5 ms·

They haven't changed a bit. Open Source is merely a marketing tag for them to gain credibility. They are not very good in the open source community; most of the

by cjsuk 9y ago

They haven't changed a bit. Open Source is merely a marketing tag for them to gain credibility. They are not very good in the open source community; most of their github OSS releases other than a few high profile ones are unmaintained crap with zero response. If you want to fire up Linux in SCVMM for example, the tooling is open source now, but full of bugs and no way to ship it with working tools. Nothing is ever responded to, PRs, defects or anything. But it's OSS, look we're OSS! It's a joke. Then when you do raise something on a high profile project like .Net Core which actively has buggy untested tracking enabled in the command line build tools, which violates security policies of a lot of their clients, you get told in nearly as few words to fuck off when you want it turned off by default. On top of that They still don't listen to customers, preferring to shout loudly over them on endless blogs and marketing whilst crapping on them with increasing costs, decreasing quality, less privacy, ruinous products and more fragmentation. They're the Omni-Consumer-Products software company now.

Quarrelsome 9y ago
> They haven't changed a bit. o_0. I remember when I had to use tools to disassemble their precious source that they kept withheld and locked up. Now they post their new tech to github and I can view all the source easily. Now they try to make their tech work on Linux. I'm all for fair criticism but your prose is not that, its dogma. If you think they're still the same company I can only imagine that you left your eyes behind in the 90's. The culture has shifted a lot towards the engineers and you need to appreciate the good things that happen in life otherwise all you'll see is gloom. They're by no means perfect but they are _different_.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  They're not really different though. People's memory is short. I've had access to MSFT source code before under shared source apart from the CSPs suspiciously, I've had symbol server around for years and been able to pop into framework code, then there's stuff like this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx - not even counting the amount of source coming from MSR etc. My criticism is not dogma, it's the regression in all the other areas that's the big problem. I appreciate not having to wade through treacle to get my job done. This has got considerably worse in the last 3-4 years as the platform sort of falls to pieces on a regular basis. Do you remember when server, dev tools, OS and platform all dropped at the same time? That was peak quality. What we have now is the diametric opposite. We have no direction with .Net Core other than all over the place, unmaintained crap falling out everywhere. It's hell. It's really difficult to build and manage a medium to large sized project when someone is smashing all the pieces off the board once a month. And also when you have to raise a defect with one of their products it is closed, ignored or via partner support "here's a registry fix you have to deploy to 2000 disparate companies to fix our product because we removed a UI option" type outcomes. The good things in life are where I start a project and run it to completion and the tools and frameworks perform as intended. That's not there any more. Things like python, golang and even Java offer better proposition. Even the tooling quality, such as Visual Studio 2017, we have to unconfigure a lot of features to make it stable (like CodeLens for example). I wouldn't even consider picking it as a platform to build a new project on now because of the time, rewrite and cost risk. What you see is marketing and front. What I see and oversee is a large team of people fighting this every day.
  - Quarrelsome 9y ago
    Sorry we're now discussing completely different things and you acknowledge that they are "different" in regards to their lack of "peak quality". You are not arguing in good faith. Check yourself.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      I disagree. I am merely relaying experience.
      - thanksgiving 9y ago
        I agree with you. I think most free software advocates are far too nice to say anything bad about people. Just look at dot net and how it is now "open source". Well, except it isn't because the dot net special interest group doesn't have the source code for tooling they need in order to meet fedora packaging guidelines. This is supposed to be the easy part because from what I understand they rewrote everything for .NET core. I was a big fan of dot net core and now I warn everyone of it. It is best to just avoid Microsoft in many cases.
      - Quarrelsome 9y ago
        To divert from the debate on their position on OSS. You started okay about Rotor but then went off on a rant. You're not interested in debating you just want to talk about how bad Microsoft are. I am stating they've changed somewhat since the Bill Gates days. Is my position really so fucking radical that it deserves your tangential rant about registry settings? Peak quality != OSS stance.
    - sumfag 9y ago
      No, you weren't. Gonna have to agree with your parent commenter that they are actively user-hostile and consumer-hostile, in addition to FOSS-hostile, even moreso than ever before for all the reasons stated above. Your comment right here shows me you have little to no argument left in you, despite your "good faith". I advise you check yourself Quarrelsome, since you devalued your own argument before it even got started. (fitting username)
jordigh 9y ago
> most of their github OSS releases other than a few high profile ones are unmaintained crap with zero response. I find this a very entitled and weird attitude. I also find the opposite side of this attitude weird, that if you release source suddenly you have new obligations. That opposite side is even worse because it makes people scared of releasing code. Being open source or free software isn't some kind of contract to provide support and "community" or whatever. Slap a license on the code, toss it over the fence and be done with it. If you want to offer support and accept patches great, if not, also great. If you're doing it for fun or advantage good, if you're doing it out of respect for your users to let them fix it themselves, even better, because the alternative is to give them no recourse but to go around begging for you and only you to fix it. The free software that MSFT has releases is free software (and open source), period. They don't have to do anything further to deserve that appellation.
- Gracana 9y ago
  If Microsoft dies or abandons maintainership of some code they've released, then the free stuff is great, because we can pick up where they left off. If they just throw it over the wall and you have no hope of getting your fixes into the tree, then you have to maintain a fork of it alongside theirs, merge changes, hope they don't change anything that would cause problems for you, etc. Source is better than no source, but I can see why people would complain about the way they're handling things right now.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  I've patched and raised PRs to contribute and they are ignored. I am helping them fix their product. Nothing. So I phone up support and PAY to have something fixed. Nothing. I try playing nice. I try paying nice. I get nothing. I vote with my feet. Nice or not, that's also an aspect here; choice.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    > I am helping them fix their product. Then stop. You don't have to make anything better for them. Fix it for yourself. If you're not having a good time trying to help others, then stop doing it. You have no obligation and neither do they (except, of course, if there were explicit contracts involved). I have some Xchat patches. I tried getting them into Hexchat, but they didn't want them. Well, looks like I'm now permanently running a personal Xchat fork.

by cjsuk 9y ago

Quarrelsome 9y ago

> They haven't changed a bit. o_0. I remember when I had to use tools to disassemble their precious source that they kept withheld and locked up. Now they post their new tech to github and I can view all the source easily. Now they try to make their tech work on Linux. I'm all for fair criticism but your prose is not that, its dogma. If you think they're still the same company I can only imagine that you left your eyes behind in the 90's. The culture has shifted a lot towards the engineers and you need to appreciate the good things that happen in life otherwise all you'll see is gloom. They're by no means perfect but they are _different_.

cjsuk 9y ago
They're not really different though. People's memory is short. I've had access to MSFT source code before under shared source apart from the CSPs suspiciously, I've had symbol server around for years and been able to pop into framework code, then there's stuff like this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx - not even counting the amount of source coming from MSR etc. My criticism is not dogma, it's the regression in all the other areas that's the big problem. I appreciate not having to wade through treacle to get my job done. This has got considerably worse in the last 3-4 years as the platform sort of falls to pieces on a regular basis. Do you remember when server, dev tools, OS and platform all dropped at the same time? That was peak quality. What we have now is the diametric opposite. We have no direction with .Net Core other than all over the place, unmaintained crap falling out everywhere. It's hell. It's really difficult to build and manage a medium to large sized project when someone is smashing all the pieces off the board once a month. And also when you have to raise a defect with one of their products it is closed, ignored or via partner support "here's a registry fix you have to deploy to 2000 disparate companies to fix our product because we removed a UI option" type outcomes. The good things in life are where I start a project and run it to completion and the tools and frameworks perform as intended. That's not there any more. Things like python, golang and even Java offer better proposition. Even the tooling quality, such as Visual Studio 2017, we have to unconfigure a lot of features to make it stable (like CodeLens for example). I wouldn't even consider picking it as a platform to build a new project on now because of the time, rewrite and cost risk. What you see is marketing and front. What I see and oversee is a large team of people fighting this every day.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  Sorry we're now discussing completely different things and you acknowledge that they are "different" in regards to their lack of "peak quality". You are not arguing in good faith. Check yourself.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    I disagree. I am merely relaying experience.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
      I agree with you. I think most free software advocates are far too nice to say anything bad about people. Just look at dot net and how it is now "open source". Well, except it isn't because the dot net special interest group doesn't have the source code for tooling they need in order to meet fedora packaging guidelines. This is supposed to be the easy part because from what I understand they rewrote everything for .NET core. I was a big fan of dot net core and now I warn everyone of it. It is best to just avoid Microsoft in many cases.
    - Quarrelsome 9y ago
      To divert from the debate on their position on OSS. You started okay about Rotor but then went off on a rant. You're not interested in debating you just want to talk about how bad Microsoft are. I am stating they've changed somewhat since the Bill Gates days. Is my position really so fucking radical that it deserves your tangential rant about registry settings? Peak quality != OSS stance.
  - sumfag 9y ago
    No, you weren't. Gonna have to agree with your parent commenter that they are actively user-hostile and consumer-hostile, in addition to FOSS-hostile, even moreso than ever before for all the reasons stated above. Your comment right here shows me you have little to no argument left in you, despite your "good faith". I advise you check yourself Quarrelsome, since you devalued your own argument before it even got started. (fitting username)

jordigh 9y ago

> most of their github OSS releases other than a few high profile ones are unmaintained crap with zero response. I find this a very entitled and weird attitude. I also find the opposite side of this attitude weird, that if you release source suddenly you have new obligations. That opposite side is even worse because it makes people scared of releasing code. Being open source or free software isn't some kind of contract to provide support and "community" or whatever. Slap a license on the code, toss it over the fence and be done with it. If you want to offer support and accept patches great, if not, also great. If you're doing it for fun or advantage good, if you're doing it out of respect for your users to let them fix it themselves, even better, because the alternative is to give them no recourse but to go around begging for you and only you to fix it. The free software that MSFT has releases is free software (and open source), period. They don't have to do anything further to deserve that appellation.

Gracana 9y ago
If Microsoft dies or abandons maintainership of some code they've released, then the free stuff is great, because we can pick up where they left off. If they just throw it over the wall and you have no hope of getting your fixes into the tree, then you have to maintain a fork of it alongside theirs, merge changes, hope they don't change anything that would cause problems for you, etc. Source is better than no source, but I can see why people would complain about the way they're handling things right now.
cjsuk 9y ago
I've patched and raised PRs to contribute and they are ignored. I am helping them fix their product. Nothing. So I phone up support and PAY to have something fixed. Nothing. I try playing nice. I try paying nice. I get nothing. I vote with my feet. Nice or not, that's also an aspect here; choice.
- jordigh 9y ago
  > I am helping them fix their product. Then stop. You don't have to make anything better for them. Fix it for yourself. If you're not having a good time trying to help others, then stop doing it. You have no obligation and neither do they (except, of course, if there were explicit contracts involved). I have some Xchat patches. I tried getting them into Hexchat, but they didn't want them. Well, looks like I'm now permanently running a personal Xchat fork.