4 ms·

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 i

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?
  - krylon 11y ago
    Microsoft used to be very hostile towards open source in general and Linux in particular. These days, the publish some core parts of their software stack - the new Javascript engine, for example, the core CLR .Net runtime, including the JIT and GC - as open source and actively support running Linux instances in Azure. That still does not mean, of course, that Microsoft is an "open source company" now, but I think it shows their attitude has changed significantly. Given their past, I think this is at least a very good sign. Of course, they still engage in plenty of lock-in, and their baroque licensing terms can drive a poor sysadmin insane. But there is some progress, and a lot of people are happy to see that. Of course, the main reason for this is that the world has changed, and Microsoft can no longer exploit their monopoly on the desktop when a fair amount of people have - at least at home - ditched laptops or desktops completely in favor of smartphones and tablets (rarely running Windows). Developers like to build web services and web apps on Linux, and if Microsoft just refused to support any non-Windows systems on Azure, they would lose a fair amount of business. So they seem to look for ways to make money in a world where Windows and Microsoft's conventional software stack can coexist with other software and operating systems. So if, for example, they open source the .Net framework, that means they can win over developers on other systems. Developers who then might want to use, say, Visual Studio, so they still can make money of those. (Alas, with regards to Windows and Office, their cash cows, nothing has changed.)

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?
- krylon 11y ago
  Microsoft used to be very hostile towards open source in general and Linux in particular. These days, the publish some core parts of their software stack - the new Javascript engine, for example, the core CLR .Net runtime, including the JIT and GC - as open source and actively support running Linux instances in Azure. That still does not mean, of course, that Microsoft is an "open source company" now, but I think it shows their attitude has changed significantly. Given their past, I think this is at least a very good sign. Of course, they still engage in plenty of lock-in, and their baroque licensing terms can drive a poor sysadmin insane. But there is some progress, and a lot of people are happy to see that. Of course, the main reason for this is that the world has changed, and Microsoft can no longer exploit their monopoly on the desktop when a fair amount of people have - at least at home - ditched laptops or desktops completely in favor of smartphones and tablets (rarely running Windows). Developers like to build web services and web apps on Linux, and if Microsoft just refused to support any non-Windows systems on Azure, they would lose a fair amount of business. So they seem to look for ways to make money in a world where Windows and Microsoft's conventional software stack can coexist with other software and operating systems. So if, for example, they open source the .Net framework, that means they can win over developers on other systems. Developers who then might want to use, say, Visual Studio, so they still can make money of those. (Alas, with regards to Windows and Office, their cash cows, nothing has changed.)