6 ms·

But Microsoft has not open sourced anything that was making $ for them. Neither windows nor any part of office, or any part of enterprise suite. What Microsoft

But Microsoft has not open sourced anything that was making $ for them. Neither windows nor any part of office, or any part of enterprise suite. What Microsoft has open sourced are things where similar stuff was already open source, and Microsoft wouldn't have made much money selling those. e.g, VSCode, tyepscript. EA also open sources stuff like that. They even have open sourced a java library to be able to write async await style code in java. They off course won't open source money making games, and neither does MSFT.

soared 6y ago
You’re moving the goal posts.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Is he? He's just saying both MS and EA are equivalent in what they open source right now.
  - modmans2nd 6y ago
    MS is open sourcing their platforms which is more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective.
    - enitihas 6y ago
      EA has open sourced tons of their internal libraries which are "more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective." Just take a look at their GitHub. What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT. EA is atleast releasing something which made them money as open source.
      - apetresc 6y ago
        > What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT? Uhh, .NET?
        postalrat 6y ago
        I thought mono was developed by a team outside Microsoft.
        thomasz 6y ago
        Microsoft open sourced all of dotnet. Runtime, class library, everything.
        aliswe 6y ago
        Not the debugger it seems :(
        severino 6y ago
        All of .net is open source? So you can now run any winforms or wpf app in the operating system of your choice? That's great.
        thomasz 6y ago
        Winforms is a thin wrapper around windows APIs, so no, you can’t.
habitue 6y ago
We probably don't expect these companies to open source their primary competitive advantages. We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, and EA is just flatly evaluating that to False every the time. Even when they aren't actively selling a title they own the rights to. The expected value of a title you don't sell is $0 [0], so in effect they're valuing goodwill negatively! When it's framed that way, it's actually pretty dumb for EA not to be making that calculation. If they do and open source more low sales titles, EA will make more money from better goodwill, and consumers will get more value from older games [0] This isn't strictly true, because they retain the rights to sell the title in the future, and that option is worth something. But barring very strange circumstances, we expect that if an old title isn't worth the effort to sell today, it likely won't be in the future either. The option is not worth a ton vs. the goodwill of open sourcing it.
- enitihas 6y ago
  >We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced? Which of the microsoft open source projects were formerly for sale. I am very sure it would be very very few, and only in those areas where open source competitors are already strong. EA does tons of stuff open source. Have a look at their GitHub. I am not even sure microsoft has made a similar amount of their internal libraries a available.
  - alexeldeib 6y ago
    From GitHub: Electronic Arts: 27 repos Azure: 1.8k repos n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.
    - pnako 6y ago
      It's mostly templates, SDKs, etc. MS is open-sourcing the pieces of cheese that lead to their proprietary cloud-shaped trap. I don't think they've open-sourced anything related to Azure itself (i.e. if I wanted to run my own Azure-like cloud). I'm not saying it's a bad or even unethical strategy. I'm just saying that MS is not, remotely, an open-source company.
xtracto 6y ago
That´s good learning by Microsoft: In the 1990s they "competed" against Netscape with the "free" web browser... it was shocking that they gave it for free, but in reality they were buying eyeballs. Nowadays, they have seen that if they provide software as "open source", and not only "free", not only do they get eyeballs, they also get "feel good" points from the community, and I assume they use that to attract customers to their revenue streams (Azure I guess).
- josefx 6y ago
  > it was shocking that they gave it for free It certainly shocked the developers of its engine. They licensed it to Microsoft for a share of the profit and ended up suing Microsoft over that stunt.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    That's very interesting! Do you happen to have any reference where I can read more about it? (a search on internet explorer profit licensed lawsuit didn't show anything relevant).
    - josefx 6y ago
      They may not have actually sued, just threatened Microsoft with an audit.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars
dvhh 6y ago
I believe a good portion of Mechcommander 2 source code was made open source (enough to compile and play it), although I don't know if the licence fit the definition of open-source * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2 * https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-mechcommander-2-shared-source-release https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...
gitgud 6y ago
VSCode was a fork of the open-source project Atom, and it was never closed-source as far as I know.
- nindalf 6y ago
  VSCode was not a fork of Atom. They started afresh. This is possibly why it’s much more performant than Atom.
  - gitgud 6y ago
    Interesting, I always thought VSCode was a fork of Atom. After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      It's also interesting to note that the core editor component/library of VSCode (called Monaco) predates Atom. It was used in a variety of places in Azure even before Atom built Atom-shell/Electron, and got a lot of early stress testing in powering the Dev Tools source code views in IE as far back as at least IE 10, IIRC.
myrandomcomment 6y ago
What about SONiC? https://azure.github.io/SONiC/ https://azure.github.io/SONiC/ OSS NOS that runs in white box hardware from Broadcom, Mellanox, Centec, etc. ASIC driver includes closed source items depending on the ASIC vendor. Now to be fair they are doing this to force the traditional switch vendors to support what they need to run their network at a lower cost. Both Arista and Juniper support SONiC on their HW and I believe (fact not in cache right now) that Cisco supports the SAI configuration layer.
hamilyon2 6y ago
Source code without assets is not game, it is just code

soared 6y ago

You’re moving the goal posts.

renewiltord 6y ago
Is he? He's just saying both MS and EA are equivalent in what they open source right now.
- modmans2nd 6y ago
  MS is open sourcing their platforms which is more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    EA has open sourced tons of their internal libraries which are "more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective." Just take a look at their GitHub. What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT. EA is atleast releasing something which made them money as open source.
    - apetresc 6y ago
      > What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT? Uhh, .NET?
      - postalrat 6y ago
        I thought mono was developed by a team outside Microsoft.
        thomasz 6y ago
        Microsoft open sourced all of dotnet. Runtime, class library, everything.
        aliswe 6y ago
        Not the debugger it seems :(
        severino 6y ago
        All of .net is open source? So you can now run any winforms or wpf app in the operating system of your choice? That's great.
        thomasz 6y ago
        Winforms is a thin wrapper around windows APIs, so no, you can’t.

habitue 6y ago

We probably don't expect these companies to open source their primary competitive advantages. We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, and EA is just flatly evaluating that to False every the time. Even when they aren't actively selling a title they own the rights to. The expected value of a title you don't sell is $0 [0], so in effect they're valuing goodwill negatively! When it's framed that way, it's actually pretty dumb for EA not to be making that calculation. If they do and open source more low sales titles, EA will make more money from better goodwill, and consumers will get more value from older games [0] This isn't strictly true, because they retain the rights to sell the title in the future, and that option is worth something. But barring very strange circumstances, we expect that if an old title isn't worth the effort to sell today, it likely won't be in the future either. The option is not worth a ton vs. the goodwill of open sourcing it.

enitihas 6y ago
>We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced? Which of the microsoft open source projects were formerly for sale. I am very sure it would be very very few, and only in those areas where open source competitors are already strong. EA does tons of stuff open source. Have a look at their GitHub. I am not even sure microsoft has made a similar amount of their internal libraries a available.
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  From GitHub: Electronic Arts: 27 repos Azure: 1.8k repos n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.
  - pnako 6y ago
    It's mostly templates, SDKs, etc. MS is open-sourcing the pieces of cheese that lead to their proprietary cloud-shaped trap. I don't think they've open-sourced anything related to Azure itself (i.e. if I wanted to run my own Azure-like cloud). I'm not saying it's a bad or even unethical strategy. I'm just saying that MS is not, remotely, an open-source company.

xtracto 6y ago

That´s good learning by Microsoft: In the 1990s they "competed" against Netscape with the "free" web browser... it was shocking that they gave it for free, but in reality they were buying eyeballs. Nowadays, they have seen that if they provide software as "open source", and not only "free", not only do they get eyeballs, they also get "feel good" points from the community, and I assume they use that to attract customers to their revenue streams (Azure I guess).

josefx 6y ago
> it was shocking that they gave it for free It certainly shocked the developers of its engine. They licensed it to Microsoft for a share of the profit and ended up suing Microsoft over that stunt.
- xtracto 6y ago
  That's very interesting! Do you happen to have any reference where I can read more about it? (a search on internet explorer profit licensed lawsuit didn't show anything relevant).
  - josefx 6y ago
    They may not have actually sued, just threatened Microsoft with an audit.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars

dvhh 6y ago

I believe a good portion of Mechcommander 2 source code was made open source (enough to compile and play it), although I don't know if the licence fit the definition of open-source * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2 * https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-mechcommander-2-shared-source-release https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...

gitgud 6y ago

VSCode was a fork of the open-source project Atom, and it was never closed-source as far as I know.

nindalf 6y ago
VSCode was not a fork of Atom. They started afresh. This is possibly why it’s much more performant than Atom.
- gitgud 6y ago
  Interesting, I always thought VSCode was a fork of Atom. After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    It's also interesting to note that the core editor component/library of VSCode (called Monaco) predates Atom. It was used in a variety of places in Azure even before Atom built Atom-shell/Electron, and got a lot of early stress testing in powering the Dev Tools source code views in IE as far back as at least IE 10, IIRC.

myrandomcomment 6y ago

What about SONiC? https://azure.github.io/SONiC/ https://azure.github.io/SONiC/ OSS NOS that runs in white box hardware from Broadcom, Mellanox, Centec, etc. ASIC driver includes closed source items depending on the ASIC vendor. Now to be fair they are doing this to force the traditional switch vendors to support what they need to run their network at a lower cost. Both Arista and Juniper support SONiC on their HW and I believe (fact not in cache right now) that Cisco supports the SAI configuration layer.

hamilyon2 6y ago

Source code without assets is not game, it is just code