3 ms·

I'm sure Microsoft is doing this now, but wasn't that frowned upon before Satya Nadella took over as CEO or was building on non Microsoft products okay before?

FireBeyond 8y ago
I worked in RedWest for Microsoft in the mid 2000s. Firefox, Chrome, Macs were all common in my building.
mikekchar 8y ago
I worked for a Corel at the turn of the century (ha ha, feels weird saying that). We worked very closely with MS from about 2000 (when MS injected about $130 million into the company). While Corel had their Linux distro, when I worked there we were forbidden from using free software (and specifically GPL software) other than on the Linux code. I heard it was due to an agreement with MS (hearsay, but I believe it). I had my knuckles wrapped a few times for disobediently editing my code using Emacs -- eventually I got used to Visual Studio (and even learned to appreciate it to a certain degree). Things started shifting around 2002 or 2003 and by the time Vector bought out Corel in 2004, I was happily using Emacs and SVN with nobody batting an eyelid. We also worked with MS to implement the shared source version of .Net, which probably nobody remembers. It was supposed to be an "open" reference implementation of .Net. Mono really took on that role, I think mainly because the shared source reference implementation had a completely useless license. You could see the wheels turning in the heads of the MS people on that project. They were actually doing really good work, but everyone knew that the project was going to be meaningless. IMHO, it was never a kind of binary switch from "open source is cancer" to "we can make money through open source". It was more of a slow internalisation that open source was a better business model for a lot of stuff that MS was doing. It may be that the switch in CEO helped that transition, but it was clear (at least from my perspective) that the wheels were already in motion for a long time prior to that. I'm sure there are a lot of people still in MS that are rabid about having to control every last scrap of their "IP", but as MS starts to solve some of their revenue problems with open source solutions I think these people will lose relevance. I don't know if the corporate culture of MS (or even most large organisations) will ever get to the point of embracing free software ideals, but at least they seem to see the advantages of engineering collaboration in some circumstances.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It was a slow transition even before Satya - remember the Ms-PL license, and ASP.NET MVC being open sourced under that with great fanfare? Or IronPython and IronRuby? The difference before and after was that before, it felt like carefully controlled and contained experiments, that were still treated as decidedly different and unusual on the inside, and on which the plug could be pulled at any moment. After, it was like a flood with the gates opened. We went from spending a year to get approval to use Boost (and failing!), to a streamlined approval system for pretty much any piece of OSS out there. It's very visible in Visual Studio if you look closely at the files installed - compare, say, VS 2012 to VS 2015, and note how many more OSS bits are in the full install of the latter. The same goes for releasing under OSS. You might notice that a lot more developer tools are OSS these days - even many new bits written for closed-source products like VS. Hell, I shipped some Microsoft code under GPLv2 a couple years ago - and it was easier to do than getting Boost approved under the old regime! So I think it's fair to say that Satya and his cadre of execs did drastically re-imagine the company in that regard, rather than just finalizing an existing process.
- magnat 8y ago
  > We also worked with MS to implement the shared source version of .Net, which probably nobody remembers. It was supposed to be an "open" reference implementation of .Net SSCLI, or Rotor, for those interested in archaeology. It sure was an invaluable resource for learning how innards of .NET worked back then. Official release is no longer available from Microsoft, but there are some mirrors on github [1]. [1] https://github.com/SSCLI/sscli20_20060311 https://github.com/SSCLI/sscli20_20060311
int_19h 8y ago
It was much more difficult to get all the necessary approvals etc. But possible if you had a particularly strong business case for it. Of course, Nadella has been in charge for, what, 4 years now? So there had been plenty of time for the company culture to change in that regard. And it did, big time! "GPL is actually a pretty neat hack" is not a phrase I thought I'd ever hear from a Microsoft corporate lawyer, much less in the context of shipping a Microsoft product under that license.

FireBeyond 8y ago

I worked in RedWest for Microsoft in the mid 2000s. Firefox, Chrome, Macs were all common in my building.

mikekchar 8y ago

I worked for a Corel at the turn of the century (ha ha, feels weird saying that). We worked very closely with MS from about 2000 (when MS injected about $130 million into the company). While Corel had their Linux distro, when I worked there we were forbidden from using free software (and specifically GPL software) other than on the Linux code. I heard it was due to an agreement with MS (hearsay, but I believe it). I had my knuckles wrapped a few times for disobediently editing my code using Emacs -- eventually I got used to Visual Studio (and even learned to appreciate it to a certain degree). Things started shifting around 2002 or 2003 and by the time Vector bought out Corel in 2004, I was happily using Emacs and SVN with nobody batting an eyelid. We also worked with MS to implement the shared source version of .Net, which probably nobody remembers. It was supposed to be an "open" reference implementation of .Net. Mono really took on that role, I think mainly because the shared source reference implementation had a completely useless license. You could see the wheels turning in the heads of the MS people on that project. They were actually doing really good work, but everyone knew that the project was going to be meaningless. IMHO, it was never a kind of binary switch from "open source is cancer" to "we can make money through open source". It was more of a slow internalisation that open source was a better business model for a lot of stuff that MS was doing. It may be that the switch in CEO helped that transition, but it was clear (at least from my perspective) that the wheels were already in motion for a long time prior to that. I'm sure there are a lot of people still in MS that are rabid about having to control every last scrap of their "IP", but as MS starts to solve some of their revenue problems with open source solutions I think these people will lose relevance. I don't know if the corporate culture of MS (or even most large organisations) will ever get to the point of embracing free software ideals, but at least they seem to see the advantages of engineering collaboration in some circumstances.

int_19h 8y ago
It was a slow transition even before Satya - remember the Ms-PL license, and ASP.NET MVC being open sourced under that with great fanfare? Or IronPython and IronRuby? The difference before and after was that before, it felt like carefully controlled and contained experiments, that were still treated as decidedly different and unusual on the inside, and on which the plug could be pulled at any moment. After, it was like a flood with the gates opened. We went from spending a year to get approval to use Boost (and failing!), to a streamlined approval system for pretty much any piece of OSS out there. It's very visible in Visual Studio if you look closely at the files installed - compare, say, VS 2012 to VS 2015, and note how many more OSS bits are in the full install of the latter. The same goes for releasing under OSS. You might notice that a lot more developer tools are OSS these days - even many new bits written for closed-source products like VS. Hell, I shipped some Microsoft code under GPLv2 a couple years ago - and it was easier to do than getting Boost approved under the old regime! So I think it's fair to say that Satya and his cadre of execs did drastically re-imagine the company in that regard, rather than just finalizing an existing process.
magnat 8y ago
> We also worked with MS to implement the shared source version of .Net, which probably nobody remembers. It was supposed to be an "open" reference implementation of .Net SSCLI, or Rotor, for those interested in archaeology. It sure was an invaluable resource for learning how innards of .NET worked back then. Official release is no longer available from Microsoft, but there are some mirrors on github [1]. [1] https://github.com/SSCLI/sscli20_20060311 https://github.com/SSCLI/sscli20_20060311

int_19h 8y ago

It was much more difficult to get all the necessary approvals etc. But possible if you had a particularly strong business case for it. Of course, Nadella has been in charge for, what, 4 years now? So there had been plenty of time for the company culture to change in that regard. And it did, big time! "GPL is actually a pretty neat hack" is not a phrase I thought I'd ever hear from a Microsoft corporate lawyer, much less in the context of shipping a Microsoft product under that license.