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Microsoft Is Now 'Open by Default', Says Xamarin Founder Miguel de Icaza
- aikah 10y agoMy Windows license doesn't feel "Open by Default", nor SQL Server license audits ... I like the guy, he created Mono, Xamarin, Gtk and co. But only a tiny subset of MS products like the .NET ecosystem are open.
- adrianlmm 10y agoJust waith and see.
- Aldo_MX 10y agoMy Windows 10 Telemetry settings really look "open by default"...
- bobajeff 10y agoYes, DirectX is still looks closed to me, along with the NT Kernel and even EdgeHTML.
- Ant5do 10y agoIsn't it clear from the article, like everyone else pointed out, that things going forward in Icaza's org are open? As in cloud and developer tools? You're talking about older things.
- bobajeff 10y agoSorry, I just read the title and commented.
- gigatexal 10y agoEdge core got open sourced they even made a fork of nodejs that used it
- wmccullough 10y agoObviously they are talking about projects going forward. The article makes that pretty clear. "Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza." Should they stay guilty forever for the things done in the previous regime?
- irq-1 10y agoWill the next versions of Microsofts closed/licensed software be open? Will someone have to make a case that they need to remain closed? Will they release new products that are closed/licensed?
- nogbit 10y agoYes, because their OS is now evergreen, there will never be another "Windows X" and it will be forever closed. If/when they make the OS open (and ideally their other products as well) only then can his statement be taken seriously.
- cryptarch 10y agoI assume they'll make all Windows updates open-source from now on then?
- sametmax 10y agoFirst, you have to give very strong evidences that they are not "like the previous regime", or that there is a "previous" at all. All I see right now is PR and strategic moves (let's do what google did, even a bit late). Secondly, given the track record, it is fair that it will take a long time before their past is forgiven. At least the same number of years of doubt that they spent misbehaving. And again that supposes they are not doing it right now. Like patent trolling, or moving software you could buy to a rent-only model, or put spywares in their new OS. I strongly believe MS is not getting better, just getting better at communicating. They are not in a monopoly anymore and they can't get away with a "linux is cancer" like they used to do. The only thing that bother me is that the Gates are getting away with it. They detached them self from MS, and now make heavy communication on their charity, so everybody seems to think they are saints. People have very short memory.
- zgramana 10y agoMiguel is clearly referring to Microsoft developer tools, since he's in the developer tools org.
- maxxxxx 10y agoThen they should open source Visual Studio and TFS and make them free. Dealing with those licenses is a major PITA.
- runjake 10y agoVisual Studio basically is free [1]. I imagine we'll see Visual Studio open sourced sooner rather than later, going off the hint-dropping from MSFT engineers. I assume they have some code cleanup, and intellectual property issues to deal with first. 1. https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/
- maxxxxx 10y agoIt's not free for companies from a certain size on. I am not even talking about the money but just the effort of tracking licenses.
- digi_owl 10y agoActually he founded Gnome, GTK already existed (the G coming from GIMP). Frankly the guy seems very similar to Poettering. Stuff he creates, for the most part, only really becomes usable once the leaves the project.
- deckard1 10y agoNo idea why you're getting downvotes. You're completely right. I was there when GNOME started. Was working heavily with GTK+ and GIMP at the time. Most of GNOME was tossed together haphazardly in a mad dash to catch up with KDE. There were astroturfing campaigns against KDE/Qt, organized on the GIMP IRC servers. The hate on Slashdot towards KDE was crazy, and much of it coming directly from GNOME camp. GNOME 1.x was a total shitshow. The code was horrid, and nothing was stable at all. Luckily their poor standards of code quality never hurt GTK+ much, as the GIMP guys still knew what the hell they were doing.
- anonbanker 10y agoRemember that KDE/Qt were not licensed under anything GPL-compatible at the time, hence the reason GNOME was started in the first place. KDE was indeed much better. GNOME 1.x was awful. I and others like me still used GNOME 1.x, because I wanted a free desktop environment. You weren't the only one on #gimp; don't pretend GIMP had a much better class of developers. Remember GEGL used to refer to hairy parts of the codebase (Genetically-Engineered Goat, Large) that people were afraid of touching.
- anonbanker 10y agoyour downvotes are alarming. Miguel left GNOME before 2.0 shipped, and started working on Mono full-time. If you've ever used GNOME 1.0, it was barely more than a set of ORB-based applications you stacked on top of Enlightenment DR 0.15 (or Sawmill/Sawfish if you weren't cool/used RedHat after Raster left). The panel was awful, the fonts were awful. Themeing (once they moved to gdkpixbuf rather than imlib) was awful. It didn't even have Human Interface Guidelines until Eugenia Loli-Queru basically forced her opinion on the devs. Sun Microsystems had to dedicate months of programming and useability testing to get the UI to a point that everyone didn't hate it anymore. Once Miguel gave up the reins, others took GNOME where it is today. This is similar to Lennart Poettering, wherein NetworkManager and PulseAudio became much better/more stable/useable when he left.
- baldfat 10y ago"Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza." The Microsoft bias is to always bash them but give a pass to Apple. I think Microsoft has been the good guy for a bit but they still get hate mainly due to Steve Balmer.
- sigzero 10y ago“There was no story at Microsoft for other platforms back in the day. But the world is full of heterogeneous connections now and I think Scott Guthrie [now Microsoft’s lead on Azure cloud platform] helped drive a lot of the openness. Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza." So it seems "new" projects not older ones are "open by default" with a caveat. That's still a lot better than they used to be.
- blub 10y agoMicrosoft embraces open source because they found out that there are other methods to monetize and lock in customers. As a bonus people seem to like you when you give them stuff for free, even with the catch of privacy invasion. In other words, they stopped copying Apple and switched their sights on Google. The stuff that matters stays closed source. Infrastructure, tooling are published because they bring massive amounts of goodwill and developer mindshare while hindering potential competitors that now have to battle with a free offering. Frankly I preferred the old Microsoft which wanted your money, not the new one that (also!) wants your data.
- AnonymousPlanet 10y agoAnd there is nothing at all stopping them from closing everything up again once they're back on top (which might be sooner than anyone thinks).
- prplhaz4 10y agoAre there any good examples of this strategy? I can't think of anyone successfully moving a leading open source product back to closed source...I think normally it's the fork of the open source version that lives on...
- randomguy23 10y agohistorically it's what MS has done: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No reason to think that they are doing something different this time. Trust, once broken, takes quite a while to build back.
- parennoob 10y agoSolaris? The open source nature of it seemed to disappear overnight after Oracle bought Sun, but looks like Oracle's not doing too badly with it. I know there's the Open Source illumos (IIRC) but haven't heard of anyone using it in production.
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- executesorder66 10y agoThey don't even have a closed source MS Office for Linux.
- simonh 10y agoIt's hard to see how a port to Linux would ever make back the cost of porting it in the first place.
- notatoad 10y agoor how that really has any impact on the general "openness" of microsoft.
- adrianlmm 10y agoNot even Google is investing in Desktop Linux, where is that official Google Drive client?
- snippet22 10y agoWho wants to use Windows? So now they are just repackaging open free software like npm and angular 2... Oh great... Again who wants to use Windows? Azure you can't even have it use anything that touches other servers without costing you. I think their focus on their base is what is hurting them. Sure they gained a little with azure but as tech people know, thatll be out if date if not already. Cause why learn how is all connected right?
- moron4hire 10y agoI want to use Windows. No other OS has put the time and effort into ensuring stable, cutting edge support for the 3D graphics systems I need for my work. Windows is still 90% of the PC market. If only 10% of those users are developers, that means there are more Windows developers than all macOS users combined. There are a lot of us out here, and I think we're starting to get fed up with being treated like we don't exist, just because of the shame that gets lumped on us from a small cohort of other developers.
- simonh 10y agoThis is a fair point actually. I switched to the Mac a decade ago, but Mac hardware free-rides off the PC hardware market all the time. If we're honest, so does Linux. If Microsoft hadn't supported and grown the PC hardware industry for decades the whole desktop ecosystem would be a lot poorer. Personally I'm very happy with the hardware options available to me on the Mac, but there's a whole world of hardware options over there in PC land I'll never take advantage of. Conversely Linux graphics card driver support is still woeful, but that's really not Microsoft's problem and if Linux didn't have the PC platform to run on it's hardware costs would be much higher. What would be the alternative, Sun-style workstations? It's not that Microsoft did this on purpose, but it's still a fact.
- pmontra 10y agoWith no MicroSoft the PC industry would be as fragmented as it was in the 80s, with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on different chipsets. We are down to Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS now, on either ARM or x86. Everything else is very minor. However network effects would have given to another company the position that MicroSoft enjoyed for some 30 years. It could have been a slower growth or a faster downfall, but somebody would have been there. Not Apple because they are interested only in selling their own hardware. Probably some company out of nowhere, not necessarily on a x86 chip. Then everybody would have started building drivers for the OS of that company and Linux and MacOS would be running on the preferred chip of that OS. Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen (by the time standards) 8086 computer and replace MSDOS and Microsoft as the OS and sw company of choice. We'd be talking about VisiOffice and Vindows now :-)
- makecheck 10y agoWell, nothing like having to “log in” to a product to make it feel “open”, or have it randomly prioritize verifying its own license for 60 seconds over letting you launch and begin your work.
- SomeHacker44 10y agoSomewhat OT: With the ad interstitial, and now an auto-play video with audio ad on the main article, and the article split into three pages... I just can't bring myself to read Forbes content online anymore. Even if I'm interested in what de Icaza has to say.
- megous 10y agoForbes looks like quote of the day website that's progressively enhanced to a online newspaper if you care about enabling JavaScript. Progressive enhancement was nice while it lasted.
- recentdarkness 10y agoOT: Too funny: http://imgur.com/7Zh7tdm http://imgur.com/7Zh7tdm This HN app doesn't seem to agree with the title
- st3v3r 10y agoCool. Where's the Windows and Office source? I've got some changes I'd like to contribute.
- whoopdedo 10y agoThe exFAT patent is royalty-free now?
- anonbanker 10y agoI wonder what kind of sit-down peer review was done to keep it closed?
- m-p-3 10y agoAnd thus a new cycle of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish is happening.
- ergo14 10y agoDid MS stop suing linux users already?
- l3m0ndr0p 10y agoMS is not open. Well, they're as open as a Burmese tiger pit. I.T. Has been evolving leaps and bounds due to "open" initiatives (GNU, FSF etc..). All the "closed" companies are hitting a ceiling in terms of their profits & their tech. is stagnating. MS is trying hard and they can catch up, but it's too little too late. Nothing from the MS software portfolio beats a plain vanilla Unix/GNU Linux command shell (bash,sh etc..).
- thr0waway1239 10y agoI have started thinking that those who now work at Microsoft are blind to its flaws by default. The classic example being Windows 10 - anyone who is actually not blind to the fiasco of the automatic upgrades/issues around further updates [1] notices that there is a certain brutality in the way the whole thing was carried out. After installing the unwanted Windows 10 OS on probably hundreds of millions of perfectly fine Windows 7 machines, they claimed that some 300+ million computers were now running on Windows 10. [2] My guess is, less than half of those were actually desired by the end users. And a few more iterations of these botched auto-updates, and "happy Windows 10 user" is going to become an oxymoron. This episode went so much against the spirit of open source that these claims seem a little comical. It is probably true that MS had to make these choices to maximize shareholder profit, but lets just take it down a notch on the supposed openness. To those who wish to still make this 'open by default' claim, I welcome MS to open source Windows 7 and Windows XP and see if they can sustain the same kind of growth after that point [3] [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%2010%20update&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%2010%20update&sort=byP... [2] http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-300-million-active-devices-are-now-running-windows-10 http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-300-million-active-d... [3] http://www.computerworld.com/article/3054528/microsoft-windows/zombie-os-windows-xp-still-powers-181m-pcs-two-years-after-support-ends.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/3054528/microsoft-windo...
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoFrom what I've seen, Microsoft employees have a keen understanding of both the issues with Microsoft as well as it's past. If you are seeing complete radio silence on something, like we see with both telemetry and automatic updates, that's when you know there's a corporate policy that's been laid down that nobody's going to risk their job to speak out against. You can see this sort of thing with a lot of companies, not just Microsoft.
- leandrod 10y agoDe Icaza is now ‘gullible by default’, says Universe.