6 ms·

I can be counted as one of the skeptics of MS's open-source efforts. It just seems to me that MS's history and recent investment in open-source puts us in a qu

by skohan 6y ago

I can be counted as one of the skeptics of MS's open-source efforts. It just seems to me that MS's history and recent investment in open-source puts us in a quantum state between two possibilities: 1. MS has changed their ways, and has become an altruist organization which just wants to give developers things of value for free so they might hopefully choose Azure when they decide what cloud provider to run on. 2. MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it, and they will use that to their advantage against competitors and developers. It's just hard for me to think that the second possibility won't become increasingly true to the extent that MS gains the leverage to get away with it. As a side-note, I think MS's marketing for VSCode has been very effective. As an editor, I don't see an advantage over 𝚖̶𝚘̶𝚛̶𝚎̶ ̶𝚘̶𝚙̶𝚎̶𝚗̶ less corporate alternatives like SublimeText, and I actually don't like the "install this plugin" spam in the bottom right corner.

chongli 6y ago
MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools Embrace, extend, and extinguish [1]. It’s practically Microsoft’s motto. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
skrebbel 6y ago
How is Sublime Text more open? It's closed source.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I don’t think Package Control prevents you from downloading its extensions and using it with another editor.
- skohan 6y ago
  Thanks for the correction, I have updated my post. The more relevant point is that Sublime Text is a less corporate alternative.
- wolco 6y ago
  Version 2 is open. Download and enjoy.
ponker 6y ago
I think it's 3. MS realized that it's not as powerful as it was in the 80s and 90s because Apple and Google took over a huge portion of the computing market with mobile. So they have "changed their ways," not because of any altruism but because they have to change their ways to compete from a position that, while enviably strong, is also a laggard especially on the consumer and developer side of the business.
- skohan 6y ago
  The problem with that is because if the only reason they changed their ways is because they lost the competitive advantage, what confidence should you have that they won't change back if they regain market-share? It doesn't make me feel great about them owning the platform where almost all open source software is hosted, and one of the most dominant tools for writing code.
  - ohthehugemanate 6y ago
    It's a company, in one of the most cutthroat industries in the world. Of course they do everything for competitive advantage, that's the same for all of them. Do you honestly think Amazon or Google are any different in this regard? Microsoft's embrace of open source is about making their PaaS offerings universally compatible, and about trying to meet developers where they are. They will continue this strategy as long as it remains super profitable; ie as long as great developers have a preference for OSS, and as long as OSS remains a key part of the software ecosystem. If you want Microsoft to remain open source friendly, those are your battlefields.
    - skohan 6y ago
      I certainly don't think Amazon or Google are any different, but I'm not using their code editors, and I'm not hosting my open source projects on their platform. It's not about MS being worse than the other tech giants, it's about opting out of these kinds of tools in favor of more open, less corporate controlled tools in general.
  - ponker 6y ago
sjellis 6y ago
I would say that it can be both. Large organizations like Microsoft have so many different people and teams that there isn't necessarily a group-think. On the contrary, different teams will have different priorities, and keeping people aligned is a really hard job. The thing that bothers me about Visual Studio Code is that does conform to the general Microsoft rule of enabling telemetry by default. IMO, this is not good practice, and in some cases it seems to have been encouraged or mandated at a senior level. We should not have aggressive data collection in the world's standard desktop OS, or compilers baking vendor instrumentation into C++ binaries by default.
- skohan 6y ago
  I would argue that it's not about intent. The most reliable way to predict the behavior of a corporation is to expect them to take the action which will optimally help their bottom line. So for instance, the team building VSCode might be the most altruistic FOSS diehards on the planet, but that doesn't matter if the people managing them see an opportunity to leverage their work to profit MS at the expense of developers.
  - jmeister 6y ago
    Optimally help their stock price*, which is supposed to factor in longer term effects including developer community goodwill etc.
    - skohan 6y ago
      If you have compelling evidence of corporations choosing long-term "good will" over short term profits I would be very interested to see it
      - john_miller 6y ago
        every generous return policy by a shop every PR action free(as in beer) software (e.g. visual studio) charitable donations (e.g. google to wikipedia) not pressing charges for rampant cracking (photoshop used by students/children) diversity photo ops/hiring practices non-firing of incompetent employees free workshops or tours for the public/children
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
> MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it Try removing the word "proprietary" from that strategy, and see if it still fits the evidence you see. Or replace it with "paid". Look at their earnings reports (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4...). Licensing proprietary software is a small and shrinking piece of the pie, they don't even segment that way anymore in fiscal reports. They are (successfully) pivoting to become the Enterprise cloud service provider, and tightly integrated tools are an important part of that picture. Licenses simply aren't. So it's not "commercial office365", it's "commercial office365 and cloud", because o365 has tightly integrated Azure services and the revenue is tracked together. Which parts are OSS licensed is irrelevant, because that's not a primary revenue driver anymore. A good example is the fastest growing service on Azure, AKS. 100% open source, even the implementation down to bare metal. They don't care about keeping it proprietary, because they make the same money with it either way.
- skohan 6y ago
  Let's imagine that a few years from now, MS starts advertising Azure right inside VSCode, and they start releasing features which favor Azure integration, and actually cause problems when working with GCP. Now imagine I as a developer want to pick up shop and move to another editor, but it turns out my workflow depends on proprietary extensions which are only available on VSCode, and my velocity will be cut by 70% if I switch editors. If MS owns the interface most developers have to their code, there are all kinds of ways they could leverage that to your disadvantage.
  - ta8594505930 6y ago
    In this scenario would you be relying on a proprietary extension to interact with GCP developed by Microsoft? Surely you would want to use a Google or Third-party developed extension to do that right? And in that case the developer of that extension would have a vested interest in making it available to you again, potentially in a forked version of VS Code. As long as the editor is open source extension developers can just fork it and create a new public directory of extensions. The only thing you potentially lose is Microsoft's proprietary extensions which are likely to always work well with Microsoft products and you really shouldn't use them to interact with Microsoft's competitors.
chriswwweb 6y ago
As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website. This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two. There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.
- skohan 6y ago
  > but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them. And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.
  - untog 6y ago
    Conversely, I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes. The MS of today isn’t the MS of the 90s. That’s not to say they’re virtuous and wonderful today, just that banging on about the past doesn’t really feel relevant.

by skohan 6y ago

chongli 6y ago

MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools Embrace, extend, and extinguish [1]. It’s practically Microsoft’s motto. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

skrebbel 6y ago

How is Sublime Text more open? It's closed source.

saagarjha 6y ago
I don’t think Package Control prevents you from downloading its extensions and using it with another editor.
skohan 6y ago
Thanks for the correction, I have updated my post. The more relevant point is that Sublime Text is a less corporate alternative.
wolco 6y ago
Version 2 is open. Download and enjoy.

ponker 6y ago

I think it's 3. MS realized that it's not as powerful as it was in the 80s and 90s because Apple and Google took over a huge portion of the computing market with mobile. So they have "changed their ways," not because of any altruism but because they have to change their ways to compete from a position that, while enviably strong, is also a laggard especially on the consumer and developer side of the business.

skohan 6y ago
The problem with that is because if the only reason they changed their ways is because they lost the competitive advantage, what confidence should you have that they won't change back if they regain market-share? It doesn't make me feel great about them owning the platform where almost all open source software is hosted, and one of the most dominant tools for writing code.
- ohthehugemanate 6y ago
  It's a company, in one of the most cutthroat industries in the world. Of course they do everything for competitive advantage, that's the same for all of them. Do you honestly think Amazon or Google are any different in this regard? Microsoft's embrace of open source is about making their PaaS offerings universally compatible, and about trying to meet developers where they are. They will continue this strategy as long as it remains super profitable; ie as long as great developers have a preference for OSS, and as long as OSS remains a key part of the software ecosystem. If you want Microsoft to remain open source friendly, those are your battlefields.
  - skohan 6y ago
    I certainly don't think Amazon or Google are any different, but I'm not using their code editors, and I'm not hosting my open source projects on their platform. It's not about MS being worse than the other tech giants, it's about opting out of these kinds of tools in favor of more open, less corporate controlled tools in general.
- ponker 6y ago

sjellis 6y ago

I would say that it can be both. Large organizations like Microsoft have so many different people and teams that there isn't necessarily a group-think. On the contrary, different teams will have different priorities, and keeping people aligned is a really hard job. The thing that bothers me about Visual Studio Code is that does conform to the general Microsoft rule of enabling telemetry by default. IMO, this is not good practice, and in some cases it seems to have been encouraged or mandated at a senior level. We should not have aggressive data collection in the world's standard desktop OS, or compilers baking vendor instrumentation into C++ binaries by default.

skohan 6y ago
I would argue that it's not about intent. The most reliable way to predict the behavior of a corporation is to expect them to take the action which will optimally help their bottom line. So for instance, the team building VSCode might be the most altruistic FOSS diehards on the planet, but that doesn't matter if the people managing them see an opportunity to leverage their work to profit MS at the expense of developers.
- jmeister 6y ago
  Optimally help their stock price*, which is supposed to factor in longer term effects including developer community goodwill etc.
  - skohan 6y ago
    If you have compelling evidence of corporations choosing long-term "good will" over short term profits I would be very interested to see it
    - john_miller 6y ago
      every generous return policy by a shop every PR action free(as in beer) software (e.g. visual studio) charitable donations (e.g. google to wikipedia) not pressing charges for rampant cracking (photoshop used by students/children) diversity photo ops/hiring practices non-firing of incompetent employees free workshops or tours for the public/children

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

> MS is embedding themselves in the open-source community in such a way that it's almost unavoidable to make use of their proprietary tools without even realizing it Try removing the word "proprietary" from that strategy, and see if it still fits the evidence you see. Or replace it with "paid". Look at their earnings reports (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q4...). Licensing proprietary software is a small and shrinking piece of the pie, they don't even segment that way anymore in fiscal reports. They are (successfully) pivoting to become the Enterprise cloud service provider, and tightly integrated tools are an important part of that picture. Licenses simply aren't. So it's not "commercial office365", it's "commercial office365 and cloud", because o365 has tightly integrated Azure services and the revenue is tracked together. Which parts are OSS licensed is irrelevant, because that's not a primary revenue driver anymore. A good example is the fastest growing service on Azure, AKS. 100% open source, even the implementation down to bare metal. They don't care about keeping it proprietary, because they make the same money with it either way.

skohan 6y ago
Let's imagine that a few years from now, MS starts advertising Azure right inside VSCode, and they start releasing features which favor Azure integration, and actually cause problems when working with GCP. Now imagine I as a developer want to pick up shop and move to another editor, but it turns out my workflow depends on proprietary extensions which are only available on VSCode, and my velocity will be cut by 70% if I switch editors. If MS owns the interface most developers have to their code, there are all kinds of ways they could leverage that to your disadvantage.
- ta8594505930 6y ago
  In this scenario would you be relying on a proprietary extension to interact with GCP developed by Microsoft? Surely you would want to use a Google or Third-party developed extension to do that right? And in that case the developer of that extension would have a vested interest in making it available to you again, potentially in a forked version of VS Code. As long as the editor is open source extension developers can just fork it and create a new public directory of extensions. The only thing you potentially lose is Microsoft's proprietary extensions which are likely to always work well with Microsoft products and you really shouldn't use them to interact with Microsoft's competitors.

chriswwweb 6y ago

As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website. This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two. There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.

skohan 6y ago
> but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them. And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.
- untog 6y ago
  Conversely, I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes. The MS of today isn’t the MS of the 90s. That’s not to say they’re virtuous and wonderful today, just that banging on about the past doesn’t really feel relevant.