8 ms·

I think the author nailed it. This is Microsoft's chance to reach out to developers and prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. We've s

I think the author nailed it. This is Microsoft's chance to reach out to developers and prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. We've seen this over the years with previous code hosting platforms. If the platforms betrays it's users, developers are not scared to mass migrate to something else. The onus is now on Microsoft to keep developers happy or risk losing their $7.5B investment.

sixothree 8y ago
That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source. GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers. When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux. With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.
- tehlike 8y ago
  People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects. Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate. It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.
  - sjellis 8y ago
    I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).
- wnsire 8y ago
  > That to me is what DotNet Core DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license. Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio. I don't really called that "all in open source" . It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice. Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna have a bad time.
  - oblio 8y ago
    You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? That's what everyone does. Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core. And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding. After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP (https://langserver.org/ https://langserver.org/) and now they're thinking about a Debug Adapter Protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues/175 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues...) that would do the same thing for debugging.
    - wnsire 8y ago
      >You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else. This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy. >Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core. I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them. Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it. Just to name a few : One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there. One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well. One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia. If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.
2bitencryption 8y ago
even chunks of Azure are open source. https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure
- Rapzid 8y ago
  Azure used to bill themselves as the "open cloud". That's kinda gone from their marketing, but they are WAY more open than AWS.
  - taakd 8y ago
    Only OpenStack is fully open source and fairly feature complete, with a few dozen providers using the OpenStack platform. OVH, who owns the largest datacenter in North America uses OpenStack, they're actually one of the largest contributors. Red Hat & IBM both seem to be really pushing private deployments as of late for their larger clients that already own large DCs.
    - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
      Knowing that OVH uses a piece of software makes me want to never use that piece of software. They are the worst quality cloud provider, IMO.
      - herbst 8y ago
        Definitly not the worst, but very far from the actually good ones for sure.
      - taakd 8y ago
        Did they kill your puppy? I've got multiple servers and VMs with them, uptime and connectivity is great.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Zyst 8y ago
I wouldn't say that, as siblings echo. I genuinely think that, for instance, Microsoft is genuinely doing a better job of doing open source than Google right now (With Facebook at the top, MSFT #2, Goog #3 from FAANG). That might be because I'm deeper into web development though, and both TypeScript, and VS Code are great contributions. Maybe I'd feel different if I worked in ML, and used Tensorflow daily.
- taakd 8y ago
  Microsoft might be doing a better job wrt contributing to and creating open source software, but the trust of Microsoft is not there. My SO migrated everything off Github back on Sunday when rumors broke, deleting the account & repos that had commits and contribs going back years. Consistently, one of the first questions I ask friends and acquaintences who go to work across the lake to work for MS in Bellevue or Redmond is whether they are on an Embrace or Extend team. Most are on Embrace/Rewrite our own version but "better" teams. Microsoft has changed, but they're no Red Hat or Suse.
- iamnotlarry 8y ago
  I wouldn't say that Google is high on my list of trust, either. But TypeScript and VS Code do not jump you into a #2 ranking. Go and Chrome easily trump them for starters. Then you get things like node that ride off V8, and Atom that rides off Chrome. The Google ecosystem of community building blocks is still much, much more significant than MS. After all, Google actually dogfoods OSS. FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use a source code repository of Google's or Facebook's, either. In fact, rather than open a GitLab account, I started self-hosting a year ago. GitLab made that easy. I also looked at Pagure.
  - nikofeyn 8y ago
    wait, how does go and chrome trump open source c#, f#, vb.net, .net core, typescript, asp.net, visual studio code, monaco, powershell core, mono, and the many, many other things they have open sourced? they’ve gone insane. https://opensource.microsoft.com https://opensource.microsoft.com https://github.com/Microsoft https://github.com/Microsoft and all of these are active and well managed with microsoft employees engaged in communication.
rqs 8y ago
> prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. Change of heart? Why? I think they are doing a pretty smart move to be friendly towards open source community, but it's not because I believe they changed their mind and want to contribute to the open source world, instead, I simply believes they embrace open source community is because it's good for business. You see, open source software these years became pretty good and infrastructural. If Microsoft can't be a part of it, then they will soon be obsolete. And they don't want to be obsolete, so they just can't afford to not be a friend with open source. The real thing that I curious about is what would happen when Microsoft managed to re-dominates the software market (in both user and enterprise end). Will they still be friendly with open source community after that?
- staticassertion 8y ago
  All companies that embrace open source do it because it's good for business. It's a seemingly unlimited resource that accounts for billions (made up number, feels reasonable) of dollars of unpaid labor. It was always stupid to be against OSS from a business perspective and so long as developers hand over their IP on a platter it always will be - Microsoft would be really stupid to turn away free money, and they seem to realize this now.
  - woah 8y ago
    The idea that open source involves “handing over ip on a platter” is what’s stupid here. The vast majority of open source code is developed on the job. The fact that it’s open source means that the developer can take it with them when they leave and possibly even get some name recognition from it. If it was closed source, the developer would be handing it over on a platter to their employer, never to be seen again.
    - mjburgess 8y ago
      That's a very contemporary development. Open source was originally hobbyist, research or academic. Often, it was "programmer solve thyself". Businesses have only been employing significant numbers to work on open source projects for the last decade.
gear54rus 8y ago
To get the developers to help write obnoxious garbage like win10 which forces users into all sorts of things they don't want? They want an undo button? It's right under their nose: stop with the bullshit auto-update that re-enables itself, document all telemetry and make a big button to disable it. But they don't do that, do they? Any idea why? Spoiler: it's all fake bs again, take one flashy but insignificant step forward and take 3 covert snake-like steps back.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level-windows-diagnostic-events-and-fields-1709 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level.... And I'm not sure what Windows is supposed to force users into things they don't want. I haven't had an issue with turning off functionality and having it be switched back on during updates - I guess it must happen based on the complaints, but it's not something I've experienced.
  - shakna 8y ago
    > Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    There's a middle ground somewhere around 'not re-downloading updates every time they fail' and 'not disguising Minecraft as a security update'. A lot of the annoyance at the updates is with how frustrating the implementation is. Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.
watwut 8y ago
Realistically, if Microsoft wants to be profitable on that investment, they will have to make changes to earn more money. Which will alienate developers looking for free good repo. Even if they plan to keep good will support for strategic relational reasons, that good will is easy to go away with strategy changes.

sixothree 8y ago

That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source. GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers. When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/aspnet

kumarvvr 8y ago
DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux. With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.
- vvanders 8y ago
  I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.
tehlike 8y ago
People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects. Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate. It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.
- sjellis 8y ago
  I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).
wnsire 8y ago
> That to me is what DotNet Core DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license. Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio. I don't really called that "all in open source" . It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice. Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna have a bad time.
- oblio 8y ago
  You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? That's what everyone does. Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core. And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding. After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP (https://langserver.org/ https://langserver.org/) and now they're thinking about a Debug Adapter Protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues/175 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues...) that would do the same thing for debugging.
  - wnsire 8y ago
    >You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else. This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy. >Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core. I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them. Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it. Just to name a few : One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there. One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well. One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia. If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.

2bitencryption 8y ago

even chunks of Azure are open source. https://github.com/Azure https://github.com/Azure

Rapzid 8y ago
Azure used to bill themselves as the "open cloud". That's kinda gone from their marketing, but they are WAY more open than AWS.
- taakd 8y ago
  Only OpenStack is fully open source and fairly feature complete, with a few dozen providers using the OpenStack platform. OVH, who owns the largest datacenter in North America uses OpenStack, they're actually one of the largest contributors. Red Hat & IBM both seem to be really pushing private deployments as of late for their larger clients that already own large DCs.
  - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
    Knowing that OVH uses a piece of software makes me want to never use that piece of software. They are the worst quality cloud provider, IMO.
    - herbst 8y ago
      Definitly not the worst, but very far from the actually good ones for sure.
    - taakd 8y ago
      Did they kill your puppy? I've got multiple servers and VMs with them, uptime and connectivity is great.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Zyst 8y ago

I wouldn't say that, as siblings echo. I genuinely think that, for instance, Microsoft is genuinely doing a better job of doing open source than Google right now (With Facebook at the top, MSFT #2, Goog #3 from FAANG). That might be because I'm deeper into web development though, and both TypeScript, and VS Code are great contributions. Maybe I'd feel different if I worked in ML, and used Tensorflow daily.

taakd 8y ago
Microsoft might be doing a better job wrt contributing to and creating open source software, but the trust of Microsoft is not there. My SO migrated everything off Github back on Sunday when rumors broke, deleting the account & repos that had commits and contribs going back years. Consistently, one of the first questions I ask friends and acquaintences who go to work across the lake to work for MS in Bellevue or Redmond is whether they are on an Embrace or Extend team. Most are on Embrace/Rewrite our own version but "better" teams. Microsoft has changed, but they're no Red Hat or Suse.
iamnotlarry 8y ago
I wouldn't say that Google is high on my list of trust, either. But TypeScript and VS Code do not jump you into a #2 ranking. Go and Chrome easily trump them for starters. Then you get things like node that ride off V8, and Atom that rides off Chrome. The Google ecosystem of community building blocks is still much, much more significant than MS. After all, Google actually dogfoods OSS. FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use a source code repository of Google's or Facebook's, either. In fact, rather than open a GitLab account, I started self-hosting a year ago. GitLab made that easy. I also looked at Pagure.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  wait, how does go and chrome trump open source c#, f#, vb.net, .net core, typescript, asp.net, visual studio code, monaco, powershell core, mono, and the many, many other things they have open sourced? they’ve gone insane. https://opensource.microsoft.com https://opensource.microsoft.com https://github.com/Microsoft https://github.com/Microsoft and all of these are active and well managed with microsoft employees engaged in communication.

rqs 8y ago

> prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source. Change of heart? Why? I think they are doing a pretty smart move to be friendly towards open source community, but it's not because I believe they changed their mind and want to contribute to the open source world, instead, I simply believes they embrace open source community is because it's good for business. You see, open source software these years became pretty good and infrastructural. If Microsoft can't be a part of it, then they will soon be obsolete. And they don't want to be obsolete, so they just can't afford to not be a friend with open source. The real thing that I curious about is what would happen when Microsoft managed to re-dominates the software market (in both user and enterprise end). Will they still be friendly with open source community after that?

staticassertion 8y ago
All companies that embrace open source do it because it's good for business. It's a seemingly unlimited resource that accounts for billions (made up number, feels reasonable) of dollars of unpaid labor. It was always stupid to be against OSS from a business perspective and so long as developers hand over their IP on a platter it always will be - Microsoft would be really stupid to turn away free money, and they seem to realize this now.
- woah 8y ago
  The idea that open source involves “handing over ip on a platter” is what’s stupid here. The vast majority of open source code is developed on the job. The fact that it’s open source means that the developer can take it with them when they leave and possibly even get some name recognition from it. If it was closed source, the developer would be handing it over on a platter to their employer, never to be seen again.
  - mjburgess 8y ago
    That's a very contemporary development. Open source was originally hobbyist, research or academic. Often, it was "programmer solve thyself". Businesses have only been employing significant numbers to work on open source projects for the last decade.

gear54rus 8y ago

To get the developers to help write obnoxious garbage like win10 which forces users into all sorts of things they don't want? They want an undo button? It's right under their nose: stop with the bullshit auto-update that re-enables itself, document all telemetry and make a big button to disable it. But they don't do that, do they? Any idea why? Spoiler: it's all fake bs again, take one flashy but insignificant step forward and take 3 covert snake-like steps back.

tallanvor 8y ago
Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level-windows-diagnostic-events-and-fields-1709 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level.... And I'm not sure what Windows is supposed to force users into things they don't want. I haven't had an issue with turning off functionality and having it be switched back on during updates - I guess it must happen based on the complaints, but it's not something I've experienced.
- shakna 8y ago
  > Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates. They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  There's a middle ground somewhere around 'not re-downloading updates every time they fail' and 'not disguising Minecraft as a security update'. A lot of the annoyance at the updates is with how frustrating the implementation is. Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.

watwut 8y ago

Realistically, if Microsoft wants to be profitable on that investment, they will have to make changes to earn more money. Which will alienate developers looking for free good repo. Even if they plan to keep good will support for strategic relational reasons, that good will is easy to go away with strategy changes.