14 ms·

Open-Source `Great Satan’ No More, Microsoft Wins over Skeptics

124 points by Bostonian 7y ago

duality 7y ago
Makes me think of Paul Graham's essay on submarine articles: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.
- mxcrossb 7y ago
  It’s pretty clear here. Microsoft wins over skeptics, and who exactly are those won over skeptics? Don’t expect satisfying answers in the article. In general, I wish the passive voice was banned from headlines.
  - mhb 7y ago
    That's not the passive voice. An example of it would be "Skeptics are won over".
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    > In general, I wish the passive voice was banned from headlines. I know most people can't detect the passive voice properly, but I'm mystified as to what in this headline even makes you think it's passive. Usually, misidentification of the passive comes from people identifying some variant of the verb "to be." Here's a lengthy guide on what the passive voice actually is: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
- Bakary 7y ago
  The part on blogs being a more honest voice really didn't age well...
  - TremendousJudge 7y ago
    I was thinking the exact same thing. It seems that it changed as soon as people writing online started trying to make a living out of blogging.
atonse 7y ago
MS has always been a really developer-friendly company (which is not the same as an open source friendly company). Small tweaks to that model, coupled by really solid products that everyone can use since they're free and open source (like TypeScript and VS Code), make it easy to bring that developer-friendliness to the masses. And the substantive move of making .NET open source with the apache license (and .NET core)x really opened up yet another solid technology to the masses that didn't want to run Windows. Kudos to them. Update: before people pounce on me, I mean they're developer friendly to developers in their ecosystem. .NET has had the best docs and tutorials and improvements for many years.
- rectang 7y ago
  The interests of platform vendors and developers are inherently at odds. Vendors benefit from lockin, while developers benefit from portability. This applies to other OS vendors like Apple, Cloud vendors like AWS and GCP, and so on, just as much as it applies to Microsoft. It's a universal principle.
  - bunderbunder 7y ago
    It's true, but Microsoft has also done a pretty good job of failing to lock people into their development platform, and seems to have largely given up on it. Does anybody use COM or WCF anymore, except maybe to maintain or talk to legacy systems? It leaves us in a situation where it's hard to get any more locked into Microsoft than it is to get locked into Haskell: Sure, you can build up a whole lot of dependencies on libraries that don't have great equivalents on other platforms, and any wholesale migration is going to involve rewriting a mountain of code. But interoperability relies on the same open and de facto standards that everyone else is using these days, so your migration paths are exactly the same as they'd be anywhere else.
- kemiller2002 7y ago
  I agree. They really try and take care of their customers. I think it was the launch of 2017, and my team upgraded right after the release. (I mean like within hours.) We were having some problems with the upgrade and TypeScript (I think), and it asked me to rate it my experience with it so far. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bad mood and aggravated at the time, and I gave it a low score. They wrote me an email and scheduled an hour to talk to like 2 or 3 people from different product teams about what was wrong and how they could make it better. It's not often when a company does that.
itomato 7y ago
They said it best: > "The open-source world would’ve rightly looked at us at the time as the antichrist..." Heavy PR campaign changed some minds, but the underlying issues remain. Win32 persists but the thinking that brought it here is gone? .Net? All the lawsuits and bad blood aren't on the minds of Microsoft's sponsored CS programs. Not on the Mindcraft players radar at all. Same code, name name, same culture. Counterclaims are pure PR.
- buildzr 7y ago
  > Same code, name name, same culture. Counterclaims are pure PR. I don't think that's fair, there's major, objective moves in this direction: - .NET Core is fully open source and they're moving towards it being the primary .NET implementation - VS Code - TypeScript - React Native for Windows - Windows Subsystem for Linux - Broad support for major open source tooling on their Azure services These are significant and measurable moves of the sort we wouldn't have seen from Microsoft a decade ago. While they may not have opened all their patents, they're also not pursuing implementers of open source software for them. It seems a shift of one sort or another occurred.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Even if they are playing nice now, MS is a profit-driven corporation and will behave as such. If and when they feel like they have sufficient market leverage to use their positioning to favor their own products, they will. They have a fiduciary responsibility to do so.
    - buildzr 7y ago
      In many ways this open source tooling is making them money. Developers tend to use what they know and are comfortable with, if you have to move off of C# say in order to write servers with better Linux compatibility or mobile apps you're going to learn something else and may not stay in their ecosystem. If instead you use .NET Core for your Linux based services and buy Xamarin for your mobile apps, they're in a lot better condition, especially given that they can offer to host those Linux based services for you on Azure as well as dozens of open source databases and tools which may support them. They're making a killing off this, many companies have gone to pure Azure services given that they're able to host everything they need there, had they not been able to that money may have gone to Amazon or Google, investing in open source is generally a good move for them financially. They're now less and less reliant upon everyone using their exact stuff - as long as your corporation still wants a Windows domain controller and MS Office, they're on top of the list for cloud considerations and will easily make money hosting open source software - they lock companies in in other ways than software, like Office 365 and Active Directory login integration with your Azure hosted applications. There's big money in hosting and managing open source software, Amazon and Google discovered this before Microsoft, but Microsoft has been quite competitive given these advantages.
xvilka 7y ago
They still didn't give up exFAT patents, there are still many things that hostile to FOSS world.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  There are two main reasons I remain skeptical about Microsoft's ambitions. First and foremost is that they don't seem willing to make a commitment to use software patents only for defensive purposes. Secondly is Microsoft's refusal to let regular users of Windows 10 fully and persistently disable telemetry. If Microsoft were to change in both of those ways, without introducing some replacement form of sleaze, I would take their overtures more seriously. But as things currently stand, I see no reason to believe this is anything other than a charm offensive.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Most of the early MS open licenses were effectively MIT with a nuclear patent clause that would only be defensive. Aside from that, the developer tools, azure etc have been under different management from Windows. Windows has specifically been chipped away slowly and methodically. Windows licensing has been reduced and the cost significantly lowered. And while I agree on telemetry, I'm not sure it's significantly worse than say iOS, Android or other OSes these days. I'm likely to shift from Hackintosh to Linux (Manjaro or Pop) with my hardware refresh coming soon. I'm not a huge fan of Windows. But I don't really blame them too much. All of that said, MS is probably the most developer friendly corporation out there today. That doesn't mean they aren't trying to and don't profit from their positions.
  - vezycash 7y ago
    I dislike the forced telemetry stuff but, I hate the forced updates even more cos it wastes my limited data. When developing Windows Phone, Microsoft aped Apple and tended to copy the stupid things from them - such as the locked store model, inability to share apps, developer registration fee... Now for Windows, they are looking at Google. Ms prob copied the telemetry and forced update idea from Chrome. Google is a cloudish company and has used open source extensively to get that big. Google tracks every thing, everyone and converts that to cash via ads. This is what the current Microsoft CEO wants.
ginko 7y ago
Still not impressed. We can talk when they open source Windows and port their APIs to Linux.
kingo55 7y ago
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu... Call me a skeptic.
- czechdeveloper 7y ago
  Well, the third part never came, so it's just "Embrace, extend". I'm ok with that.
  - gilbetron 7y ago
    The third part hasn't come yet. Maybe not ever, but if so, it's because it is too much of a raging fire to extinguish. Time will tell.
  - melling 7y ago
    Doesn’t Microsoft still control almost 90% of desktops? OS/2, Commodore, Atari, WordPerfect, Lotus 123, those DOS clones, Novell, BeOS. They killed Netscape as a company. Microsoft was a monopoly that certainly did some damage. The only reason they are less feared is because of Google, and because iOS and Android on mobile.
    - dTal 7y ago
      Yeah, I don't know where people get this idea that Microsoft isn't a monopoly anymore. You still can't buy a new computer without Windows on it (unless you trade Microsoft's horizontal monopoly for Apple's vertical one). And the captivity of the audience is evident from the way Windows treats its users these days. Last time I installed Windows it even had the temerity to ask me what kind of ads I wanted in my OS. Not whether I wanted ads - what kind. I think the cultural shift around Microsoft is connected to a broader cultural shift where software freedom is losing importance. Maybe the old guard that weathered the intolerably closed conditions of the 80s and 90s is dying off, and the new guard, having grown up in an environment where free software is high-quality and plentiful, just doesn't understand what all the fuss is about (not realizing that it was that fuss that got us here today). Or maybe the idealistic countercultural element to hacker culture got swamped by capitalism. All I know is that even as Richard Stallman has never been more right, he's never been less popular.
0xADADA 7y ago
Hot take™ on GitHub and Microsoft, with Microsoft ownership of GitHub, they have effectively sized "open sources" means of production. They now own the defacto superhighway that much of "open source" reproduces itself. Is GitHub becoming less a free host for git projects (not that they're suddenly charging) and becoming more a capital accumulator of free labor, enclosing open source software behind an invisible fence? my concern is that github is becoming a marketplace where consumers of open source software (corporations, etc) can accumulate labor by reducing their own costs, they do this by externalizing the cost of developing software by appropriating it from open source projects. it both makes it easy to for for-profit companies to externalize the cost of producing software and cheap (free) to consume OSS, and it drives the perception of the value of software to to nothing (the actual labor-time of the software creation is quite high). Much of the OSS labor being done is subsidized by the contributors paid day jobs.
- dleslie 7y ago
  I don't think it's necessary for GitHub to exist, or be owned by Microsoft, for open source efforts to be exploited in the manner which you describe. OTOH, I'm unaware of any hard data regarding just how much open source work is done at the behest of commercial interests, and without compensation. Come to think of it, that might violate minimum wage laws in some countries.
- pm90 7y ago
  It very well might be. But why is it bad? If there are more incentives to open source more things, I say let them go nuts. Our incentives are aligned. What OSS does is to democratize access to tech building blocks. There is still a ton of wealth generation possible by using these blocks to build useful products.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  > github is becoming a marketplace where consumers of open source software (corporations, etc) can accumulate labor by reducing their own costs This is kinda the perpetual quid-pro-quo of Open Source, though, right? It's mutually beneficial so it continues like this. Folks who fear misuse/abuse from licensees usually gravitate towards GPL -- it's much more user focused and IMO makes some sense.
throwaway333444 7y ago
Not sure how relevant it is but Microsoft’s acquisition of github has kiled atom’s written-in-rust successor xray. This along with what feels like slower updates and less focus on atom feels very much like embrace extend extinguish. So in my books Microsoft is still quite evil. https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/177#issuecomment-479631340 https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/177#issuecomment-4796313...
- mu_killnine 7y ago
  Evil? I think you might mean "microsofts priorities don't align with my own".
  - throwaway333444 7y ago
    This is probably true. My preference is for multiple choices for lightweight IDEs whereas Microsoft probably prefers that everyone just uses vscode.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  > embrace extend extinguish I don't think this phrase applies for an acquisition. It's more like "(1) buy. (2) do whatever suits my agenda. (3) no step 3." De-emphasizing atom doesn't sound evil to me, really. Re-licensing it with some crazy terms like "you can't say bad things about MS or sue MS" would be evil. But you can still use Atom and modify and distribute it with relatively few restrictions from MIT license. Just the feature pace sounds like it's slower. Maybe that's natural with an acquisition?
  - skohan 7y ago
    I think Embrace Extend Extinguish applies perfectly here, but with respect to git and not github. Github has already become the way that a vast majority of people interact with git, and it already has lock-in potential with the value-added features it implements: I've worked at companies which use github almost exclusively for project management and issue tracking, and it would be a huge expensive burden for them to change to something else. Owning GitHub puts Microsoft in an excellent position to advantage their own products, and disadvantage competitors. Given Microsoft's history, I can not see it as anything other than foolish to assume this time they are going to act altruistically. "To repeat the same experiment and expect a different result is the definition of insanity."
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
There's nothing wrong with people holding Microsoft Corporation to a high standard. So long as you also hold Facebook, Google, Oracle, Amazon and Apple to that same high standard. IMHO, the world has changed since the 1990s and we have more to worry about from some of the others.
accnumnplus1 7y ago
Not convinced. Just because the vampire is feeding you cookies doesn't mean it isn't sucking your blood.
- branko_d 7y ago
  (Slightly) more accurate analogy... The vampire is feeding cookies to the developer, and sucking blood out the company that hosts the developer's code on the vampire's cloud. Not such a bad deal for us developers, IMO.
  - swebs 7y ago
    Also the vampire keeps firebombing your house telling you that you should instead live in the house that the vampire is selling, filled with wiretaps and bathroom cameras so he can sell those to third parties for a profit.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  I feed my cattle too. If they understood their situation, they would hate and fear humans even more than they hate and fear dogs. They've been bred for generations not to understand their situation...
- rolph 7y ago
  remember that movie "mars attacks" how the humans kept falling for the ruse, martians want peace we just had some misunderstandings, lets try again, then the martians screw them? This whole situation looks like that movie. MS has started convincing people to trust them once again, after capturing sovereign territory. The thing that allowed this was the hope that a centralized service [github] will stay as is forever. this should be the poster child for distributed peer to peer sharing.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Ack ACK! ACK ACK ACK!!
mu_killnine 7y ago
Man, people are salty about this. I've been a long-time .net developer and the changes in the last few years have felt really refreshing, even as someone deeply in the microsoft ecosystem. .Net announcements seemed to feel like monolithic messages coming down from on high. Now, I see folks like Scott Hanselman and the asp.net team (Damian Edwards and David Fowler, mostly) being so open about their design decisions as core moves forward. VS Code seems to have been a smash hit from all indicators I can find. Sure, Windows isn't OSS, and there's a lot of skeletons in the closet. But the amount of dismissal I read here is frustrating given the amount of earnest effort I see engineers putting into getting things right.
- sharpneli 7y ago
  I was a teenager when MS was at its worst. In the late 90's and early 2000's. I still remember the Halloween papers. Embrace, extend, extinguish. I know rationally that MS is not that bad anymore. But emotionally its really hard to let it go. At maximum I manage to be "Meh" about whatever MS does, never excited. I do try to avoid the influence it has on my decision making. But its hard. And its something that likely will never go out of my mind. On the other hand for the companies that's the price one pays for that behaviour. Humans are not perfectly rational. If you behave like crap there will be people that will harbor grudge until they die, regardless of how you try to make up for past behaviour.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I just wanted to say I really appreciate the honesty in this comment. I find it truly irritating when people talk about EEE like it was yesterday, and obviously still totally company policy just in secret or something. There are also companies I admit I will probably never want to deal with or get excited about, even if it's not for a particularly rational or currently relevant reason, but it sticks with me too.
    - JoelMcCracken 7y ago
      How many companies had a policy like EEE that we know of? How many has presented an existential threat to open source and free software as a whole? I have dislike for MS because of these actions. I recognize that this may have changed. But, how do I know that extinguish isn't coming?
dTal 7y ago
A quote from Chris Hitchens about religion springs to mind: "Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  I read that in Christoper Hitchens voice. What a powerful way to put words together and convey them.
iamwil 7y ago
I barely got the tail end of Microsoft's crappy businesses practices 20 years ago, and even I'm skeptical. Bad will takes a long time to reverse.
enlyth 7y ago
The endless Microsoft bashing in this thread makes me so sad, I think they've done really well and put a lot of work and effort behind it. VS Code, Ts, .NET Core, WSL (v2 soon), Github (yes I know they merely bought it, but changes like allowing free users private repos wouldn't have happened without MS) among others are all quite amazing.
- skohan 7y ago
  It's foolish to anthropomorphize a corporation and have pity for it. A publicly traded company is an entity which is legally required to maximize value for its shareholders. Microsoft is "putting a lot of work and effort" into open source software because, by their calculations, this is good for the bottom line. When that calculation changes, they will certainly be less developer friendly. Don't forget: nothing is for free. If a corporation is pouring resources into something and you're not paying up front, someone's going to pay for it sooner or later.
  - craftyguy 7y ago
    > A publicly traded company is an entity which is legally required to maximize value for its shareholders. Stop spreading this, it's not true. 'Strong motivation' != 'legal requirement'. The rest of your comment is spot on.
    - rectang 7y ago
      +1, Here's a piece explaining the details: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... I appreciate skohan's perspective and their comments in this thread very much. It won't take much to adapt the points to be technically correct while preserving the gist.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    >It's foolish to anthropomorphize a corporation and have pity for it. No more foolish than to anthropomorphize it and assign negative human qualities to it.
maxxxxx 7y ago
Let’s stop idolizing or demonizing any big companies. Basically they are all the same. They may look friendly or hostile from time to time. But in the end they are not your friend and should be viewed with skepticism because of the power they gain through their size and wealth. They can cut the little guy off whenever they feel like it and can trample on people when they want to. I think we would be better off if we had more smaller companies but I guess capitalism lends itself to power concentration.
- rectang 7y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Choice and competition are good for consumers. These days because of what I happen to be working on, it's more Apple that's getting in my way than Microsoft (because of Vulkan vs. Metal). This article raises my hackles, because it is selling a vendor as benign. It's wrongheaded -- skepticism is always appropriate when fundamental interests are at odds.
  - kazagistar 7y ago
    Agreed. Embrace, extend, extinguish isn't a warning against Microsoft, it's a warning against a pattern of behavior that any corporation may attempt at any time it seems beneficial and likely to succeed. And it's a warning not about the first step (embracing a technology or standard is purely beneficial), but the second (extending it in proprietary ways for lock in). So keep an eye on every embraced technology of Microsoft and everyone else, and when you see someone extending it in incompatible ways, make sure you have an escape plan. The obvious example these days? Google Chrome.
jdright 7y ago
No, they didn't. Yes, I use VSCode, but that is it. And still, I have zero trust on Microsoft with it. I also still use github, but the first sign of misstep will give me the little push I need to migrate of off it.
- romanovcode 7y ago
  > first sign of misstep will give me the little push I need to migrate of off it. To the company that will own GitLab? The one that blocks ad-blocks in their browser? The one that primary revenue comes from advertisement and user tracking?
  - reallydude 7y ago
    That's correct. I don't care about these issues. The repos are open source, so track away. That's a large part of what my code doest, ironically. I work in Adtech and I have no problem with adblock-blocking. YMMV
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I don't use VSCode, and I left GitHub after the purchase. The water here is fine!
TheTruth1234 7y ago
It's only taken 20 years to pull the wool over Bloomberg's eyes.
sametmax 7y ago
Nope. Still skeptic. Not that I don't use the products. I use VSCode and Github. But I just know that MS current behavior is simply money oriented: it started exactly when they lost their top dog position in several important markets. So now they have to attract people, clients, devs... They can't get away with insulting communities anymore. Hence they hired more friendly people, and told the ones they already had that now it was ok to love open source and make the world better. It's great for us really, and we should enjoy it as long as it last. Currently Google is going toward the reverse trend, and is probably going to be the new Microsoft in 10 years. Then who knows, maybe they'll do vice-versa all over again. But it's not about the company core identity, it's about what's profitable. It will change when the wind turns. I will believe the heart of MS changed when their attitude will have been mostly positive for a long as they haven't been in the past. So see you in 30 years.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  Companies aren't people, they don't have an identity or a personality. That's anthropomorphism that benefits them by causing users to trust them as if they were actual people. They aren't good or evil; they are better seen as profit seeking automatons. I will never "trust" a company as if it were a person. I just take what they give me and use what I need.
  - sametmax 7y ago
    Indeed. But all corporations started as small companies with a soul. We are just blind to the transition.
NetBeck 7y ago
Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion[1]. If Kubernetes were proprietary, could one value it at $7.5 billion? I think GitHub was acquired for the same reason Kubernetes was open sourced - to gain market share against AWS. Microsoft has a similar service to GitHub called Azure DevOps[2]. It has been rebranded over the years. My guess is GitHub's brand will absorb Azure DevOps, even as far to rebrand everything in Azure to "GitHub Cloud". The new war is in the cloud. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM have to pay a premium for a chance to catch AWS. [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-rebrands-repositions-visual-studio-team-services-as-azure-devops/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-rebrands-repositions...
- tracker1 7y ago
  I don't think that Azure DevOps (AZDO) will be rebranded again anytime soon, but I agree that it will get a bit more muddled with GitHub. I still think "VSTS" is easier to say than "Azure DevOps". AZDO is a path towards CI/CD with Github, and can include private repos. I do think that GH's path for CI/CD is more interesting though. I'm not sure where Circle-CI and Travis-CI will end up against the stacked competition though. I think they'll be the biggest losers from GH's acquisition in the end, which would be true regardless of who acquired them. I feel that MS was probably the best option. Specifically because of the increased skepticism that MS draws despite it's recent moves in the developer community towards more open software. I spent over half my career in an MS-centric world, and the other half outside of it. I'm both appreciative and skeptical of everything that is out there that developers have to make use of.
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
I remember when Microsoft bought Github, they flooded open source-related sub-reddits with astroturfers who kept posting slight variants of the the same talkpoints, the funniest and most persistent of which was, "You have to admit that Microsoft has changed in the last four years", as if that was common knowledge that people were not willing to accept, as opposed to a slogan that they came up with in some meeting in Redmond.
- amyjess 7y ago
  Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they're being paid off by people you don't like. That's an egregious and unreasonable assumption of bad faith.
  - westmeal 7y ago
    I used to think this way but I don't know any more. Disinformation is so easy to spread.
  - mikestew 7y ago
    Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they're being paid off by people you don't like. Though in the case of companies that have a track record of just that[0], it's not outlandish to jump to that conclusion. [0] The reader is free to look up "Microsoft munchkins" as an exercise.
    - tw2019060383544 7y ago
      Since we're on the topic of OS/2 wrapped up in a discussion about Microsoft's messaging versus actions in open source: OS/2 could be open source. There was a push for this a little over 10 years ago. IBM actually took notice and issued a statement. They were willing to make OS/2 open source, to the extent that their interests in the IP allowed them to, but that alone wouldn't be sufficient. So the reason that it's not open source, right now, today, is because of Microsoft. If MS really is this new and changed philanthropic messiah of free and open source software, then let's see it. Open source OS/2. I'm not saying "open source Win10". I'm not even saying "open source XP". We're talking about friggin' OS/2—a product that barely fared higher than DOA status at its height on the market.
gubbrora 7y ago
Microsoft hasn't gotten better. But other companies are now even worse. People used to be scared Microsoft would lock our devices down so we could only run approved software. Guess what Apple and to a lesser extent Google did that. Microsoft tried to move in that direction with the windows store, but they didn't go as far. Microsoft has worsened on privacy but less so than others. Microsoft has moved more things to the cloud where we can't see the binaries we run but less so than others.
- rectang 7y ago
  The players in the competition you describe above are all vendors, and we should expect all of them to act according to their interests. Believing too fervently in any vendor will inevitably yield disappointment.
_bxg1 7y ago
I still think they're playing a really long Embrace-Extend-Extinguish game. But long enough that we can benefit from it for the time being.
aneutron 7y ago
Not your call, Bloomberg. Go write about the next company whose stock you want to sink.
bithavoc 7y ago
Microsoft is winning me back: I switched to Visual Studio Core on daily basis for Go and Ruby. I switched to Typescript for everything JS including React Native. I was already using Github and was ok with it, now under Microsoft it feels like it's moving faster and actually going somewhere. I'm in the market for a Windows-based PC since I can get Linux with it courtesy of WSL2. Probably keep using my current crappy MBP until the ARM ones come out. With every release of .NET Core I feel tempted to use it instead of Go. How does all this translates to me wanting to try Azure Cloud the next time I need to deploy something? I feel stupid because I don't know, you may need to ask Microsoft.
jtms 7y ago
I never in a million years thought a day would arrive where I would be supportive of Microsoft and skeptical/suspicious of Google, but yet that’s exactly where I am.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  On this score, I don't see a huge difference between the two.
kerng 7y ago
Maybe Microsoft hasn't changed that much, but others in the industry do way worse? I remember late 90s Microsoft phones home via one web request and all hell broke loose that they try to track everyone and take total control of everything. Then Google came along and did just that, and noone complaint because it was free (as in beer).
ilikenwf 7y ago
Uh no, not really.
blitmap 7y ago
Merge DirectX into Vulcan (without killing it) and then I'll be convinced.
duxup 7y ago
I was at a conference and myself and some other old guys were sitting around and chatting / complaining. Dude 1: None of these kids remember the old Microsoft! Me: Maybe that's ok?
yarrel 7y ago
Microsoft has fooled a lot of people who should know better, yes.
shmerl 7y ago
Not really, or rather it very much depends on MS subdivision. Their browser and Alliance for Open Media efforts are commendable, but their gaming division with its DirectX lock-in straight from the '90s is still as nasty as it gets. At least they dropped their obnoxious UWP push. But let them start supporting Vulkan on Xbox, then they can come back claiming they aren't that bad anymore. Also, don't forget their other cash cows that thrive on lock-in, such as Outlook, Office, exFAT and etc. Opening up stuff there could indeed take MS out of their dark empire stigma into something positive. But that didn't happen yet.
mncharity 7y ago
Community-scale bulk analysis of code and development artifacts is now finally arriving. One issue with the open-source community's choice of GitHub over a more open provider, was the leverage to help or hinder access to that data. The issue continues, and manifests as what portion of GitHub data can be downloaded, under what licensing terms, and using what tooling. It would be unsurprising to find those "limited, and less than Microsoft is using for it's own value-added products", "restrictive of competition, and thus of innovation", and "Azure-only".
mncharity 7y ago
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" can be thought of as pattern of incentives, not just a policy that might be renounced. Embrace. We care about our developers and customers. If someone somewhere does something that would be better for them than what we're doing now, of course we're going to pick it up and adapt it for them. Failing to do so would be to fail them. Extend. We care about our developers and customers. We want to improve the experience we provide them. Sometimes that involves extending standards with additional functionality. Just as everyone else does. We're not going to deny them those improvements while standards processes grind slowly, and especially not when those are retarded by competitors with interests other than the best well being of our developers and customers. And we value maintaining backwards compatibility. [...] Similarly for community infrastructure. Extinguish. We care about our developers and customers. If we can help that community grow and strengthen, attracting new members from elsewhere, of course we're going to do that for them. Helping competitors, their developers, and their customers, isn't where our focus is. Resources are limited. And if competitors think to steal our hard-earned intellectual property, of course we're going to stop them. (Ok, that last bit is policy.) "Windows Everywhere"... and scorched earth everywhere else. That systematically torching the surrounding valley, now has less prominence as policy, does seem an improvement. It remains to be seen how different the effects are, of say allocating available water based on the best interests of our developers, customers, and competitive advantage. One question is what Microsoft is willing to sacrifice for the common good. Taking a hit on DOC, for example, to avoid undermining ISO. Sacrificing the competitive advantage of offensive patent use. There doesn't seem much track record yet, in prioritizing the broader there's-more-here-than-Microsoft ecosystem and community and profession.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beagle3 7y ago
Microsoft has a PR department, and would like you to believe that, at the very least.
parliament32 7y ago
Looks like everyone's forgotten about EEE again[1]. MS is simply going through the same motions as the last dozen times they wanted to take down a competing technology. Microsoft has certainly not "won over" skeptics; if anything, the opposite. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

124 points by Bostonian 7y ago

Makes me think of Paul Graham's essay on submarine articles: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.

mxcrossb 7y ago
It’s pretty clear here. Microsoft wins over skeptics, and who exactly are those won over skeptics? Don’t expect satisfying answers in the article. In general, I wish the passive voice was banned from headlines.
- mhb 7y ago
  That's not the passive voice. An example of it would be "Skeptics are won over".
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > In general, I wish the passive voice was banned from headlines. I know most people can't detect the passive voice properly, but I'm mystified as to what in this headline even makes you think it's passive. Usually, misidentification of the passive comes from people identifying some variant of the verb "to be." Here's a lengthy guide on what the passive voice actually is: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
Bakary 7y ago
The part on blogs being a more honest voice really didn't age well...
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  I was thinking the exact same thing. It seems that it changed as soon as people writing online started trying to make a living out of blogging.

atonse 7y ago

MS has always been a really developer-friendly company (which is not the same as an open source friendly company). Small tweaks to that model, coupled by really solid products that everyone can use since they're free and open source (like TypeScript and VS Code), make it easy to bring that developer-friendliness to the masses. And the substantive move of making .NET open source with the apache license (and .NET core)x really opened up yet another solid technology to the masses that didn't want to run Windows. Kudos to them. Update: before people pounce on me, I mean they're developer friendly to developers in their ecosystem. .NET has had the best docs and tutorials and improvements for many years.

rectang 7y ago
The interests of platform vendors and developers are inherently at odds. Vendors benefit from lockin, while developers benefit from portability. This applies to other OS vendors like Apple, Cloud vendors like AWS and GCP, and so on, just as much as it applies to Microsoft. It's a universal principle.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  It's true, but Microsoft has also done a pretty good job of failing to lock people into their development platform, and seems to have largely given up on it. Does anybody use COM or WCF anymore, except maybe to maintain or talk to legacy systems? It leaves us in a situation where it's hard to get any more locked into Microsoft than it is to get locked into Haskell: Sure, you can build up a whole lot of dependencies on libraries that don't have great equivalents on other platforms, and any wholesale migration is going to involve rewriting a mountain of code. But interoperability relies on the same open and de facto standards that everyone else is using these days, so your migration paths are exactly the same as they'd be anywhere else.
kemiller2002 7y ago
I agree. They really try and take care of their customers. I think it was the launch of 2017, and my team upgraded right after the release. (I mean like within hours.) We were having some problems with the upgrade and TypeScript (I think), and it asked me to rate it my experience with it so far. Admittedly, I was in a slightly bad mood and aggravated at the time, and I gave it a low score. They wrote me an email and scheduled an hour to talk to like 2 or 3 people from different product teams about what was wrong and how they could make it better. It's not often when a company does that.

itomato 7y ago

They said it best: > "The open-source world would’ve rightly looked at us at the time as the antichrist..." Heavy PR campaign changed some minds, but the underlying issues remain. Win32 persists but the thinking that brought it here is gone? .Net? All the lawsuits and bad blood aren't on the minds of Microsoft's sponsored CS programs. Not on the Mindcraft players radar at all. Same code, name name, same culture. Counterclaims are pure PR.

buildzr 7y ago
> Same code, name name, same culture. Counterclaims are pure PR. I don't think that's fair, there's major, objective moves in this direction: - .NET Core is fully open source and they're moving towards it being the primary .NET implementation - VS Code - TypeScript - React Native for Windows - Windows Subsystem for Linux - Broad support for major open source tooling on their Azure services These are significant and measurable moves of the sort we wouldn't have seen from Microsoft a decade ago. While they may not have opened all their patents, they're also not pursuing implementers of open source software for them. It seems a shift of one sort or another occurred.
- skohan 7y ago
  Even if they are playing nice now, MS is a profit-driven corporation and will behave as such. If and when they feel like they have sufficient market leverage to use their positioning to favor their own products, they will. They have a fiduciary responsibility to do so.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    In many ways this open source tooling is making them money. Developers tend to use what they know and are comfortable with, if you have to move off of C# say in order to write servers with better Linux compatibility or mobile apps you're going to learn something else and may not stay in their ecosystem. If instead you use .NET Core for your Linux based services and buy Xamarin for your mobile apps, they're in a lot better condition, especially given that they can offer to host those Linux based services for you on Azure as well as dozens of open source databases and tools which may support them. They're making a killing off this, many companies have gone to pure Azure services given that they're able to host everything they need there, had they not been able to that money may have gone to Amazon or Google, investing in open source is generally a good move for them financially. They're now less and less reliant upon everyone using their exact stuff - as long as your corporation still wants a Windows domain controller and MS Office, they're on top of the list for cloud considerations and will easily make money hosting open source software - they lock companies in in other ways than software, like Office 365 and Active Directory login integration with your Azure hosted applications. There's big money in hosting and managing open source software, Amazon and Google discovered this before Microsoft, but Microsoft has been quite competitive given these advantages.

xvilka 7y ago

They still didn't give up exFAT patents, there are still many things that hostile to FOSS world.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
There are two main reasons I remain skeptical about Microsoft's ambitions. First and foremost is that they don't seem willing to make a commitment to use software patents only for defensive purposes. Secondly is Microsoft's refusal to let regular users of Windows 10 fully and persistently disable telemetry. If Microsoft were to change in both of those ways, without introducing some replacement form of sleaze, I would take their overtures more seriously. But as things currently stand, I see no reason to believe this is anything other than a charm offensive.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Most of the early MS open licenses were effectively MIT with a nuclear patent clause that would only be defensive. Aside from that, the developer tools, azure etc have been under different management from Windows. Windows has specifically been chipped away slowly and methodically. Windows licensing has been reduced and the cost significantly lowered. And while I agree on telemetry, I'm not sure it's significantly worse than say iOS, Android or other OSes these days. I'm likely to shift from Hackintosh to Linux (Manjaro or Pop) with my hardware refresh coming soon. I'm not a huge fan of Windows. But I don't really blame them too much. All of that said, MS is probably the most developer friendly corporation out there today. That doesn't mean they aren't trying to and don't profit from their positions.
- vezycash 7y ago
  I dislike the forced telemetry stuff but, I hate the forced updates even more cos it wastes my limited data. When developing Windows Phone, Microsoft aped Apple and tended to copy the stupid things from them - such as the locked store model, inability to share apps, developer registration fee... Now for Windows, they are looking at Google. Ms prob copied the telemetry and forced update idea from Chrome. Google is a cloudish company and has used open source extensively to get that big. Google tracks every thing, everyone and converts that to cash via ads. This is what the current Microsoft CEO wants.

ginko 7y ago

Still not impressed. We can talk when they open source Windows and port their APIs to Linux.

kingo55 7y ago

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu... Call me a skeptic.

czechdeveloper 7y ago
Well, the third part never came, so it's just "Embrace, extend". I'm ok with that.
- gilbetron 7y ago
  The third part hasn't come yet. Maybe not ever, but if so, it's because it is too much of a raging fire to extinguish. Time will tell.
- melling 7y ago
  Doesn’t Microsoft still control almost 90% of desktops? OS/2, Commodore, Atari, WordPerfect, Lotus 123, those DOS clones, Novell, BeOS. They killed Netscape as a company. Microsoft was a monopoly that certainly did some damage. The only reason they are less feared is because of Google, and because iOS and Android on mobile.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Yeah, I don't know where people get this idea that Microsoft isn't a monopoly anymore. You still can't buy a new computer without Windows on it (unless you trade Microsoft's horizontal monopoly for Apple's vertical one). And the captivity of the audience is evident from the way Windows treats its users these days. Last time I installed Windows it even had the temerity to ask me what kind of ads I wanted in my OS. Not whether I wanted ads - what kind. I think the cultural shift around Microsoft is connected to a broader cultural shift where software freedom is losing importance. Maybe the old guard that weathered the intolerably closed conditions of the 80s and 90s is dying off, and the new guard, having grown up in an environment where free software is high-quality and plentiful, just doesn't understand what all the fuss is about (not realizing that it was that fuss that got us here today). Or maybe the idealistic countercultural element to hacker culture got swamped by capitalism. All I know is that even as Richard Stallman has never been more right, he's never been less popular.

0xADADA 7y ago

Hot take™ on GitHub and Microsoft, with Microsoft ownership of GitHub, they have effectively sized "open sources" means of production. They now own the defacto superhighway that much of "open source" reproduces itself. Is GitHub becoming less a free host for git projects (not that they're suddenly charging) and becoming more a capital accumulator of free labor, enclosing open source software behind an invisible fence? my concern is that github is becoming a marketplace where consumers of open source software (corporations, etc) can accumulate labor by reducing their own costs, they do this by externalizing the cost of developing software by appropriating it from open source projects. it both makes it easy to for for-profit companies to externalize the cost of producing software and cheap (free) to consume OSS, and it drives the perception of the value of software to to nothing (the actual labor-time of the software creation is quite high). Much of the OSS labor being done is subsidized by the contributors paid day jobs.

dleslie 7y ago
I don't think it's necessary for GitHub to exist, or be owned by Microsoft, for open source efforts to be exploited in the manner which you describe. OTOH, I'm unaware of any hard data regarding just how much open source work is done at the behest of commercial interests, and without compensation. Come to think of it, that might violate minimum wage laws in some countries.
pm90 7y ago
It very well might be. But why is it bad? If there are more incentives to open source more things, I say let them go nuts. Our incentives are aligned. What OSS does is to democratize access to tech building blocks. There is still a ton of wealth generation possible by using these blocks to build useful products.
wyldfire 7y ago
> github is becoming a marketplace where consumers of open source software (corporations, etc) can accumulate labor by reducing their own costs This is kinda the perpetual quid-pro-quo of Open Source, though, right? It's mutually beneficial so it continues like this. Folks who fear misuse/abuse from licensees usually gravitate towards GPL -- it's much more user focused and IMO makes some sense.

throwaway333444 7y ago

Not sure how relevant it is but Microsoft’s acquisition of github has kiled atom’s written-in-rust successor xray. This along with what feels like slower updates and less focus on atom feels very much like embrace extend extinguish. So in my books Microsoft is still quite evil. https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/177#issuecomment-479631340 https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/177#issuecomment-4796313...

mu_killnine 7y ago
Evil? I think you might mean "microsofts priorities don't align with my own".
- throwaway333444 7y ago
  This is probably true. My preference is for multiple choices for lightweight IDEs whereas Microsoft probably prefers that everyone just uses vscode.
wyldfire 7y ago
> embrace extend extinguish I don't think this phrase applies for an acquisition. It's more like "(1) buy. (2) do whatever suits my agenda. (3) no step 3." De-emphasizing atom doesn't sound evil to me, really. Re-licensing it with some crazy terms like "you can't say bad things about MS or sue MS" would be evil. But you can still use Atom and modify and distribute it with relatively few restrictions from MIT license. Just the feature pace sounds like it's slower. Maybe that's natural with an acquisition?
- skohan 7y ago
  I think Embrace Extend Extinguish applies perfectly here, but with respect to git and not github. Github has already become the way that a vast majority of people interact with git, and it already has lock-in potential with the value-added features it implements: I've worked at companies which use github almost exclusively for project management and issue tracking, and it would be a huge expensive burden for them to change to something else. Owning GitHub puts Microsoft in an excellent position to advantage their own products, and disadvantage competitors. Given Microsoft's history, I can not see it as anything other than foolish to assume this time they are going to act altruistically. "To repeat the same experiment and expect a different result is the definition of insanity."

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

There's nothing wrong with people holding Microsoft Corporation to a high standard. So long as you also hold Facebook, Google, Oracle, Amazon and Apple to that same high standard. IMHO, the world has changed since the 1990s and we have more to worry about from some of the others.

accnumnplus1 7y ago

Not convinced. Just because the vampire is feeding you cookies doesn't mean it isn't sucking your blood.

branko_d 7y ago
(Slightly) more accurate analogy... The vampire is feeding cookies to the developer, and sucking blood out the company that hosts the developer's code on the vampire's cloud. Not such a bad deal for us developers, IMO.
- swebs 7y ago
  Also the vampire keeps firebombing your house telling you that you should instead live in the house that the vampire is selling, filled with wiretaps and bathroom cameras so he can sell those to third parties for a profit.
jessaustin 7y ago
I feed my cattle too. If they understood their situation, they would hate and fear humans even more than they hate and fear dogs. They've been bred for generations not to understand their situation...
rolph 7y ago
remember that movie "mars attacks" how the humans kept falling for the ruse, martians want peace we just had some misunderstandings, lets try again, then the martians screw them? This whole situation looks like that movie. MS has started convincing people to trust them once again, after capturing sovereign territory. The thing that allowed this was the hope that a centralized service [github] will stay as is forever. this should be the poster child for distributed peer to peer sharing.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Ack ACK! ACK ACK ACK!!

mu_killnine 7y ago

Man, people are salty about this. I've been a long-time .net developer and the changes in the last few years have felt really refreshing, even as someone deeply in the microsoft ecosystem. .Net announcements seemed to feel like monolithic messages coming down from on high. Now, I see folks like Scott Hanselman and the asp.net team (Damian Edwards and David Fowler, mostly) being so open about their design decisions as core moves forward. VS Code seems to have been a smash hit from all indicators I can find. Sure, Windows isn't OSS, and there's a lot of skeletons in the closet. But the amount of dismissal I read here is frustrating given the amount of earnest effort I see engineers putting into getting things right.

sharpneli 7y ago
I was a teenager when MS was at its worst. In the late 90's and early 2000's. I still remember the Halloween papers. Embrace, extend, extinguish. I know rationally that MS is not that bad anymore. But emotionally its really hard to let it go. At maximum I manage to be "Meh" about whatever MS does, never excited. I do try to avoid the influence it has on my decision making. But its hard. And its something that likely will never go out of my mind. On the other hand for the companies that's the price one pays for that behaviour. Humans are not perfectly rational. If you behave like crap there will be people that will harbor grudge until they die, regardless of how you try to make up for past behaviour.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I just wanted to say I really appreciate the honesty in this comment. I find it truly irritating when people talk about EEE like it was yesterday, and obviously still totally company policy just in secret or something. There are also companies I admit I will probably never want to deal with or get excited about, even if it's not for a particularly rational or currently relevant reason, but it sticks with me too.
  - JoelMcCracken 7y ago
    How many companies had a policy like EEE that we know of? How many has presented an existential threat to open source and free software as a whole? I have dislike for MS because of these actions. I recognize that this may have changed. But, how do I know that extinguish isn't coming?

dTal 7y ago

A quote from Chris Hitchens about religion springs to mind: "Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

iscrewyou 7y ago
I read that in Christoper Hitchens voice. What a powerful way to put words together and convey them.

iamwil 7y ago

I barely got the tail end of Microsoft's crappy businesses practices 20 years ago, and even I'm skeptical. Bad will takes a long time to reverse.

enlyth 7y ago

The endless Microsoft bashing in this thread makes me so sad, I think they've done really well and put a lot of work and effort behind it. VS Code, Ts, .NET Core, WSL (v2 soon), Github (yes I know they merely bought it, but changes like allowing free users private repos wouldn't have happened without MS) among others are all quite amazing.

skohan 7y ago
It's foolish to anthropomorphize a corporation and have pity for it. A publicly traded company is an entity which is legally required to maximize value for its shareholders. Microsoft is "putting a lot of work and effort" into open source software because, by their calculations, this is good for the bottom line. When that calculation changes, they will certainly be less developer friendly. Don't forget: nothing is for free. If a corporation is pouring resources into something and you're not paying up front, someone's going to pay for it sooner or later.
- craftyguy 7y ago
  > A publicly traded company is an entity which is legally required to maximize value for its shareholders. Stop spreading this, it's not true. 'Strong motivation' != 'legal requirement'. The rest of your comment is spot on.
  - rectang 7y ago
    +1, Here's a piece explaining the details: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... I appreciate skohan's perspective and their comments in this thread very much. It won't take much to adapt the points to be technically correct while preserving the gist.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >It's foolish to anthropomorphize a corporation and have pity for it. No more foolish than to anthropomorphize it and assign negative human qualities to it.

maxxxxx 7y ago

Let’s stop idolizing or demonizing any big companies. Basically they are all the same. They may look friendly or hostile from time to time. But in the end they are not your friend and should be viewed with skepticism because of the power they gain through their size and wealth. They can cut the little guy off whenever they feel like it and can trample on people when they want to. I think we would be better off if we had more smaller companies but I guess capitalism lends itself to power concentration.

rectang 7y ago
I couldn't agree more. Choice and competition are good for consumers. These days because of what I happen to be working on, it's more Apple that's getting in my way than Microsoft (because of Vulkan vs. Metal). This article raises my hackles, because it is selling a vendor as benign. It's wrongheaded -- skepticism is always appropriate when fundamental interests are at odds.
- kazagistar 7y ago
  Agreed. Embrace, extend, extinguish isn't a warning against Microsoft, it's a warning against a pattern of behavior that any corporation may attempt at any time it seems beneficial and likely to succeed. And it's a warning not about the first step (embracing a technology or standard is purely beneficial), but the second (extending it in proprietary ways for lock in). So keep an eye on every embraced technology of Microsoft and everyone else, and when you see someone extending it in incompatible ways, make sure you have an escape plan. The obvious example these days? Google Chrome.

jdright 7y ago

No, they didn't. Yes, I use VSCode, but that is it. And still, I have zero trust on Microsoft with it. I also still use github, but the first sign of misstep will give me the little push I need to migrate of off it.

romanovcode 7y ago
> first sign of misstep will give me the little push I need to migrate of off it. To the company that will own GitLab? The one that blocks ad-blocks in their browser? The one that primary revenue comes from advertisement and user tracking?
- reallydude 7y ago
  That's correct. I don't care about these issues. The repos are open source, so track away. That's a large part of what my code doest, ironically. I work in Adtech and I have no problem with adblock-blocking. YMMV
JohnFen 7y ago
I don't use VSCode, and I left GitHub after the purchase. The water here is fine!

TheTruth1234 7y ago

It's only taken 20 years to pull the wool over Bloomberg's eyes.

sametmax 7y ago

Nope. Still skeptic. Not that I don't use the products. I use VSCode and Github. But I just know that MS current behavior is simply money oriented: it started exactly when they lost their top dog position in several important markets. So now they have to attract people, clients, devs... They can't get away with insulting communities anymore. Hence they hired more friendly people, and told the ones they already had that now it was ok to love open source and make the world better. It's great for us really, and we should enjoy it as long as it last. Currently Google is going toward the reverse trend, and is probably going to be the new Microsoft in 10 years. Then who knows, maybe they'll do vice-versa all over again. But it's not about the company core identity, it's about what's profitable. It will change when the wind turns. I will believe the heart of MS changed when their attitude will have been mostly positive for a long as they haven't been in the past. So see you in 30 years.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
Companies aren't people, they don't have an identity or a personality. That's anthropomorphism that benefits them by causing users to trust them as if they were actual people. They aren't good or evil; they are better seen as profit seeking automatons. I will never "trust" a company as if it were a person. I just take what they give me and use what I need.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Indeed. But all corporations started as small companies with a soul. We are just blind to the transition.

NetBeck 7y ago

Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion[1]. If Kubernetes were proprietary, could one value it at $7.5 billion? I think GitHub was acquired for the same reason Kubernetes was open sourced - to gain market share against AWS. Microsoft has a similar service to GitHub called Azure DevOps[2]. It has been rebranded over the years. My guess is GitHub's brand will absorb Azure DevOps, even as far to rebrand everything in Azure to "GitHub Cloud". The new war is in the cloud. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM have to pay a premium for a chance to catch AWS. [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-rebrands-repositions-visual-studio-team-services-as-azure-devops/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-rebrands-repositions...

tracker1 7y ago
I don't think that Azure DevOps (AZDO) will be rebranded again anytime soon, but I agree that it will get a bit more muddled with GitHub. I still think "VSTS" is easier to say than "Azure DevOps". AZDO is a path towards CI/CD with Github, and can include private repos. I do think that GH's path for CI/CD is more interesting though. I'm not sure where Circle-CI and Travis-CI will end up against the stacked competition though. I think they'll be the biggest losers from GH's acquisition in the end, which would be true regardless of who acquired them. I feel that MS was probably the best option. Specifically because of the increased skepticism that MS draws despite it's recent moves in the developer community towards more open software. I spent over half my career in an MS-centric world, and the other half outside of it. I'm both appreciative and skeptical of everything that is out there that developers have to make use of.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

I remember when Microsoft bought Github, they flooded open source-related sub-reddits with astroturfers who kept posting slight variants of the the same talkpoints, the funniest and most persistent of which was, "You have to admit that Microsoft has changed in the last four years", as if that was common knowledge that people were not willing to accept, as opposed to a slogan that they came up with in some meeting in Redmond.

amyjess 7y ago
Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they're being paid off by people you don't like. That's an egregious and unreasonable assumption of bad faith.
- westmeal 7y ago
  I used to think this way but I don't know any more. Disinformation is so easy to spread.
- mikestew 7y ago
  Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they're being paid off by people you don't like. Though in the case of companies that have a track record of just that[0], it's not outlandish to jump to that conclusion. [0] The reader is free to look up "Microsoft munchkins" as an exercise.
  - tw2019060383544 7y ago
    Since we're on the topic of OS/2 wrapped up in a discussion about Microsoft's messaging versus actions in open source: OS/2 could be open source. There was a push for this a little over 10 years ago. IBM actually took notice and issued a statement. They were willing to make OS/2 open source, to the extent that their interests in the IP allowed them to, but that alone wouldn't be sufficient. So the reason that it's not open source, right now, today, is because of Microsoft. If MS really is this new and changed philanthropic messiah of free and open source software, then let's see it. Open source OS/2. I'm not saying "open source Win10". I'm not even saying "open source XP". We're talking about friggin' OS/2—a product that barely fared higher than DOA status at its height on the market.

gubbrora 7y ago

Microsoft hasn't gotten better. But other companies are now even worse. People used to be scared Microsoft would lock our devices down so we could only run approved software. Guess what Apple and to a lesser extent Google did that. Microsoft tried to move in that direction with the windows store, but they didn't go as far. Microsoft has worsened on privacy but less so than others. Microsoft has moved more things to the cloud where we can't see the binaries we run but less so than others.

rectang 7y ago
The players in the competition you describe above are all vendors, and we should expect all of them to act according to their interests. Believing too fervently in any vendor will inevitably yield disappointment.

_bxg1 7y ago

I still think they're playing a really long Embrace-Extend-Extinguish game. But long enough that we can benefit from it for the time being.

aneutron 7y ago

Not your call, Bloomberg. Go write about the next company whose stock you want to sink.

bithavoc 7y ago

Microsoft is winning me back: I switched to Visual Studio Core on daily basis for Go and Ruby. I switched to Typescript for everything JS including React Native. I was already using Github and was ok with it, now under Microsoft it feels like it's moving faster and actually going somewhere. I'm in the market for a Windows-based PC since I can get Linux with it courtesy of WSL2. Probably keep using my current crappy MBP until the ARM ones come out. With every release of .NET Core I feel tempted to use it instead of Go. How does all this translates to me wanting to try Azure Cloud the next time I need to deploy something? I feel stupid because I don't know, you may need to ask Microsoft.

jtms 7y ago

I never in a million years thought a day would arrive where I would be supportive of Microsoft and skeptical/suspicious of Google, but yet that’s exactly where I am.

JohnFen 7y ago
On this score, I don't see a huge difference between the two.

kerng 7y ago

Maybe Microsoft hasn't changed that much, but others in the industry do way worse? I remember late 90s Microsoft phones home via one web request and all hell broke loose that they try to track everyone and take total control of everything. Then Google came along and did just that, and noone complaint because it was free (as in beer).

ilikenwf 7y ago

Uh no, not really.

blitmap 7y ago

Merge DirectX into Vulcan (without killing it) and then I'll be convinced.

duxup 7y ago

I was at a conference and myself and some other old guys were sitting around and chatting / complaining. Dude 1: None of these kids remember the old Microsoft! Me: Maybe that's ok?

yarrel 7y ago

Microsoft has fooled a lot of people who should know better, yes.

shmerl 7y ago

Not really, or rather it very much depends on MS subdivision. Their browser and Alliance for Open Media efforts are commendable, but their gaming division with its DirectX lock-in straight from the '90s is still as nasty as it gets. At least they dropped their obnoxious UWP push. But let them start supporting Vulkan on Xbox, then they can come back claiming they aren't that bad anymore. Also, don't forget their other cash cows that thrive on lock-in, such as Outlook, Office, exFAT and etc. Opening up stuff there could indeed take MS out of their dark empire stigma into something positive. But that didn't happen yet.

mncharity 7y ago

Community-scale bulk analysis of code and development artifacts is now finally arriving. One issue with the open-source community's choice of GitHub over a more open provider, was the leverage to help or hinder access to that data. The issue continues, and manifests as what portion of GitHub data can be downloaded, under what licensing terms, and using what tooling. It would be unsurprising to find those "limited, and less than Microsoft is using for it's own value-added products", "restrictive of competition, and thus of innovation", and "Azure-only".

mncharity 7y ago

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" can be thought of as pattern of incentives, not just a policy that might be renounced. Embrace. We care about our developers and customers. If someone somewhere does something that would be better for them than what we're doing now, of course we're going to pick it up and adapt it for them. Failing to do so would be to fail them. Extend. We care about our developers and customers. We want to improve the experience we provide them. Sometimes that involves extending standards with additional functionality. Just as everyone else does. We're not going to deny them those improvements while standards processes grind slowly, and especially not when those are retarded by competitors with interests other than the best well being of our developers and customers. And we value maintaining backwards compatibility. [...] Similarly for community infrastructure. Extinguish. We care about our developers and customers. If we can help that community grow and strengthen, attracting new members from elsewhere, of course we're going to do that for them. Helping competitors, their developers, and their customers, isn't where our focus is. Resources are limited. And if competitors think to steal our hard-earned intellectual property, of course we're going to stop them. (Ok, that last bit is policy.) "Windows Everywhere"... and scorched earth everywhere else. That systematically torching the surrounding valley, now has less prominence as policy, does seem an improvement. It remains to be seen how different the effects are, of say allocating available water based on the best interests of our developers, customers, and competitive advantage. One question is what Microsoft is willing to sacrifice for the common good. Taking a hit on DOC, for example, to avoid undermining ISO. Sacrificing the competitive advantage of offensive patent use. There doesn't seem much track record yet, in prioritizing the broader there's-more-here-than-Microsoft ecosystem and community and profession.

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beagle3 7y ago

Microsoft has a PR department, and would like you to believe that, at the very least.

parliament32 7y ago

Looks like everyone's forgotten about EEE again[1]. MS is simply going through the same motions as the last dozen times they wanted to take down a competing technology. Microsoft has certainly not "won over" skeptics; if anything, the opposite. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...