU development model something that was actually being used, when people thought of openness in computing they usually thought of "100% IBM compatible", running a Microsoft OS. The contrast between the "open" world of PC clones and the isolated islands of hardware makers that supplied their own operating system was as alive and visible back then as the contrast between FOSS and MS is now. Seen this way, the slow transformation from lock-in to charm-in that we observe today is more a return to the roots than a dissolution of identity for Microsoft.
staticelf 11y ago
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they really take their words into action nowadays. Seems like there is at least one news item per week. They have been really active in the open source space recently. Personally, I love this. Have recently been learning ASP.NET and started using Azure simply because I find it to be one of the easiest frameworks and platforms to iterate quickly on. I love the new Microsoft, I hope this continues. It feels like they have had a lot of brilliant people previously held back by rules and constraints which are now removed.
- cm2187 11y ago
  Reading it, it doesn't seem to be a completely altruistic policy. The way I read this blog post is "we are going to contribute to Eclipse to ensure that you can deploy your projects well on Azure". I'm not saying it's bad. But it's not a "MSFT open sources xxx" headline either.
  - staticelf 11y ago
    Of course it's in their interest to do this, but that's always the case when it comes to company sponsored open source? It's not like they're going to throw money on something that they believe never will benefit them in any way. This is completely fine and how it should be.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  They're doing this for themselves. If MS don't invest in open source, they'll be left behind. It's a nice reminder how important OSS has become.
  - staticelf 11y ago
    Can you mention one company sponsored open source investment that isn't based in self-interest? I don't think that is relevant, but of course open source is important and probably will be in the future as well.
    - 11y ago
akerro 11y ago
Do you remember the times MS tried to kill Java by adding new features to Java? Every time they "contribute to open-source" I trust them less and less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish...
- untog 11y ago
  Yes, we all remember Embrace, extend and extinguish. Even people who weren't around then. Because it gets brought up in every single Hacker News thread about Microsoft. At this point I really don't think it's useful to cite a Microsoft strategy from the mid 1990s. It's clear at even a cursory glance that their approach has changed dramatically.
  - yAnonymous 11y ago
    I didn't know about it and I'm glad it was brought up.
  - bragh 11y ago
    No, it gets brought up because the after effects of that philosophy are still felt even today.
    - Delmania 11y ago
      Got a few examples to bring up? Because I'm not seeing how Java suffered. If anything, Oracle is a bigger threat to Java than MS.
      - bragh 11y ago
        2 examples that affect me every week when serving SMB clients: - old IE installs - PDF printing functionality not included in older versions of Office and Windows More experienced people/sysadmins can probably bring out lot more issues. And I totally agree with you that Java didn't suffer in the end, but how many lawyer hours were spent on stuff that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place?
Delmania 11y ago
Well, this is certainly an interesting development, although not entirely unexpected, given that JetBrains is developing Project Rider. It would definitely be interesting to develop a Java application in Visual Studio.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
optforfon 11y ago
I feel like I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. I swear Microsoft's business model was to bring people in to their ecosystem and then charge them for what is hopefully a superior development experience. Is there a new business model? How do they lock people in and squeeze them for money? Is their cloud solution radically different from the competition that they can put all their eggs in that basket? What's the big picture plan? Or is the new CEO just going rambo and pandering to DIY geeks who want everything for free ? (myself included!) I feel like there has to be some parallel universe blog where these press releases explain what they're doing to investors beyond "we're going to take your money, and we're going to make things with it. And then give it away for free! Please give us more money" Like awesome dude... but what the hell is going on?
- ericcholis 11y ago
  I think it's about capturing new marketshare or previously lost marketshare. There's a large group of developers and their associated companies that were never likely to hop on the MS toolchain. In many ways MS == .NET for years. Now, it's more agnostic with Azure and even Visual Studio Code. So, marketshare and marketing.
- Delmania 11y ago
  TL;DR: Azure. What's going on in a new strategy. Microsoft wants people building applications in Azure. They want people using ASP.NET technologies. Given that Azure competes with AWS and Google Compute; that ASP.NET and C# compete with Elixir/Phoenix, Clojure, Scala, Koitlin, etc, there is absolutely no way they can maintain any form of lockin. Even in the conservative companies, they compete with Java. The pitch to the investors is that by opening up their toolset, it gets more people on their cloud services and boosts recurring revenue. Which is what everyone else is doing.
  - optforfon 11y ago
    So they've decide that the business model of the past two decades is doomed? Are investors onboard with that? Sounds like some serious downsizing is coming to come up in the next 5 years... We might be looking back at this CEO with incredulity in 10 years when MSFT is struggling to keep the lights on ("they did what?! They just gave away all their products for free??")
grandalf 11y ago
Microsoft is finally realizing that Open Source is not an opposing ideology but an alternative kind of business contract (which happens to lend itself to services).
Yhippa 11y ago
Argh. Was hoping to hear about C# integration not Azure hooks.
TheHappyRock 11y ago
I was really thinking the announcement was going to be Visual Studio in eclipse............long shot I know.
ethomson 11y ago
Interesting. I was part of the original "Team Explorer Everywhere" team that built their Eclipse plug-in for TFS and had originally championed this as a good idea. But really, I'm not sure that I'm enthused about this news. Certainly this is good community building, but I've found the Eclipse Foundation to be so ineffective that I'm not sure what purpose this actually serves except to send out a press release. My team was initially acquired; we were originally a small company in a cornfield in Illinois called Teamprise, where we built the original TFS plug-in for Eclipse. At the time, we were Eclipse Foundation members and reasonably happy about it. Certainly it was nice to give back (in terms of membership fees) to a project that we were a part of and took advantage of. And the Foundation has a few really solid employees and it was nice to talk to them about tech stuff. But our larger goal in joining the Eclipse Foundation was largely unmet, which was to actually partner. For example: we hoped to bring in a contractor who could occasionally tackle some bugs in Eclipse on AIX which ultimately affected our customers. We were a tiny company and going deep on some weird problem that only affected the Motif AIX build was not particularly rewarding. So we hoped to engage the Foundation to help us out here: we would pay this contractor if they could help us find them. But we were rebuffed in a manner that I found rather off-putting. Despite this, after we became part of Microsoft I still pushed for us to join the Eclipse Foundation. I stopped pushing when Microsoft had a booth at Eclipse Con one year and a member of the Foundation (apropos nothing) went on a nice, long rant about Microsoft. I don't think it's particularly classy to make fun of your competitors, nor do I really appreciate inculcating an "us vs them" mentality. But to do that after we had paid a big hunk of money to sponsor that conference seemed particularly poor form, and if the Foundation is going to make fun of the people who are paying to sponsor their Conference, what does membership buy you? A steaming pile on your doorstep once a year? In any case, that was when I stopped advocating for Microsoft to join the Eclipse Foundation and instead advocated for us to ignore them wholesale. I hope that my old team has better luck working with them than I did.
- specialist 11y ago
  Very interesting. I would like to understand governance models for open source projects, standards committees, etc. I took a job working on an open source product / stack precisely to get experience with how a consortia (kuali.org) manages to do things. TL;DR: it doesn't. I'm told the Apache Foundation is also like a tarpit. Would love to hear stories from people with direct experience. My utopian view is that all government software should be citizen owned. That dream took a hit by my recent experience. I'm still searching for projects, efforts, teams, whatever that cracked this nut.
Negative1 11y ago
This seems like an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish type deal [1]. Can someone explain exactly what Microsoft would get out of this (and what they would theoretically give back in the process)? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
MyNameIsFred 11y ago
I must be missing something. All of the comments here are all about "Microsoft is advancing OSS" and "Microsoft grew a heart" and "Mind blown", but all I see in the article is "We'll be providing some tools to help you use our paid cloud services". What am I missing here?
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  You're not missing anything. Some people feel emotional towards things like this. It is why we see all those, "I'm breaking up with <some random technology>" articles.
- alexkavon 11y ago
  You read the article, most people only read the headline.
- krylon 11y ago
  Of course Microsoft is doing all this with the goal of making money at the end of the day. But if you remember the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago, when they were bashing open source at every turn, spreading FUD and exploiting their monopoly on the desktop to crush competition, things have changed a lot. Not neccessarily because the "new" Microsoft is made of nicer people who just want to be friends with everyone, but because the world around them has changed. The end result, though, is the same - Microsoft appears to be embracing open source and community-driven development processes.
  - MyNameIsFred 11y ago
    Thank you for your reply. Yes. I understand that that's the message here in the HN comments, but my question is why. In what way does this mean that MS is embracing open source? Many replies to that question (including yours) have been along the lines of "Remember when they were saboteurs? They just took an action that wasn't overt malice!" Again, I assume I'm missing something, but it all sounds like "Hitler doesn't spend all of his time engaging in acts of genocide; Sometimes, he eats cereal." (BTW, no, I don't think of MS as inherently evil. I make my own living on closed-source software.) I'm not seeing the "complete reversal" people are talking about, nor even a partial reversal. Nor do I see the opposite. These things appear orthogonal. Is this all because their new Azure-specific tooling is open source? Or is it simply because they're shaking hands (harder) with an organization that has OSS street credit? Or something else entirely?
bitmapbrother 11y ago
Is there a reason Microsoft doesn't make their VS Studio IDE work with Java? Yes, I'm aware of the 3rd party plugins available, but it would be nice to see official support for what is the world's most popular language according to the TIOBE index.
- cm2187 11y ago
  Old scars perhaps. VS initially had a java IDE, but then they got sued by Sun, which ultimately resulted in Microsoft developing C# as a Java killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
  - teh_klev 11y ago
    That was old Visual Studio, from the days of VS6 which shipped VB6, prior to the launch of Visual Studio.NET (2002).
geodel 11y ago
It seems MS is thinking money is to be made from order of magnitudes more users paying order of magnitude less money on cloud tools / infrastructure. It is opposite of traditional MS where fewer users were paying lots of money for MS tools.
pdeva1 11y ago
Microsoft is just a 'Solutions member', which is among the lowest form of membership for Corporate entities. They are only required to pay $20K a year. Not required to contribute any engineers to Eclipse Foundation. The 'membership' portion of this announcement is pure PR. If they were setting aside real cash, they would join as 'Strategic Member' where they would be required to contribute real cash and minimum amount of engineers to Eclipse.
- mey 11y ago
  While I'm sure they could easily join at a higher tier, I will still applaud their contribution.
selvans 11y ago
Hopefully MS stay as a "Solutions member" and not become a "strategic member" and screw-up Eclipse Foundation
rbanffy 11y ago
I'm afraid that their "To Serve the Community" may actually be a cookbook...
ausjke 11y ago
Visual Studio runs on Linux, now MS joins Eclipse...the changes at Microsoft is too fast and dramatic, considering a while ago they're so hostile to the open source and Linux world at large. This indeed explains the saying: "if you can't beat them, you join them". I hope it's not too late for them, for me there is no way to get back to Windows environment for any kind of development. I suddenly realized that, Linux has won already, from Smart phones to the cloud servers, all the way.
- Delmania 11y ago
  > for me there is no way to get back to Windows environment for any kind of development. Awesome! You don't need to: https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads http://www.omnisharp.net/ http://www.omnisharp.net/ *It's a stretch to say "Linux won on the smart phone".

204 points by dstaheli 11y ago

junto 11y ago

I swear I just saw a pig flying across the sky. What is going on in Microsoft? Have they finally seen the light? First today comes SQL Server on Linux and now this. It makes a refreshing change. Long may it continue.

nwah1 11y ago
First SQL Server on Linux? More like a continuing strategy going back for years, since they began opening up bits of the .NET framework, compiler, ASP.NET and MVC, etc etc. Now the great majority of the .NET development stack is completely open, aside from Visual Studio itself. But there's always Visual Studio Code, the lightweight, open source alternative. Runs on linux too.
Cyph0n 11y ago
This shift occurred some time back when MS started the process of open-sourcing .NET and porting it to Linux.
theandrewbailey 11y ago
Where do you want to go today? Open source, apparently.
qihqi 11y ago
MS realized that Windows as a platform is not attractive to developers. So it is desperately to win those developers back. On the consumer land, Windows is quite happy being the de-facto platform OS, so it doesn't bother to release anything in other OS (DirectX, Office, just killed Skype in linux etc).
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > so it doesn't bother to release anything in other OS (DirectX, Office, just killed Skype in linux etc). Office is available on other platforms, and they've been adding new platforms in the last couple of years. Currently supports: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Mac, and PC. Not including their in-browser suite which runs on Chromebooks and your smart fridge. They also haven't killed Skype for Linux. Skype for Linux was terrible before Microsoft purchased Skype. If anything Skype for Linux hasn't been improved while the Skype for Windows client has become progressively worse.
usrusr 11y ago
Before Linux made the GNU development model something that was actually being used, when people thought of openness in computing they usually thought of "100% IBM compatible", running a Microsoft OS. The contrast between the "open" world of PC clones and the isolated islands of hardware makers that supplied their own operating system was as alive and visible back then as the contrast between FOSS and MS is now. Seen this way, the slow transformation from lock-in to charm-in that we observe today is more a return to the roots than a dissolution of identity for Microsoft.

staticelf 11y ago

Say what you want about Microsoft, but they really take their words into action nowadays. Seems like there is at least one news item per week. They have been really active in the open source space recently. Personally, I love this. Have recently been learning ASP.NET and started using Azure simply because I find it to be one of the easiest frameworks and platforms to iterate quickly on. I love the new Microsoft, I hope this continues. It feels like they have had a lot of brilliant people previously held back by rules and constraints which are now removed.

cm2187 11y ago
Reading it, it doesn't seem to be a completely altruistic policy. The way I read this blog post is "we are going to contribute to Eclipse to ensure that you can deploy your projects well on Azure". I'm not saying it's bad. But it's not a "MSFT open sources xxx" headline either.
- staticelf 11y ago
  Of course it's in their interest to do this, but that's always the case when it comes to company sponsored open source? It's not like they're going to throw money on something that they believe never will benefit them in any way. This is completely fine and how it should be.
yAnonymous 11y ago
They're doing this for themselves. If MS don't invest in open source, they'll be left behind. It's a nice reminder how important OSS has become.
- staticelf 11y ago
  Can you mention one company sponsored open source investment that isn't based in self-interest? I don't think that is relevant, but of course open source is important and probably will be in the future as well.
  - 11y ago

akerro 11y ago

Do you remember the times MS tried to kill Java by adding new features to Java? Every time they "contribute to open-source" I trust them less and less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish...

untog 11y ago
Yes, we all remember Embrace, extend and extinguish. Even people who weren't around then. Because it gets brought up in every single Hacker News thread about Microsoft. At this point I really don't think it's useful to cite a Microsoft strategy from the mid 1990s. It's clear at even a cursory glance that their approach has changed dramatically.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  I didn't know about it and I'm glad it was brought up.
- bragh 11y ago
  No, it gets brought up because the after effects of that philosophy are still felt even today.
  - Delmania 11y ago
    Got a few examples to bring up? Because I'm not seeing how Java suffered. If anything, Oracle is a bigger threat to Java than MS.
    - bragh 11y ago
      2 examples that affect me every week when serving SMB clients: - old IE installs - PDF printing functionality not included in older versions of Office and Windows More experienced people/sysadmins can probably bring out lot more issues. And I totally agree with you that Java didn't suffer in the end, but how many lawyer hours were spent on stuff that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place?

Delmania 11y ago

Well, this is certainly an interesting development, although not entirely unexpected, given that JetBrains is developing Project Rider. It would definitely be interesting to develop a Java application in Visual Studio.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

optforfon 11y ago

I feel like I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. I swear Microsoft's business model was to bring people in to their ecosystem and then charge them for what is hopefully a superior development experience. Is there a new business model? How do they lock people in and squeeze them for money? Is their cloud solution radically different from the competition that they can put all their eggs in that basket? What's the big picture plan? Or is the new CEO just going rambo and pandering to DIY geeks who want everything for free ? (myself included!) I feel like there has to be some parallel universe blog where these press releases explain what they're doing to investors beyond "we're going to take your money, and we're going to make things with it. And then give it away for free! Please give us more money" Like awesome dude... but what the hell is going on?

ericcholis 11y ago
I think it's about capturing new marketshare or previously lost marketshare. There's a large group of developers and their associated companies that were never likely to hop on the MS toolchain. In many ways MS == .NET for years. Now, it's more agnostic with Azure and even Visual Studio Code. So, marketshare and marketing.
Delmania 11y ago
TL;DR: Azure. What's going on in a new strategy. Microsoft wants people building applications in Azure. They want people using ASP.NET technologies. Given that Azure competes with AWS and Google Compute; that ASP.NET and C# compete with Elixir/Phoenix, Clojure, Scala, Koitlin, etc, there is absolutely no way they can maintain any form of lockin. Even in the conservative companies, they compete with Java. The pitch to the investors is that by opening up their toolset, it gets more people on their cloud services and boosts recurring revenue. Which is what everyone else is doing.
- optforfon 11y ago
  So they've decide that the business model of the past two decades is doomed? Are investors onboard with that? Sounds like some serious downsizing is coming to come up in the next 5 years... We might be looking back at this CEO with incredulity in 10 years when MSFT is struggling to keep the lights on ("they did what?! They just gave away all their products for free??")

grandalf 11y ago

Microsoft is finally realizing that Open Source is not an opposing ideology but an alternative kind of business contract (which happens to lend itself to services).

Yhippa 11y ago

Argh. Was hoping to hear about C# integration not Azure hooks.

TheHappyRock 11y ago

I was really thinking the announcement was going to be Visual Studio in eclipse............long shot I know.

ethomson 11y ago

Interesting. I was part of the original "Team Explorer Everywhere" team that built their Eclipse plug-in for TFS and had originally championed this as a good idea. But really, I'm not sure that I'm enthused about this news. Certainly this is good community building, but I've found the Eclipse Foundation to be so ineffective that I'm not sure what purpose this actually serves except to send out a press release. My team was initially acquired; we were originally a small company in a cornfield in Illinois called Teamprise, where we built the original TFS plug-in for Eclipse. At the time, we were Eclipse Foundation members and reasonably happy about it. Certainly it was nice to give back (in terms of membership fees) to a project that we were a part of and took advantage of. And the Foundation has a few really solid employees and it was nice to talk to them about tech stuff. But our larger goal in joining the Eclipse Foundation was largely unmet, which was to actually partner. For example: we hoped to bring in a contractor who could occasionally tackle some bugs in Eclipse on AIX which ultimately affected our customers. We were a tiny company and going deep on some weird problem that only affected the Motif AIX build was not particularly rewarding. So we hoped to engage the Foundation to help us out here: we would pay this contractor if they could help us find them. But we were rebuffed in a manner that I found rather off-putting. Despite this, after we became part of Microsoft I still pushed for us to join the Eclipse Foundation. I stopped pushing when Microsoft had a booth at Eclipse Con one year and a member of the Foundation (apropos nothing) went on a nice, long rant about Microsoft. I don't think it's particularly classy to make fun of your competitors, nor do I really appreciate inculcating an "us vs them" mentality. But to do that after we had paid a big hunk of money to sponsor that conference seemed particularly poor form, and if the Foundation is going to make fun of the people who are paying to sponsor their Conference, what does membership buy you? A steaming pile on your doorstep once a year? In any case, that was when I stopped advocating for Microsoft to join the Eclipse Foundation and instead advocated for us to ignore them wholesale. I hope that my old team has better luck working with them than I did.

specialist 11y ago
Very interesting. I would like to understand governance models for open source projects, standards committees, etc. I took a job working on an open source product / stack precisely to get experience with how a consortia (kuali.org) manages to do things. TL;DR: it doesn't. I'm told the Apache Foundation is also like a tarpit. Would love to hear stories from people with direct experience. My utopian view is that all government software should be citizen owned. That dream took a hit by my recent experience. I'm still searching for projects, efforts, teams, whatever that cracked this nut.

Negative1 11y ago

This seems like an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish type deal [1]. Can someone explain exactly what Microsoft would get out of this (and what they would theoretically give back in the process)? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

MyNameIsFred 11y ago

I must be missing something. All of the comments here are all about "Microsoft is advancing OSS" and "Microsoft grew a heart" and "Mind blown", but all I see in the article is "We'll be providing some tools to help you use our paid cloud services". What am I missing here?

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
You're not missing anything. Some people feel emotional towards things like this. It is why we see all those, "I'm breaking up with <some random technology>" articles.
alexkavon 11y ago
You read the article, most people only read the headline.
krylon 11y ago
Of course Microsoft is doing all this with the goal of making money at the end of the day. But if you remember the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago, when they were bashing open source at every turn, spreading FUD and exploiting their monopoly on the desktop to crush competition, things have changed a lot. Not neccessarily because the "new" Microsoft is made of nicer people who just want to be friends with everyone, but because the world around them has changed. The end result, though, is the same - Microsoft appears to be embracing open source and community-driven development processes.
- MyNameIsFred 11y ago
  Thank you for your reply. Yes. I understand that that's the message here in the HN comments, but my question is why. In what way does this mean that MS is embracing open source? Many replies to that question (including yours) have been along the lines of "Remember when they were saboteurs? They just took an action that wasn't overt malice!" Again, I assume I'm missing something, but it all sounds like "Hitler doesn't spend all of his time engaging in acts of genocide; Sometimes, he eats cereal." (BTW, no, I don't think of MS as inherently evil. I make my own living on closed-source software.) I'm not seeing the "complete reversal" people are talking about, nor even a partial reversal. Nor do I see the opposite. These things appear orthogonal. Is this all because their new Azure-specific tooling is open source? Or is it simply because they're shaking hands (harder) with an organization that has OSS street credit? Or something else entirely?

bitmapbrother 11y ago

Is there a reason Microsoft doesn't make their VS Studio IDE work with Java? Yes, I'm aware of the 3rd party plugins available, but it would be nice to see official support for what is the world's most popular language according to the TIOBE index.

cm2187 11y ago
Old scars perhaps. VS initially had a java IDE, but then they got sued by Sun, which ultimately resulted in Microsoft developing C# as a Java killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
- teh_klev 11y ago
  That was old Visual Studio, from the days of VS6 which shipped VB6, prior to the launch of Visual Studio.NET (2002).

geodel 11y ago

It seems MS is thinking money is to be made from order of magnitudes more users paying order of magnitude less money on cloud tools / infrastructure. It is opposite of traditional MS where fewer users were paying lots of money for MS tools.

pdeva1 11y ago

Microsoft is just a 'Solutions member', which is among the lowest form of membership for Corporate entities. They are only required to pay $20K a year. Not required to contribute any engineers to Eclipse Foundation. The 'membership' portion of this announcement is pure PR. If they were setting aside real cash, they would join as 'Strategic Member' where they would be required to contribute real cash and minimum amount of engineers to Eclipse.

mey 11y ago
While I'm sure they could easily join at a higher tier, I will still applaud their contribution.

selvans 11y ago

Hopefully MS stay as a "Solutions member" and not become a "strategic member" and screw-up Eclipse Foundation

rbanffy 11y ago

I'm afraid that their "To Serve the Community" may actually be a cookbook...

ausjke 11y ago

Visual Studio runs on Linux, now MS joins Eclipse...the changes at Microsoft is too fast and dramatic, considering a while ago they're so hostile to the open source and Linux world at large. This indeed explains the saying: "if you can't beat them, you join them". I hope it's not too late for them, for me there is no way to get back to Windows environment for any kind of development. I suddenly realized that, Linux has won already, from Smart phones to the cloud servers, all the way.

Delmania 11y ago
> for me there is no way to get back to Windows environment for any kind of development. Awesome! You don't need to: https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/ https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads https://code.visualstudio.com/#alt-downloads http://www.omnisharp.net/ http://www.omnisharp.net/ *It's a stretch to say "Linux won on the smart phone".